The first part is quite feasible, if it is somehow tapping into your ship systems to get power or do something similar to our reboot/repair sequence (and given code reuse it would not surprise me if it is exactly the latter which they use to determine the module damage).
Unknown Artefact (or artifact) Community Thread - The Canonn
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The first part is quite feasible, if it is somehow tapping into your ship systems to get power or do something similar to our reboot/repair sequence (and given code reuse it would not surprise me if it is exactly the latter which they use to determine the module damage).
First - rep for your IO video; good work
You and I see eye to eye on an awful lot of things, but on this I'm afraid you're hung up on a detail that's irrelevant and, more importantly, just wrong.
You talk about 'true random' - what is that?
A, not quite formal, but decent enough, description is a sequence of numbers where it's not possible to deduce the next number in the sequence by analysing any quantity of the numbers in the sequence.
Popular random number generators present in most platforms are based on mathematical formulae which have an inherent periodicity - that is, they will get to a certain point in the sequence and repeat. That's bad pseudo randomness, but valid for some applications.
Cryptographically secure pseudorandom generators, on the other hand (available with fewer than 5 function calls on a windows platform in native code), do not use such implementations.
These use a large number of different sources of entropy within the machine (both hardware and software) to generate sequences of bytes where it's impossible to see a pattern, without knowing every single measure that's being incorporated in the calculation. That's good pseudo-randomness and is accepted, to all intents and purposes as being 'true random'.
Managing a spawn rate based off that source of information, and then using prime numbers distribution, as I described in my post, gives you a perfect way to generate random occurrences where the odds remain realistically the same all the time. Trust me - I've written a coin flip simulation based on similar principles and it yields an almost exact (within about 4-6 decimal places after a few thousand iterations) 1:2 chance of a head or tail, without having to track any numbers that have been 'dished out' before.
So, yes, it's absolutely possible, and easier, to control a spawn rate with a source of entropy like this. At worst, you might keep a record of the last time you dished out a UA spawn, and put a cool-down time on it. That's one column for one record in a database table.
Whereas keeping track of all the UAs in people's possession - yes, it's easy - but what if a CMDR goes on holiday for a month and has two in his/her hold, logging out in deep space? Suddenly you have reduced the pool for everyone else, potentially preventing them for appearing for anybody. So you can add some extra layers to manage this, and logically decide to add some more - meaning that your hard limit of n UAs can't have been that important in the first place - because you've had to break that rule.
Plus you're now writing more code with more logic that can go wrong to solve a scenario that you could've just done with a decent random number generator.
Nature shows us time and time again that complexity arises from simple rules - and the best software obeys those same principles. Frontier are genuine experts in procedural generation, and at the heart of it are principles such as these, and they apply to generating temporal data, I.e. events in a simulation, as well as they do to generating terrain on a planet surface.
Finally, apologies to everybody for such a boring and dry post. I promise never to post such a thing ever again.
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It's toxic jellyfish poison ;-)
Junior will translate. He is at home in his Liaquarium.
Talking Dolpin in aquarium and he is a Liaququ local lad.
What more do we want?
I'm going to have to disagree on this. I know that we've been using this technique in the hunt, but I found both UAs in Timocani within a couple Mm of Seega & Pennington, as well as many other Fed convoys close by. I'm convinced MB was talking about certain systems near the bubble, not a specific place within the system.
I agree with you. That's why, at yesterday's poll, I voted for selling it to Newton Dock.
BTW you CG theory sounds very good!
Bitstorm! Could you try to sign up to one of the plague CG, and then try to hand the UA like you'd do with medicines? Do not sell it right now, don't worry
But I strongly support Dommarraa's...
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Can I buy a Junior? TAKE MY MONEY NOW
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I agree with you. That's why, at yesterday's poll, I voted for selling it to Newton Dock.
BTW you CG theory sounds very good!
Bitstorm! Could you try to sign up to one of the plague CG, and then try to hand the UA like you'd do with medicines? Do not sell it right now, don't worry
But I strongly support Dommarraa's...
I like newton dock as a solution, too - gets my vote
I agree with you. That's why, at yesterday's poll, I voted for selling it to Newton Dock.
BTW you CG theory sounds very good!
Bitstorm! Could you try to sign up to one of the plague CG, and then try to hand the UA like you'd do with medicines? Do not sell it right now, don't worry
But I strongly support Dommarraa's...
medicines have to be sold to hand them in, so UA will have to be sold to hand it in too
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region of space = space controlled by the feds?
