DevTracker: About Exploration

Supplementing this we’re also adding information when you sell exploration data of the bodies contained within the exploration data being sold for a specific system. There’s also a change to enable selling exploration data a page at a time to help those who have been on long journeys of exploration!

The system map fix is to return you where you entered from.

I'm not making promises but we do have a few mechanics we are investigating. One of the crazy (for me as a developer) benefits of working on this game is that we will sometimes have the ability to say "hey, you know feature X? We could like, totally improve that, dood!"

This might not sound like much to non-developers, but compared to the older, more conventional game development cycle, it's pretty revelatory. It certainly is to me, anyhow .

So as well as new features, we will be scrutinizing current implementations and looking for improvements.

Route Planning

Well, I've just played a build that has some route plotting, so hopefully that should be in a build soon. It has a range limit due to technical constraints, but for reasonably short journeys of several stops, I know I'm quite happy with the result .

How does it work?

Well, you lock a destination in the galaxy map and use a "plot route" option.next to it. As well as show the route in the galaxy map and a marker on the next step, it automatically targets the next step in the journey when you go back to the cockpit view.

However, you can deselect it and find it again because it has a cute little "plot" icon next to it (I love team GUI – they rock).

Once you jump, upon arrival the next step is targeted, and so on.

expansion into an unpopulated system

This will be a three stage process. The first step is for us and the DDF to establish a short list of candidate systems. The aim for this initial colony is to support further exploration and to act as a hub for other expansion in the region. Once we have the shortlist players will be invited to map the candidate systems and whichever system has the most data about it sold will be the target system. A community goal will then start to gather the resources needed to build an Ocellus starport that will be deployed in the chosen star system.

Microjump

If we did microjumps then it would only be between stars. It's only being considered, it isn't planned at the moment.

Super-Cruise between systems

You can't supercruise between systems, there are no plans to change this at the moment. It's one of those things that would be cool, but is very expensive in dev time for the benefit you get.