I think this kind of thing could be solved with the Radio Transmitter and player ingenuity. I feel the addition of a /location style command (system or otherwise) which gives players their X Y Z grid location would detract from the feel of the game, taking away a large element of exploration. Since you can design a beacon, drop those beacons like breadcrumbs along your path, and find your way back using those breadcrumbs and a Radio Transmitter scanning for objects, I'd prefer to see this kind of thing fleshed out in the player market rather than killing literally any need, desire and thus possibility of such a system being invented by players with the addition of a /location for players to utilize otherwise.
I did overhear players talking about making a factory which pumps out GPS-style drones which go to a location and sit as a beacon, expanding into a grid automatically. I'm not sure how viable this is with peer-to-peer, but it won't even been tried if such a location shortcut is added.
I think of a player crashing their ship, typing /loc, getting their XYZ coordinate, respawning, getting another ship, and arriving at their wreck 30m later with no issue. This sounds like every other game out there. Instead, making it matter when you wreck your ship - making you learn to carry all the tools and resources to repair your ship and backup parts and so on; I feel this is more worthwhile than making ships disposable if you can just /loc your way back to it should anything happen.
With that said, I don't see any real issue with this kind of location system inside the safe zones, since it can make sense thematically.
Why not drop beacons and carve out a chunk of space for your own mining operation, instead of going at it randomly into the void? Location would eliminate such gameplay, which I find very interesting to consider the possibilities of.
I really enjoy the idea of players learning to triangulate their position from nearby stations, and using YOLOL and math to solve the equation of how to get back to that position and so on. I see a vast amount of gameplay cut out with the addition of a hard XYZ grid location system, and yet I'm sure everyone would agree it is much more approachable by a larger audience. It is then up to us the players to develop easy-to-use systems that the mass of players will use to achieve the same effect, if the goal is to make the game world still vast and interesting, instead of just points along a line. The player experience will have the same net-effect of a grid location (or a relative position location system) and then, if some station gets destroyed, now things are dynamic and interesting as people have to work through finding a new point of reference.
Much like everything else: is the ease of use more valuable than the amount of gameplay eliminated by the implementation of such a system?
This is a critical game issue, and will remain so until resolved in some way. It's such a fundemental issue that it causes the following problems:
- Friends cannot find each other
- Exploration becomes useless, because if it's virtually impossible to ever re-find your position
- Any important location becomes useless to you and everyone else.
- If you see a shipwreck, you cannot come back and salvage it.
- If you crash into an asteroid and run out of repair beams, you cannot load up more and come back to fix it up.
- If you find an asteroid that you cannot fully mine out, it is now lost forever once you leave it.
In the absence of stations, it is functionally impossible to know where you are. Out-of-game screenshot triangulation is the least immersive thing i can imagine, takes hours, and is still not guaranteed to succeed due to the completely mind-bending scale of the game. Seriously, a human mind has real trouble understanding the distances and scale of a 3D space this vast. Some way to simply
tell where you are is
critical.
So, the question becomes: what's the best, most engaging and interesting way to solve this problem?
Your solution is to implement an entire system of ingame beacons (the gps system as described cannot function with current game features) and rely on the currently existing radar and yolol systems interacting with that beacon system in order to navigate. Currently, the only premade ship capable of full-scanning an area and displaying multiple radar points (currently only stations) is the Hedron. In order to accomplish this, it requires 30 yolol racks, and an entire wall of panels and buttons that almost requires an entire owners manual to read and understand:
All of this extremely complex, expensive, and space-intensive implementation STILL only is able to show a total of 5 locations. Just 5. For all of that complexity and effort.
And, even with ALL of this and more on every single ship in the game, you STILL would not be able to actually navigate in any reasonable way using these tools.
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Alternatively, the devs can implement an xyz coordinate system (which already exists in the background of the game code), and let us interact with it either via a chat command, or via the universal tool. This implementation does not "remove gameplay possibilities" as described, It does the opposite. The system you described is so convoluted and near-impossible to implement and interact with using the existing tools in the game, that it might as well not exist.
The situation you described of someone crashing their ship and using XYZ to re-find and repair it IS gameplay, that currently DOES NOT exist, and WOULD NOT exist with your system, not for months, and possibly not ever for 95% of players. The systems in this game are already very, very complex and intricate. If you think implementing a system that requires dozens of yolol banks, and walls of location data screens is a viable and gameplay-creating way to simply
know where you and your friends are, you're living in a fantasy world.
