Exploration Poll

[SeeJay]

Ohhhh. My little mapping project is almost done then! LOL at least about 0.000000000000000000% of it!

[TGS]

I have to respectfully disagree with this. More specifically the point about "as far as possible to reflect realistic feel" I'm sorry but right now in the year 2010 we already have most of our immediate space mapped. If we were to advance in technology the mapping would only increase. And last time I checked... we haven't had to send ships/humans to the mapped planets/stars/systems in real life to determine that they are there and where they are or how to get to them. We did so via telescopes and probes.

The point is you may think its realistic and fun to fly around in "search patterns" to find celestial object's but that is actually quite far from realistic. If you went out in space with no tools to navigate... no charts no nothing you would die. The funny part is in evochron prior to mercenaries if you were to go out in exploration without some idea of where you were going you'd run out of fuel and have to reset their save or get help in multiplayer. At least now you have the option of dropping fuel processors and replenishing. But it still doesn't help the fact that exploring doesn't actually feel fun to some people. Probably most people.

Originally posted by MCCON
One of the (many) beauties about Mercenaries which makes it different from many other games is that, with a little imagination, it can feel very realistic. If there is going to be a development along the exploration thread it should, as far as possible, reflect that "realistic" feel. I personally favor the hint system of facilitating exploration, in particular through contact with other AI pilots. If I imagine myself to be in my ship way out in deep space following up a rumour, and I encounter another pilot I would try to hail them and ask if they know any information. Maybe he doesn't or maybe he does, and maybe if you offer him a good sum he'll give you more precise info. This is something which could probably be incorporated into the trade console system.

I also like Soulsacrifice's idea of having a device that will automatically drop you out of FTL jump when you pass through a sector with something in. You could then set the autopliot for a very long trip and go and do something else instead of sitting staring at the NavMap for half an hour.

Whilst a little more aids to exploration would be a good thing I think it's important to still leave a lot of undiscovered stuff without any clues whatsoever. If not, within a short time, everything in the Evochron universe will become known and the game will lose its long-term appeal.

[Aures]

Yeah the limited scan range is not very realistic. But the scale is nowhere near realistic in Evochron anyway. People buy into the illusion that it is a realistic scale because *insert appropriate quote from HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy* and most space games have a much smaller scale than Evochron.

I have already run the numbers and written something up so if you like I can start a post about scale in Evochron. I wrote it for another post but changed my mind and I am hesitant about posting it as it is rather disheartening.

A better cue would be looking at the Sol system. With the current scan range (minor spoiler alert) you can see the entire inner solar system at once. That is not too bad for a spacecraft as opposed to a dedicated observation instrument. Not having observational distance based on size (eg can see Earth from just as far away as Jupiter) is an unrealistic limitation but putting in something more sophisticated is a big ask.

[Rush]

Maybe we just need a good piece of equipment that lets us scan more sectors, and zoom out the nav-map beyond 8x

[Edited on 16-10-2010 by Rush]

[Aures]

There are a few good ideas around. Personally I think people would be surprised just how easy finding stuff would be if you could see the sector designations in all sectors in the nav screen rather than just your current one. So that's the suggestion I'm pushing.

Higher scan range would be nice (via a dedicated piece of equipment as you suggest sounds good), as would seeing stars visually from further away. It all depends what Vice feels fits in the game. Technically the idea I'm pushing would probably need the least work (unless determining the sector designation is computationally intensive and/or hard to disentangle from the code for entering a sector). A new piece of equipment is easy, but the reworking of the nav map resulting from a higher scan range might be substantial. I'm not sure how much work making stars visible from further away would take but it would involve drawing objects rather than altering the nav map so probably a fair bit. There are various other suggestions worthy of consideration like probes and whatnot. Any one of these or a combination of several would greatly aid in exploring.

The other suggestions about clues and rumors of various sorts I don't think are going to work. They are either going to be so specific as to make the actual going there trivial and boring or vague enough that it won't properly answer the requests of people who think exploring is too hard. In combination with another suggestion they might be great, but by themselves I don't think they can do enough without spoiling it altogether.

[MindYerBeak]

The answer to your problems is 42.

Exploration of hidden systems should be fun, but not easy. The fun part of Evochron is having a good old ding dong with those nasty baddies. Why not have a Top Gun Baddie Commander appear during certain times and battles? TG would be a badass pilot with a well armoured fighting ship. He wouldn't be an easy kill by a long shot. Furthermore he wouldn't come alone neither, but bring several Baddies along with him, say 4 or 5. It would take an experienced pilot to bring them all down. To counteract ganging up on him in multiplayer, then for every player there would be 4 or 5 baddies. If 4 players were involved there would be 4+4+4+4 = 16 baddies plus Commander Badass.

