These drones will be small a block high two long to craft them it would take a form of metal glass and wire. To craft it you'll need a mid tier crafting table. Now the glass is for the camera wich will send the the player what it sees and if the player see something he or she wants you can shot a red flashing light that will stick on the block so the player can see it with out looking everywhere and you don't need lights because it will have night vision goggle built in to it and if you find your way blocked you can use your trusty grappling hook to get across and enemy's will not attack the drone but by chance the drone finds itself with no hope it can teleport to home the drone can mine some blocks and will carry most blocks but if the drone finds a rare being that drops good loot it can shot it with its lazar and grab the loot in short they are the Swiss army knifes of exploration. Hope you like the idea sorry about any spelling errors thank you for your time and I don't use punctuation because in large amount it crashs my machine.
This idea is very neat indeed. Although maybe you can explain how it would be like a little clearer? Like how would you be able to see stuff with this drone? A smaller screen pops up in the corner of the game which centers around the drone in a zoomed out state? Other than that, I think this would be really fun to play around with. Good idea man.
Nice idea. I can imagine using this when the space station crashes because the generater was shut off by some unknown thing so, you use one and go to the engine room and find a few mindwurms chewing on some cords. Probe in cave* Shines Light* You see a giant bat it attacks the probe because you shined in his face.. Awww.
Huh, you know that doesn't sound like a bad idea at all. A little hard to read, but i follow you. Maybe the control for your droid might work something like the old game Diggers 2. Your have limited control over the droid but your able to move your camera to it's location to give it orders.
The controls of the drone could behave like a second player, and you can use a hotkey to switch between them. So only one could be active at any given time. Maybe the second one could auto attack, but not more. So the player wont have a permanent companion, that is even strong. That would be far to OP.
I think it's primary purpose should be to explore, and the only upgradable trait should be durability.
I like the idea. Being able too look ahead is invaluable, although on the List of Announced Game Information, is says that the player will be able to pan their view around a certain distance. Maybe you could use the droid to go further.
Kinda like those mapping drones from Prometheus. They just run the hell around and scan everything for you until they are destroyed/done. It would be cool if you had a greyed-out outline of the terrain they discovered after they returned, giving you a basic idea of what to expect but with no idea of the mobs/pitfalls, etc. Like fog of war in any RTS, for example.
Well everyone has been saying how would you control it. My idea is you would place it and then press a button on the keyboard. That would make you see through the drones camera. So it would be like controlling a player and you press the button to go out of drone mode when your done. You could set it to automated to so that is my idea hope you like it oh ya the player would go afk when using the drone so you need to find a safe spot first.
Yeah, that would be awesome! That is, if fog of war is implemented, it would probably be in some sort of (mini)map feature.
Theres gotta be something it could see that the player cant, or there'd be no point in using it. Perhaps the drone, RPV or whatnot, could be equipped with a scanner to find metal ore, or like the greyed out map Seria suggested, maybe a greyscale density scan. Not a dead giveaway, but would let you make educated guesses based on the planets environment, spot anomalies, etc. Perhaps it could "see" in radiation, so its view looks different on every planet but signals sent out from high tech items or heat imagery could be used to spot points of interest.
Pretty good idea, maybe as you progress, you can get materials to upgrade speed/weapons/durability/ make it fly?
Without a mapping system of some kind, Exploration drones probably wouldn't have a lot of use. About the most they could do is look for valuable ores and resources and send an alert back with their coordinates if they find any. They really do need a mapping system to actually provide ongoing useful data. Exploration drones should be more-or-less defenseless, but it should be possible to upgrade their mobility and durability to let them survive or evade a hit or two. Maybe upgrades could even allow them to fly or submerge themselves without harm; the latter would be great for poking around underwater (or possibly magma-filled, if the drone is heat-resistant is well) caves without risking drowning yourself. It would also be cool if you can obtain better sensors for your drone as well, possibly allowing it to see through walls or identify deposits of useful materials. At that point, it would be useful to just have the drone follow you around, scanning the walls and pointing out any choice resources you've overlooked. While I like the idea of being able to remote-control a drone if necessary, I believe they should be primarily automatic, with simple orders such as "go explore" or "return to base" or "follow me". Remote-control should be an option, perhaps implemented as an upgrade for the drone. In addition, upgrade "slots" should probably be limited, to prevent a person from just loading up one drone with every available option and having a do-everything drone. Of course, these are all just suggestions - use/ignore/pick-n-mix as you see fit.
You know, with all the "haywire AI" ideas in the sidequest thread, I'm thinking it might be a bad idea to deploy these things on planets with lightning storms, or any high tech alien signals coming from them...
