Since we have these really handy PDA's with personal mission notes, it would be nice to have a command that would let you find your XYZ corrodinates in any sector.

It would make mapping asteroid fields, setting up meet points well away from the jump areas, and other things, much simpler.

E.G. /location show
Result Dao D-4 500,459,9000

It could even be a HUD toggle like the FPS, to show a continuous postion.

Sorry if this is already out there. I hunted the wiki, and asked a bit in 100, but nobody had any answers about it.

SOmething like this has been discussed before. The bottom line is that while it would be of great benefit in the ways that you have described - it would also benefit those who want to script trade and mining bots to run independent of player control.

This would be a way for some people to become fabulously wealthy and gain an advantage over those who don't know how to script such things.

Ultimately I think Guild will find some way to do this that is less exploitable. I'm sure suggestions would be appreciated.

There's some ideas here: http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/6423#91204

it is quite apparent to me that the developers have gone to extaordanary measures to make sure that you can not determine your x.y.z coordinates. I know how to map roids and such reguardless of these measures. but I must admit, they have made the task of building a bot seam very duanting. even my most sophisticated scripts can not find specific roids. but if you add an absoluted coordinate system...

during the very brief period when they allowed lua code, getting your current xyz was almost trivial. instantly teleporting yourself to an xyz was also nearly trivial. so the 'anti-botting' theory is very believable.

one way around it would be to make it extremely expensive and extremely risky. for example...

simple version: have an 'xyz' computer, weighs 200000kg... requires 2L and 50 cargo slots and costs 1 million credits. it can only be purchased at one station and there is a limited supply based on what raw materials have been delivered to the station lately (samoflange, CtC xith, etc). its output goes to the PDA.

multiplayer version:
surveying system. you can get xyz coordinates - but only relative to other pilots ships. and then only by shooting them with a 'surveying laser' .

beacon version:
beacon system -- you have to lay a beacon in the sector you want. you have to equip a 'beacon reader'. each are extremely heavy, take up a lot of slots/cargo, and cost a lot. furthermore, the beacon degrades over time and dies after 10 days. it can also be blown up easily.

very silly version:
captcha system: show xyz in pda. but in a captcha. (those funny looking words that websites use to make sure you arent a bot)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

etc etc ad infinitum.

I still support a beacon. As long as there was no console output, navigating a bot using a beacon would require image recognition techniques, and if somebody's using techniques that sophisticated, they'll get the bot working. Just let people drop little beacons that they can name and use 'em to mark a position...

Beacons sounds like a reasonable compromise. I have found that my asteroid mapping skills aren't up to par. At the time describing the asteroid landmark as "duck shaped" seemed like the right thing. However once I returned to the sector all the asteroids looked sort of like duck heads and I was unable to decide which one was the original. Thus ended my mineral mapping career.

The only problem with the beacon system is the sheer amount of those the server would eventually have to keep track of. Of course, a test could be carried out to see if this is an issue or not.

The captcha system, though silly, could also work.

If someone can design a script capable of image recognition and visual navigation, they DESERVE to use it... (and promtly be banned for doing so)

PS. try this thread:
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/12275#150289

Beacons and waypoints could potentially be stored client-side, provided that they're sufficiently protected from scripting, so...

Thanks for the link Cunjo.

From what I have seen, the biggest issue is a whopper. Players programming bots to do their work.

So instead of nixing the whole concept, or building really ugly workarounds, how about something simple to deal with this problem.

Make the XYZ only jump in groups of 100-250M cubes. That way any attempt to use it for docking, would almost certainly fail. It’s hard enough for the existing AI to make it in knowing exactly where the docking bays are, let alone some players program that would have to guess what 5x5 plane to enter into in a 100m^3 block

Or am I missing something about the depth of coding available to players?

psyra what, you mean like the army's old strategy for GPS navigation, to make the coordinates fuzzy and low resolution?

But beacons are such a cleaner solution... They fit into the game in a RP sense (beacons actually make sense, instead of a magical coordinate readout), they're hard to make bots with (visual recognition is the only thing that would work), they'd be easy-ish to implement, and they have the added ability to look cool if luis makes a neat beacon model...

ananzi: that was pretty much what I was thinking.