If a player/players defeated the baddies and brought Commander Badass to the brink of death then he would plead for his life and offer you information of a hidden sector in return for mercy being shown. The information could be straightforward or of the type 'Search these coordinates for a hidden probe.', possibly followed by another ding dong, with or without a Badass.

It would provide the fun everyone seeks plus offer a challenge. The better you are as a pilot the more your skills are rewarded. It wouldn't be a battle for the faint of heart.

[Rush]

MindYerBeak's idea is nice and funny Like someone who proposed to put "pieces of intelligence" in the cargo lost by destroyed enemies. But I think that it's the heaviest idea in terms of programming...

Maybe the system information can be integrated with rumors that say, for example, that north-east of the system there could be a hidden something. Or "some advanced ships have been spotted coming from north-west". Even if you know that "north-west of here there's a planet", it's not easy to find it if it's 100-200 sectors away.

Hidden stars could be spotted by analizing the solar wind, represented on the nav-map as a value, or as a color. When you are, say, 40 sectors from a star, you begin seeing some solar wind on the nav-map, and by following it you find the star. Or your sci officier could tell you the value of the solar wind in your position, and by making some smart jumps you can finally find a star.

The problem in exploration is that the objects are tiny, and the blackness is huge. You really have to survey the whole space to find something. Miss 1 sector, and you may miss a hidden planet. Maybe the objects should be detectable from a certain distance by some elements like solar winds or whatever...


[Edited on 16-10-2010 by Rush]

[reaper2040]

Preface: As I wrote this, I realized that it sounds as though I am displeased with Mercenary. Nothing could be farther from the truth! The Evochron series is one of my all-time favorites and has been since I first purchased Arvoch Conflict more than four years ago. This is the only quality game I know of where the fan community feels a true sense of communication with the developer. Vice listens, responds and reacts to the suggestions we make. While it is not possible to please everyone and many "wish-list" items are impractical, having the discussion moves future development forward in a positive direction and hopefully broadens the appeal of the series.

OK, off that soapbox and onto the next:

That would indicate 400 million sectors to explore within the Evochron Quadrant itself. (5,000 * 2)^2*4. If 1 probe completely uncovered a sector for you every second, you'd need to play about 13 years non-stop to plant a probe in every sector. And in my conceptualization of a probe system, you'd need more than one probe to fully-explore a single sector - and each probe would require a period of time to collect data (more than a second). tl;dr: If I understand the Vice quote correctly, there's no reason to worry about finishing the game any time soon, with or without a bunch of exploration aids or a news network of hints.

This got my attention, so I checked the math and it is quite correct. Remember, this only covers the Evochron quadrant. Riftspace is >7000 sectors x and >9500 sectors z, not to mention Andromeda at > 20,000 sectors z. Are there hidden systems all the way from Evochron to Andromeda? Surely "Vice only knows"!

Another way to look at this: Searching only in Evochron and only on the ecliptic at the above mentioned 1 sector per second would require over 3 years of non-stop play. If you were are true hard-core player sitting at your computer 40 hours a week dedicated to search patterns, you would again spend over 13 years to search just Evochron and only on the ecliptic. The analogy of searching for a needle in a haystack falls way short here; this is more like searching for a needle buried on a large beach. Personally, I'm game but not without a metal detector!

A more sobering, and disheartening, thought is: What will I find when I get there? At the moment there does not seem to be a great variety of unique items. Even if various cannons, lasers, missiles and armor are not particularly different in effect, just having something unique makes exploring worth while. Imagine finding a hidden station that sold a Fulcrum drive with really short range and a super fast recharge time (maybe that already exists?). Even if some things were nearly useless, it would be fun for the variety and provide a real reward for the exploration.

Evochron combines my favorite genres: Flight Sim, First-Person Shooter, RPG and "Sandbox". Why are Stalker and Fallout 3 still installed on my system? Because I still have not found all the different weapons, armors, etc. available. That and the sheer volume of mods available.

And finally, in response to a statement from Marvin "I think you should learn how to mod". I could not agree more. I have done a very small amount of modding in the past, mostly games that provide the tools (Oblivion, Fallout 3) and I have made a few hud/cockpit mods for Renegades and Legends. My available time and talent does not meet the requirements to really step up to the challenge, but there is a huge community of incredibly talented people out there that have improved and expanded many classic games in ways never imagined. I look forward to the mod kit Vice will be providing and really do hope that some folks far more talented than I will be creating lots of new and unique content. Perhaps the coming mod kit will be robust enough that many of these "if only we had..." threads will become moot. In any event, I think it is fair to say that Evochron is a big enough sandbox for us all to find a corner and play nicely together!

