Sector Design Questions

[Doctor]

1. Why is Saturn so huge? It is 1176km tall and 782km wide. Why? The navs occupy an area that would fit within a (roughly) 250x250km square.
2. Jupiter, also, is a bit wonky, being 800km wide when it needs to be roughly 1/2 that.
3. Almost all sectors are symmetrical in their axis (meaning -588km in -X to 588km in +x, but the same sector can have a different Y, but Y is also symmetrical, so -188y and +188y, but X can be different). Except for (so far):
   1. X: (min, max) || Y: (min, max)
   2. Kitara's Veil: X: -157,157 || y: -75, 172
   3. Kailaasa: X: -188, 529 || y: -149, 490

 

I found these while building a replacement for enbmaps. Mine is still very much in development. But these make no sense. So, I guess I have two fundamental questions:

 

1. Why are some sectors 5x the size they need to be when there is nothing in the empty space? Or is there something there, and I'm going to have to do the most anal-retentive of box-searches using 4 characters and scanning lines 4km apart (since we can't detect hidden navs from > than about 3-4km) to find the one hidden nav somewhere in the middle of all that nothing? I was going to do the box searches anyway, it just makes it 100x more annoying.
2. Why can't all the systems just have a symmetrical size? It makes the math to convert coordinate systems so much more annoying.

[Doctor]

Just to illustrate visually how massive some of these sectors are compared to the navs in them (the white box is the in-game sector bounds, the navs are scaled correctly relative to the size of the white box):

 

 

 

And, to show that not *every* sector is like this, here's a sector that's sized according to the navs within it:

 

Side-note: I now appreciate how much work went into enbmaps.de because holy balls this is a lot of fiddling and tweaking. My maps are still very much a WIP. I plan to add overlays for mobs and ore, and filters to let you control name opacity (right now if you mouse over a nav the name becomes fully visible, but that's hard to screenshot) and scale. But I'm still at stage 3 or 4, where I'm going around collecting all the nav points in the game.

Edited March 9 by Doctor

[Stoop]

Wow!  I had no idea about VG or ABG! 

 

For Jup and Sat though, perhaps the size of the planet were originally taken into consideration when making the maps?  (just spit balling an idea here, I'm hardly an authority) 

[Doctor]

3 hours ago, Stoop said:

Wow!  I had no idea about VG or ABG! 

 

For Jup and Sat though, perhaps the size of the planet were originally taken into consideration when making the maps?  (just spit balling an idea here, I'm hardly an authority) 

That doesn't really work because Tarsis (the planet) is outside the bounds of the sector. Ragnarok as well. It's totally possible to have a nav outside the sector bounds when it is big enough to be seen from *within* the sector bounds. Well, technically, each nav has a 'detection radius' field, so you could just set every nav to be detectable from 300km and all the navs would be discovered the second you gated in. But that's obviously a bad idea. I'm saying that the client/server logic allows for this.

[Kyp [LDEV]]

I think Altair is the only 'original' sector, created in response to the progen trader being introduced.

The other quirk I guess I would mention is it has a little more to do with potential future content if we ever wrote it and to some extent making the planets (or other orbiting objects) and lighting look right sometimes it took some weird quirks like that.

Lastly, at one point there were probably 25 sets of hands working on things too, and not everyone understood how every tool worked. However, it didn't (at the time, at least) negatively affect anything.

Double lastly, there are occasionally objects in some of that dead space, but we sort of stuck those in for 'true' explorers (or just really, really, really, really bored) people.

[karu [WDL]]

On 3/9/2024 at 4:35 AM, Doctor said:

Why can't all the systems just have a symmetrical size? It makes the math to convert coordinate systems so much more annoying.

 

How so? If you use sector size or calculate own bbox around visible navs the math is same. Translate absolute ingame coords to  relative coords (0..1 inside bbox), then relative coords to pixel coords on screen.

[Fawkes]

Random question from a newbie who has just rediscovered this game after 20 years, but i found the maps website you noted above today as well, and spotted the blue “hidden waypoints”… never came across these when i was playing years ago, how do you see them, map them, use them in the game… i did some scouting around the map looking to see if i could uncover one of them to start plotting a course using them, but even though i found some random other target capable stuff floating in the void, never saw any additional waypoint style icons appear on my map.