Roguelazer:

The only problem with beacons in relation to the actual purpose of my post, would be the limited nature of such beacons. I was looking for something I could put on the PDA note pad, to help map ALL the good asteroids I found for mining.

On second thought, or third rather, this is a bad idea all around. Fairly quickly someone would post all the best roids, with locs, and then finding good locations would be trivial, in the extreem.

Beacons therefore do in fact fit the bill much better.

Oh well. Move along, nothing to see here.

rogue: there ARE scripts out there that take a certain pattern, look for it on the screen, and then "move" the mouse to follow.

But if somebody's got image recognition software, they can navigate without any XYZ position information at all, so there's not much you can do there, unless you want the devs to require HDCP...

-- ahh yes, here it is.

function me()
return OE.GetLocalObjects()[1]
end

function my_position_string() -- returns my xyz position as a string, like '0.4 44.3 492.1'
p=OEObject.GetPosition(me())
return gvector.x(p)..','..gvector.y(p)..','..gvector.z(p)
end

-----

The only viable way to do this is beacons, and the only viable way to do beacons is clientside.
We simply can't expect the server to keep up with 5000 beacons spelling "someplayer was here" on the radar.

That leads to an obvious, to me anyway, problem:
How can the beacon data be secured?

I'm glad the mission log has nothing at all to do whith anything other than seeing past misssion, 'cuz I can forge mission entries with no problems. What if the beacon data was equally available? That's like returning the hippo command to it's original function.

It would have to be very securely encrypted or very inacurate. Marking a general area, like the 100m by 100m by 100m cubes, could work, as not many roids fit in the cube.

Alongside it, it would be great if I could transmit beacon data to other ships, like I can transmit chat data, but that's an entirely different thread, I guess.

As for the suggestion of the "surveying laser", and giving absolute-but-relative coordinates, that could actually work.
"Around 1000-230-7600 relative to that large ice" is fuzzy enough to be useless to bots, but very useful to a human.

Also, keep in mind that those who will cheat, can cheat.
Unlocking the memory space of the client, peeping in to see what changes when you just fly around, and trying to predict changes to see what is coordinates, is not hard.
Asking the video card for scene geometrics is not hard either.

All that's keeping me from doing so is my respect for the rules of the game, but not everyone will have that respect. There will be cheaters pouring into the game when the marketing broadens, make no mistake about that.

With that in mind, I suggest giving honest people atleast some sense of location. It will be misused, yeah, but those that want to cheat, will cheat anyway.

"but those that want to cheat, will cheat anyway."

And be banned for violation of the EULA. No biggie.

Fuzzy, low resolutions coordinates of sorts it is, then.

On a sidenote: If capships were able to set an arbitrary point in space as "zero", you could use capship-proprietary waypoints that persist only for as long as the ship they originate from is in the same sector as the waypoints. Setting the waypoints could be done on multiple hierarchical levels, e.g. command (inter-capship) and group (capship to bombers/fighters/whatev); i.e.: the captain can broadcast to pilots in the same battlegroup, pilots can broadcast only to the captain.

This way, you could not go beyond the sector and use navbots, but you could easily coordinate wings of fighters and bombers, mining locations, areas to defend... And for intra-system, or even inter-system coordination, you'd just need two or more capships, and multiple group membership per user.

the server handles tens of thousands of asteroids, cargo drops, hive bots, un bots, trader bots, and so forth and so on, without a problem. what makes you think that '5000 beacons' would somehow be an unmanageable load on the server?

what is the burden on a server in this case? storing 5000 beacon locations? what is each beacon, 50 bytes of data, a very liberal estimate (x, y, z, sector, playerid, timecount)? what is that total, 250 kilobytes? 1/4th of a megabyte? if their server has 4 gigs of ram, what is that, one 16th of one one thousandth of total RAM (not to even mention disk swap space)? what about CPU cycles... is everyone going to drop their beacon in one sector at the same time? i have dropped 300 cargo in a sector and the engine had no problem whatsoever with it. how many hundred thousand polygons can this engine do per second, and how many polygons will a beacon be? 10? 20? are there going to be 1000 beacons in one sector?

and from what i have heard, they dont even load sectors into memory unless someone is in that sector doing something, which for a lot of these botless mining sectors, will be the case.