[MindYerBeak]

Mods is a good answer, more precise than 42. 20 years after it's inception Baldurs Gate is still going strong and is still being modded. NWN 1 & 2 are still being modded and played 10 years hence. The X series of space games are still being played and modded. All of them have active communities. Modding provides longevity for games and you can take your pick of available mods.

How To Find A Hidden Quadrant Mod could take many forms from many modders, making for a variety of possible solutions. Just pick the one that best suits you. Many brains make light work with varying solutions. With it being nigh on impossible to find all hidden quadrants it would make the game long lived and add an extra dimension of gaming possibilities. You could spend a lifetime just searching out hidden systems with ding dongs in between. Imagination could be let loose with the modding community, involving upgrades and storylines, even new Badasses. A new race could be found on the planet Blonk who don't take too kindly to interfering invaders of their system. The possibilities are endless.

[Marvin]

I'm sure there are plenty of examples, but I'll go with one I know best: Silent Hunter III. The modders over there (at SubSim) are almost as good as the original programmers of the game. One guy even developed a program to decode certain files so that basic parameters of game play (e.g. weather and ocean effects/affects) could also be modified.

But the crowning achievement was the addition of extra compartments to the Type VII Uboat. Problem is, the mod is graphics-intensive ... many computers cannot display the new compartments without going into FPS slow-motion.

Which is why players with older systems are lucky it's a mod. If the programmers of the original game had been badgered into adding those new compartments as part of the original game, instead of giving players the choice that comes with adding or ignoring mods ... well, I think you get the picture.

That's why I prefer mods. That's why I say to anyone who is looking to "improve" the game, "Learn to mod." If I can use your mod, I will ... and thank you very much for providing it. But if I can't use it, at least I'm not stuck with it.

[Von Paulus]

Mods are nice.
But it's dependable in the community size. Bigger the community, bigger the chance of having good mods. Otherwise... yes learn to mod. That's not easy and most of us don't have time. That's not the answer.

[Rush]

Maybe the customizing kit could have some features or at least guidelines that can help wannabe-explorer-modders

[Aures]

I'm not sure why my talk about sector names doesn't get through, you don't have survey every sector (or 15 wide strip of sectors). I don't think there is all that much out there way beyond the quadrant map. I was hoping there was but as soon as I (spoiler alert) got East of Pearl there was nothing. I ran into the system border with the systems that make up Lost Rucker. I had a good poke around them (about 400 jumps but it was more to do with testing than just confirming it is empty) I had basically eliminated nearly 19 million sectors (about 500x2500x15) from containing anything capable of generating a system name. Actually, it is much bigger than that because I was a long way from Lost Rucker and it doesn't look like there is anything between where I was and it.

Now I'm going to head out East from Lost Rucker. I don't need to look everywhere to find out if there is anything there, I just need to fly in a straight line and see if the system name ever changes. You may not find everything in Evochron by following system borders, but what you can find probably makes up more than 99% of the mass in the Evochron Universe.

[DaveK]

I wonder if it is possible to clone Vice - at the rate we can generate new goodies/systems we want, I don't think that one Vice could keep up! :D

wrt modding I haven't played with the mod system properly because I bought Legend only a couple of months before I got Mercenary. Is it possible to do more than change the look of objects or create new cockpit designs/ship designs/city designs? Is it actually possible to create new technology that would help surveying? e.g. new probes, a longer range scanner, a solarwind analyser

As I understand it, the programme looks for some form of mod file in the main folder and if it doesn't find any it uses the defaults in the (encrypted) data file. If mods can create new tech that integrates into the ships' systems then that would be very very cool. I suspect that it wouldn't be possible to code though.

Perhaps the local station could have a set of Evochron OS (ordinance survey) maps for sale - my local bookstore has them for the GB and reasonable maps for Europe! (only joking - it would make things too easy)

[Trent]

Originally posted by Aures

A better cue would be looking at the Sol system. With the current scan range (minor spoiler alert) you can see the entire inner solar system at once. That is not too bad for a spacecraft as opposed to a dedicated observation instrument. Not having observational distance based on size (eg can see Earth from just as far away as Jupiter) is an unrealistic limitation but putting in something more sophisticated is a big ask.

That's true... but it takes a bit of work to find the rest. Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, pretty easy. But I found Pluto tonight, 7 jumps out from the sun. That's not so easy. If I wasn't able to triangulate it (see other post) it would have taken 5040 Fulcrum C5 jumps in a spiral pattern (from the asteroid belt out), before finding it.

[TGS]

And this is why the system needs to be revised or a new device needs to be made to make the process more... streamlined. Noone should be expected to do that sort of pattern jump to find things. That's just rediculous.

If I wasn't able to triangulate it (see other post) it would have taken 5040 Fulcrum C5 jumps in a spiral pattern (from the asteroid belt out), before finding it.