[Toaster]

They don't actually appear on the map. They are just points that give you xp when you find them. You can use them for navigation by pressing the "c" or "x" keys (if I remember correctly) and then warping to the target, but they'll never display on the in-game starmap.

Edited March 12 by Toaster

[Doctor]

On 3/10/2024 at 3:08 PM, karu said:

 

How so? If you use sector size or calculate own bbox around visible navs the math is same. Translate absolute ingame coords to  relative coords (0..1 inside bbox), then relative coords to pixel coords on screen.

 

Yeah, the math ended up being not that hard, I just had to think about it for a minute. Instead of

const x_scale_factor = (viewport_width - (sector_list_width + 30)) / (xmax*2);
const y_scale_factor = (viewport_height - (sector_name_rect.bottom + sector_name_bottom_margin)) / (ymax*2);

You do

const x_scale_factor = (viewport_width - (sector_list_width + 30)) / (xmax - xmin);
const y_scale_factor = (viewport_height - (sector_name_rect.bottom + sector_name_bottom_margin)) / (ymax - ymin);

 

So. not that hard. I was just irritated and not thinking.

 

On 3/10/2024 at 7:25 PM, Fawkes said:

Random question from a newbie who has just rediscovered this game after 20 years, but i found the maps website you noted above today as well, and spotted the blue “hidden waypoints”… never came across these when i was playing years ago, how do you see them, map them, use them in the game… i did some scouting around the map looking to see if i could uncover one of them to start plotting a course using them, but even though i found some random other target capable stuff floating in the void, never saw any additional waypoint style icons appear on my map.

 

"How do you see them" You need to fly within 3-5km of them. Each has a slightly different discovery range (some are visible from 30+km, but that's rare) but generally you have to fly within about 4km of a hidden nav for it to become 'visible' on your screen (NOT on the map!) and then you can warp to it and 'discover' it. I think just getting within 4k is enough to make it target-able from any range via the X key in-game.

 

Hidden navs never show up on the map. That's what makes them hidden. I think the Westwood dev's original idea was that people couldn't just share screenshots of where stuff was, to make people have to discover things themselves. You have to remember, the internet was very early when this game came out, most people who had been playing games for the past 20 years had written down notes for their own use, and discovered everything themselves. Most people didn't call the Nintendo hotline for tips, for example.

 

In the years since, places like Thottbott and Wowhead have made it clear that the extreme majority of players LOVE being able to look up where to go and what to do, and the few people who want that old-school discovery can best be served by just...ya know, not going to wowhead. So, if designing a new game, the basic loop is:

 

1. Create content with enough mystery to engage those who enjoy mystery.
2. Make that content easy to data log/capture in an automated fashion
3. Allow external websites to host data repositories of your content, where it is, how to do it, etc.

In this way, everyone is happy, and you aren't burdened with needing to create and maintain that knowledge repo. Eve Online has the Eve University Wiki, WoW has wowhead (and Thottbot before that), there's wikia/fandom for most RPG games, you get the idea.

 

Factorio is an example of maintaining the data yourself, as the game company. They have their official wiki which is automatically updated via scripts as they change game elements. That's quite rare though, and they spent a LOT of time getting that automation to work and create pages for things. Especially in the modding space.

Edited March 17 by Doctor
Made majority more clear, it's not 51%, it's more like 99%.

[Stoop]

On 3/17/2024 at 10:50 AM, Doctor said:

I think the Westwood dev's original idea was that people couldn't just share screenshots of where stuff was, to make people have to discover things themselves.

perhaps, but I also remember pre-Sunset (obviously after EA took over so maybe they are the ones who changed it) learning how to find things based on coordinates because people would often Ctrl+T when they found a hidden nav or place of interest

[Toaster]

True enough. People still do that when they leave loot floating so people can find it. The coordinate system can be very useful, particularly for pointing people to ore fields and such that are off the beaten path.