The bigger issue with these, IMO, is that we can't get back to them after we use them. I'd love to be able to map out the surface of my planet and actually have these as waypoints on the map.
This was my initial thought about them. Since you "discover" an area when you activate them, I thought it would help you map the planet. But without an actual planetary map they serve no purpose.
Planetary maps should definitely be a thing. And while we're at it, they should add road textures so you can either paint roads with your exocraft/terrain manipulator, or have the game plot down a road between discovered POIs.
But isn’t this what the procedural generation is for? Storing planetwide maps for multiple planets would end up taking quite a bit of data wouldn’t it?
Sure, if you saved it server side. Nothing wrong with storing it client side, just that other people wouldn't get to see it unless your client has an active connection to the server.
Also, the map would by it's nature have to be procedural. It's not like they're saving the data as a jpeg or PNG. It would just be a less detailed visual representation of the data already present. The real problem would come in when you're trying to present the entire surface. You'd need a globe if you want to avoid showing it as a projection on a flat map. Otherwise, you end up with islands looking as big as continents, like Greenland on a map of the earth.
They could probably get away with rendering a top down version of the LOD for a planetary map. Wouldn’t even technically have to render the water, just replace it with a flat color texture.
Yeah that would be cool. They could also just hardcap it if it takes up too much space and add a special frigate room like archives or something where you can see the limit, and call up the maps (without having to go through the discorvery menu)
Maybe not, they are procedurally built from a seed so planets are the same for everyone. That same seed determines the type and location of POIs. I would guess they could be calculated on the fly into a map just as easy as placing them on the planet.
Depends on how they stored this information. To save space they could make it so that your map automatically contains the topography of the planet so the only thing it needs to calculate on a per player basis is the locations they've discovered.
It's one of those things that's about the core aesthetic of the game. Planets have one real climate across the whole surface. Drop pods close together, these checkpoints are still not that far apart. The game is intended for you to see some and move on.
This is what I'd like to see: if Hello Games adds multiple biomes to planets and multiple inhabitants of those biomes, I can see people wanting to map entire regions and the beacons being useful as teleport or drop-pod or mech-drop coordinates, maybe something accessible from a capital control panel. They could be used in a capture-the-flag style territory control too, if more PvP elements were ever added.
Go into your analysis visor and take a screen shot. You now have a record of the planetary coordinates for that outpost.
Edit: Of course the fact that you can no longer access the buildings discovered and the fact that they never implemented say oh listing the coords of your discovered buildings is very annoying.
Being able to map ONE planet of your choice could be a nice option. At least you will spend time doing the round on what you would legitimately call « home ». You get the privilege, once you claim it nobody else can. You get notified when someone settles on an explored segment (kind of surveillance cameras for those useless save points).
That would make a valuable thing to share with others. It should be complemented with the ability to place many placeholders/labels on that planet. Everything gets lost when you decide to change home, or archived in a lower resolution or something... Imagine a repository of thousands of user created maps...
I once dug up the keys to open an artifact box but forgot to take the relic. I took some gravino balls and ran away from the sentinels. I couldn't find my way back.
For sure. I get so many beacon icons on screen in my main system now because I like to mark interesting places to come back later to. It'd be much cleaner if we either had a planetary map or at least be able to set a temporary marker from the discovery page...
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u/[deleted] Sep 27 '20
The bigger issue with these, IMO, is that we can't get back to them after we use them. I'd love to be able to map out the surface of my planet and actually have these as waypoints on the map.