The new exploration system
- Thread starter Anoobvia
- Start date
That particular system I don't think will be too bad at all under the FSS - all the stars autodiscover on honk anyway, so all you need to do is pick out the four planets on a quick sweep of the orbital plane if you want ... or note that the "% complete" is starting at 75% anyway so there's probably not much there other than the stars.
If they were gas giants rather than planets, then it would be trickier to decide.
Indeed, to get FDev to see your issues, make sure that you post into a thread in the feedback forum rather than here.
For the FSS (I keep typing eff eff ess and it being filtered!!) you should really post here.
But to re-iterate my comments on the FSS...
After a few hours of keybinding,testing the beta and doing twenty odd systems I feel tired. This new exploration certainly impacts on the flow of the game. My trip to BP and back took eight months, always scanning the main star and any interesting worlds.Now I could see the same journey taking years to do. Long range exploring will be for the masochistic explorer now!
One annoyance was I found a terraformable HMC on my travels but doesn't say it's a terraformable when I zoomed in and scanned it but it does on the system map. so even if I scan all the items I still have to check the system map afterwards to check.
I'm knocking the Beta on the head now and will be getting the distance in on the 'ye olde' ADS exploring until update arrives and then persevere with this new fangled (and possibly mangled) approach
One annoyance was I found a terraformable HMC on my travels but doesn't say it's a terraformable when I zoomed in and scanned it but it does on the system map. so even if I scan all the items I still have to check the system map afterwards to check.
I'm knocking the Beta on the head now and will be getting the distance in on the 'ye olde' ADS exploring until update arrives and then persevere with this new fangled (and possibly mangled) approach
Yeah, that's basically what I said, but phrased better.
Some of us (including you) have been pointing this out for a while now...
The thing that bugs me the most about scanning planets with the FSS, is the long wait for POI scans to complete. I'm very pleased that it comes back with "none" instantly, so if there's a delay, you know that it's finding something. But I suspect this delay is here to stay, since I think rather than being an artificial timer, it's probably just how long it takes to do all of the necessary procedural generation to find their spawn locations.
Putting all the 'mechanical issues' people have with the new scanning system aside, dont you guys think that its a positive side effect of it, that the galaxy got 'bigger' again?!
After all the jump range increases it's something I think is a step in the right direction. Gives us the feeling of a really big galaxy we are crawling around in.
Still, if you want to be a racer, race SgrA in the same time. I bet the record holder didnt ADSed the preplanned systems they race through, or at least they wont open the sys map at all...
But if you 'travel explore' (btw, did this phrase was around before this beta?!)
isnt it 'reasonable' that a trip to the center of our galaxy takes 24 or even 48/96 hours?
Of course its great to get there in an evening, to go in what? 8 hours to BP, circumnavigate the galaxy in 24h.... or stretch the 'furthest from sol' distance with SCing a month
This are playstyles occured maybe because the galaxy got smaller and smaller (without more content within)
All this is still possible.
Without cherryPicking, ok,
but if you want to race, race.
If you want to travel, travel (and enjoy the view)
If you want to explore, do it now.
It took FD years to integrate our passion gameplay-wise into the game.
And if you decide to explore get used to it that its a big galaxy (again)
Mechanics can get tweaked with the next patches.
The course FD sets with 3.3 is a big plus, I think.
Rudi's 2 cent
If you're not actively looking for planets with biological / alien POI then there's no need to wait. Just zoom out the instant you have zoomed in and the DSS scan completes anyway. You can then always go back to the sysmap to see which landable bodies are volcanic - if they are then they will have geological POI. Or else go back into FSS and all of the surface POI info will magically be there even though you never waited for it. (FSS is an even bigger "I win" button than ADS at heart).
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What? No, it isn't, it's a lot of time for a very simple activity. During that much time, I could finish at least two long games, to not even mention other hobbies. Or even in Elite, how much stuff you could do in the bubble. Add to that that's 48-96 hours of tedium, because interstellar travel in Elite is as boring and as simple as it gets.
All the power to you if you don't mind that, but the only reason I could stand to travel long distances to wherever I wanted to explore was because I could explore on the way as well, and still maintain decent time.
It's funny though. I remember having discussions with people where I had to argue that travelling is not the same as exploring. Now a lot of people hopped up on the latest bandwagon and are claiming that being able to explore while travelling would be a bad thing.
Speaking of bandwagons...
Exactly. If you examine the new mechanics in detail, you realise that for cherry-picking ELWs and AWs, the FSS involves less skill than the old methods did. Also, that's methods, plural: there is redundancy removed there as well. You could recognize an ELW/AW from the system map, or their icons, or their sounds. You can now recognize them from a simple pattern, and the game even tells you "your slider is now in the ELW range!" in case you had any doubts.
As for the probing minigame, it's decent, but it doesn't involve much skill either. For pretty much anything that's smaller than gas giants, it's trivial to stay inside the efficiency target, especially if you engineer your DSS. (Which introduces a +30% power draw on the 0 MW power draw... Oops.) Not that I mind this: if I want a challenge of skill, I fly into combat instead. (Thargoids, CQC, or fights where I'm outgunned and outnumbered.)
Spot on !!
