Dropping signs in orbit?

One issue with this that I've seen: Does the starmap show you where other players are located? If so, stealth is out the window. Also, can anyone on the server beam to your ship or do you have to invite them? If they can, stealth will be impossible. Anyone heard anything on how this works?

 

It is irrelevant if the Starbound Universe arguably has billions of explorable planetoids. This hardly renders a beacon system impractical. There is in excess of 38-billion * web pages on the Internet conservatively speaking, yet we do not throw in the towel with fearful trepidation that layers upon layers of technology can't provide us enough breadcrumbs to find the information we need on the internet. We also don't assume that the masses of web surfers browsing the internet do so isolated from each other, never crossing paths or communicating knowledge of Internet space outside of instant messaging or texting. I have the impression astrometric scanning technology is already built into the game as how would you look for ultra rare resources if your only option was to randomly search at surface level among billions of planets? The same technology could search beacons within a sector just as easy as ore...

It is entirely feasible to incorporate a useful beacon system into an astrometric navigation system. Here is a crude mockup of what it might look like. Original screen grabs courtesy of the Chucklefish May 19th progress video, modifications courtesy of myself. I am not suggesting that it must look like this, this is merely some broad brushstrokes to how it could be put into place.

I see beacons within an active server contributing to exploration and expansion much like the collective enterprise of ants finding the most efficient path through the forest.

Beacons could be enabled or disabled as an overlay. This would allow players to chose if they wanted beacons within their gaming experience.




Basic summary of beacon content provided at highest level of stellar navigation panel, e.g. notable lifeforms, special resources, etc. More in depth information regarding planetary survey available as you drill down, e.g. accolades, star dates, etc. Beacons could possibly match team color?

* Google Index 8/31/2013

 

Condensed argument against beacons:
- StarBound universe astronomically large.
- Beacons would be a cosmic needle in a haystack.
- Beacon information would be too awkward to find or fit within astrometric navigation.
- A Beacon system provides no practical function and would further delay the beta or full release.

Condensed argument for beacons:
- Share useful, personalized and or silly breadcrumbs of astrometric information to other players.
- Engender a sense of stellar community vs many people online playing by themselves.
- Useful for collective exploration and expansion.
- Possibly record basic stellar accolades, e.g. who discovered what and when.
- Possibly used in a competitive manner as a team domain boundary systems.
- Possibly used as an informal claim stake system.

 

This one's mine, only the V needs to either be burnt out or flickering. I wonder if I can craft a shower a la Norman Bates?

 

Serendipity Tiy just posted this star navigation screenshot a few hours after my beacon mockup. Notice the high contrast inverted brackets and ready use of icons around star systems to quickly communicate information about a system. In this case I'm guessing the gold exclamation marks indicate available quests within those systems. I wonder what the bright blue brackets or darker blue rings around star systems indicates?

 

Just like any game there will be third party programs or hacks that will make players coming across you quite frequent in PVP servers or with griefers... So hopefully something will be hard coded in to prevent that.

 

Home symbol is self-explainatory imo. Brackets probably mean current and target locations, while circles - visited systems. And star is probably main quest location

 

There is already a thread about this: http://community.playstarbound.com/...map-constellantions.29091/page-2#post-1143712

Thought I would share with you so this topic doesn't go off topic.

 

I think this would be pretty neat. Dunno how it would be implemented, but def pretty cool.