There is a mission for the Itarni where someone called Artanis Aqu askes you to search asteroid fields for two raptors. What do I do? Should the mission update when I go to the right sector? Because in this area there are only a few grid references with asteroid fields (do ice fields count?) and I travel to all of them but the mission does not update?

Ice fields count as asteroid fields. Haven't done that mission myself so that's all I can contribute to this thread.

Not all asteroid field sectors in a system are marked as such on the map--it could well be that the correct sector is marked as empty but has roids in it.

Jesus, this mission will be insanely difficult then. It has a 15 minute time limit.

Yes you have to be very efficient at searching - it can be any sector with roids in it.

Efficient has nothing to do with it. If any sector can have asteroids, and there are 256 sectors to go through, it is basically a waste of time. There is a 15 minute time limit. If it takes an average of 3 minutes to go through a sector and jump to the next you are talking up to 768 minutes. That is luck not efficiency. And that is presuming the mission updates to let you know you are in the right sector, if you actually have to search the sector fully, it is considerably more than 3 minutes per sector. There must be a trick to finding them.

1 - Jump to sector
2 - Press "u" on keyboard (or go to PDA > Sensor Log if you're on a mobile client)
3 - Look for the name of the NPC you're looking for
4 - Profit

You can plot the system's unmarked fields in advance of taking the mission, you know.

I have done the mission... If your taking 3 minutes per sector then use a faster ship - not even a storm sector should take that long....

And if you happen to find an empty sector, you can jump out to the next one almost immediately.

Thanks a lot Terran, I did not know about the U command, it really helped. Completed the mission easily with it. I now have a usb keyboard plugged into my Ouya and controlling the game just got a hell of a lot easier!

It will not be one of the unmarked roid fields, but planetary sectors do count.

I did not know about the U command, it really helped. Completed the mission easily with it.

Situational awareness in the default game client is sorely lacking. The radar scopes are mostly useless except for very short range.

I have played several space mmos and the radar in vendetta is basicly useless

without plugins such as targetless the game is more or less unplayable

Drev, you are incompetent. Don't bother talking here. VO's radar is the most useful radar I've used. Why? You can actually tell which direction you need to rotate with it. And if you can't figure out that dim dots are farther away than solid dots, you should probably just shut off the computer and go fishing instead.

Radar is important. If you doubt it's importance, remove it and try flying around. You will find you've relied on it in subtle ways you don't notice until it's gone

Oh yeah, it's important alright, but it does a terrible job of displaying distance and speed. You can't tell something that's 3000m away moving slowly from something 3000m away coming right at you at full turbo.

I play without Targetless. Radar works fine for up close. To fill in the long range gap I use the proximity warning and TCS/AlertMachine.

What we could use is an elegant light weight version of targetless that focuses on performance but keeps the core feature of displaying the ships in the sector on the screen and allowing numbered selection intact.

I find it too overdone as a plugin to be honest I think a lot of the functionality should be done in optional modules rather than as core.

And if you can't figure out that dim dots are farther away than solid dots, you should probably just shut off the computer and go fishing instead.
Pizzasgood, The radars are transparent and dim dots are barely visible.

Performance isn't the only reason not to use TargetLess. It's also a bit cluttered on the screen if you're using a 4:3 aspect display or on mobile devices.

/toplist works fine for that. It'd work better if the devs added hotkeys for target selection. The issue is, it's not visible on the HUD, so there's no indication that there's even anyone there.

Also, anything we do with plugins doesn't solve the problem that newbies flying the out-of-the-box game client are pretty close to born blind.

Wait, let me get this straight: You're telling me that people who are nearly beyond radar range barely show up on my radar?

My mind is blown.

Seriously though. The only actual issue with our radar is that we can't customize it. There is no option to adjust the fadeout rate (I'll admit it may be just a little too high). And there are no lua bindings to alter the color, size, shape, and transparency of any individual dot, which would let us make very useful situational awareness plugins (e.g. flagging important targets, using different shapes for different classes of ships, etc.). The closest we can come is overriding the game's hostility computing function to tell it that the people we want green are friendly and the people we want red are hostile, regardless of whether we actually consider them that way. (For example, I use HUM, a plugin Maal wrote that makes people within your prox-range show up red, and people outside it green.)