All the previous moaning about the ADS being "too good", and the FSS gives all the same info on a single honk, just hidden behind some mini-game.
I'm not saying it's *all* bad (eg POI location is sooo much better) ... but hopefully FDEV will settle on a compromise solution
Wait, really? So if I don't wait for the FSS locations tab to finish calculating but come back a bit later to check on it, the locations will have resolved in the background?
Going to test that now, if so then that's very useful information to know!
EDIT: yes it works, thats very nice to know.
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Spot on !!
All the previous moaning about the ADS being "too good", and the FSS gives all the same info on a single honk, just hidden behind some mini-game.
I'm not saying it's *all* bad (eg POI location is sooo much better) ... but hopefully FDEV will settle on a compromise solution
Hate to break it to you, but ED is nothing but a collection of mini-games. At least exploration finally got one.
I tried the beta and in its current state the FSS is considerably slower than locating poi's in a system than the old way.
On a simple planetary scan mission in a populated and well known system it took around a half an hour to locate the target body where the "malfunctioning equipment" was located.
This was mostly do to the energy tuning slider wandering around, despite having tried it on three different axes, but in this particular case, the old way of location was considerably faster and would have been faster even if the FSS was working as it was supposed to.
I tend to take a "wait and see the final version" before I form an opinion. That being said, I really hope that they at least overhaul the system map/surface map so that the extra time spent at least gives us some sort of spectacular visual reward. If it's a mini-game to get all the same info/visuals we had before, I'm not sure that I see the point. Maybe work on atmospheric flight, radically varying surface features...etc. I dunno it just seems like they've sunk a lot of time in this new system (Thank you F-Dev! Sincerely) but maybe it's a cart before the horse kind of situation?
There have been mentions of it in other posts i have seen, but most people dont complain as much as i do.
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Spot on !!
All the previous moaning about the ADS being "too good", and the FSS gives all the same info on a single honk, just hidden behind some mini-game.
I'm not saying it's *all* bad (eg POI location is sooo much better) ... but hopefully FDEV will settle on a compromise solution
My thoughts. Having been spending the last few sessions in nebula hunting Lagrange Clouds I thought it's time to do some traveling to test out that side of the new system, so I set course for another nearby nebula, some 70 odd jumps away, I must say I am pleasantly surprised.
So the old system I would jump in, honk while I was scooping, open system map to check for oddities and interesting stuff like ELW and WW. Stop and fly to anything interesting to scan. Previously I would fly to volcanic worlds or possible life bearing worlds but that stuffs so easy to find now I don't do that.
What happens now. I jump in, honk while fuel scooping, once done scooping I hit zero throttle and FSS straight after, you don't have to be doing 30kps to open the FSS just have throttle zero. Look at frequency scanner which immediately tells me if I have ELW or WW in the system, if I do tune frequency scanner that setting and scan orbital line until that signal appears, zoom in and scan, with a little practice, which I now have, that's a far quicker process than finding them in the system map, setting course and flying up to run the DSS on them. For systems with no interesting stuff it's as quick as the old system, just one extra button press to zero throttle.
Whats missing? Ok terraformables don't show as a specific signal, planets out of the ordinary such as extremely large and small landables or very high grav landables which are always nice to find, very large rings systems.
Extra stuff? Scenarios such as Lagrange Clouds are immediately obvious, there are probably other things that I won't find out where I am but I can certainly operate with the new system, and given a few tweaks to help people identify unusual bodies I think many people would be much happier with it.
To sum up, it works for me except a few minor issues as above, if that was fixed it would be perfect and I don't see it as a mini-game, just another way of accessing the most of the same information and that in many cases is faster than the old system. But that's what the beta is for, to get player feedback and tweak stuff that's not working well for players.
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The difference with the new system is that you do have to throttle to zero, so can't scan and see the system on the fly. So for those who are travelling quickly to a destination, but want the option to divert for interesting things it adds quite a lot of time per system. If your trip takes 700 jumps and it even adds only 10 seconds per jump to your journey that's an extra 7000 seconds, about two hours!
This is why some people find the new system onerous.
Maybe there should be a compromise. The honk should maybe give all stars and planets within, say, 10000Ls. It's highly unlikely that those travelling quickly would want to divert further than this as it takes a lot of time and they need to get on with the travelling, but it does give them enough to divert if they want to break up the monotony.
It only really adds time if you find something interesting in the system, and if you do you're not jumping out anyway. The moment I exit FSS I have fired up the FSD for my next jump and I'm off. In fact for large systems it's much quicker than the old system because I was always having to reach for the mouse to zoom out or scroll the screen up and down to see everything. So throttle zero->FSS->glance to find nothing interesting->exit FSS->jump. that can sometimes take just a few seconds, so there's not much chance of it adding ten seconds each time, in fact it's at least as quick as the old system and sometimes faster for systems with no interesting bodies.
Definitely no.
varonica said:
It takes a few seconds. FSD does not even have time to cool down. New system is not faster.
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Yes it is.
Old system. Move hand to mouse, zoom out/scroll, assess bodies, move hand back to joystick, jump.
News system.
Open FSS, see what's there, close FSS, jump.
Basically unless you can actually post times for doing both then all you are doing is expressing an opinion. Mine is based on experience of the two systems and how I explore.