I'm going to have to disagree a little on this, specifically the point about how the "Soontill hoax took more effort than the devs here". Creating a custom asset in game, especially one as complicated as what we can directly observe from the UA, isn't as trivial as you're making it out to be. The UA involves:
* Game design (what are we adding, how does it fit in, what's the story behind it)
* Concept art (sketching many variants of what a thing might look like, getting feedback, refining/reworking the good ones, settling on a final design)
* Modeling (doing a high-res sculpt of the artefact - those pits/edges/details don't come for free, generating a normal map, creating LOD models for rendering at different distances)
* Skinning (creating materials for the UA, applying them to the model, adding "water" shader effects)
* Programming (Adding custom logic, adding the spawn chance, setting up localization strings, hooking up the decay, hooking up the sound, maybe whatever behavior/mission/etc we haven't seen yet)
* VFX (adding custom space distortion effects, adding the colored pulses, the "fireflies", the custom explosion)
* Sound (the honk, purrs, distorted morse, overtones, the buzz Riz@l was hooked on, etc)
* Testing
* Localization (they have to pay other companies to localize the text for them & add it to the game)
There's a reason adding ships & other assets takes quite a while in E : D. It's not due to laziness, there's a lot of people who need to interact & do different things in order to make something new happen. It's not something they crapped out in 15 minutes & called it a day.
They're not answering us directly because 1) they're busy with other things 2) this thread is a nightmare to keep up with 3) they intentionally added a fun little mystery & 4) they feel like any more clues would give it away. Maybe you're correct & what the UA leads to isn't in-game yet. But we haven't exactly solved it yet either, so maybe it doesn't need to be.
Sir, are you suggesting that gaffa tape is unfeasible?
I would be happy to do an Orca test when you have time, if for no other reason than to cross it off the list. I can meet you wherever, as long as I have a bit of advance notice.
Have we tried measuring the Half life of the UA, ie how long it takes for the UA to decay to 50%?
if we measure that and compare that length of time to how long it takes for another cargo canister to decay to 50 %, we may be able to see if the decay rate is the same as normal canister, thus indicating that the UA's self destruction may simply be part of the game mechanic.
if we measure that and compare that length of time to how long it takes for another cargo canister to decay to 50 %, we may be able to see if the decay rate is the same as normal canister, thus indicating that the UA's self destruction may simply be part of the game mechanic.
~3:10 or thereabouts for a UA.
I graphed it but want to redo it because I think I might have started the time a few too many seconds after jettison.
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No..i got info from an external site that a station had some fifteen days ago, so thought i'd try going but no luck. need to get one for an experiment so combat missions it is then, havnt done that much combat and i'm in a cobra so do you think thats do-able, or are they the missions where you need a really souped up big ship?
It matches the decay rate of other cargo in space. For instance, the Sap-8 canisters decayed at the same rate in KatKing's "cloud" test. The UA wil "live" in normal space for a little over 5 minutes. IIRC it's 1% ever 2-3 seconds, but it's been awhile since I had one to observe directly.
Thanks for that, I didn't know you could still dock. Galnet stated docking services were revoked, silly me to trust it!
But yes, the fact that you can't fetch your stored ships in quarantined stations has been confirmed.
For one it would not take a professional graphic 3d artist that long to make this object. The sound stuff maybe a day after they know what they wanted them to do. The programming for the sound stuff a day maybe. The damage to ships less then an hour, it uses same code for toxic waste for that.
It would not take long to crank out these UAs. I would say less then 2 - 3 days total.
He lives on planet Tracy in Fawaol system.
Maybe he has kids as well?
What do you call the son of a Junior?
Don't scoop it when it's at 8% that leaves it very risky if you miss it which is why I try and scoop after 5 mins of it being jestitioned as in the latest test stream Zenith needed more time to find the right-ish system while I got really close to the UA so I could scoop it instantly. I recommend 5 mins because it allows for a little bit of moving around the UA and more scooping attempts.I agree with you. That's why, at yesterday's poll, I voted for selling it to Newton Dock.
BTW you CG theory sounds very good!
Bitstorm! Could you try to sign up to one of the plague CG, and then try to hand the UA like you'd do with medicines? Do not sell it right now, don't worry
But I strongly support Dommarraa's...
I already did that except I didn't try to sell it, just went to the screen of it but didn't sell.
Well the point of the exercise was to extend deployment time as long as is possible.
But yes, for a test where length of time isn't being tested you'd scoop earlier.
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i think putting a resonating separator with the sap will occillate the crystal in the sap and effect the ua. Got the separator, got no sap.
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