late to the party of course, but i never really had a use scenario for them so just trying them out..

main problem being, once they are down they are down.. and they expire in an hour.. so.. not super user friendly.

be nice to have a command to place them instead of a click on a designated item, then we could make use of them on goliaths and tridents rather than using the addon.

be nice if after ten they replace themselves, in order.. so the 11th makes the 1st disappear, and so on..

and even a command to clear all beacons in the current sector..

if anything, a command to clear them would be the most important, they are easy to misplace and impossible to get rid of. could even go as far as /clearnav [0~9] [all], or simply /clearnav

I use nav beacons primarily to mark the queens locations when the queen is in an ion storm so deep you cannot see her, or the NPC Trident tracking her.

I really like ScotiaKnight’s idea about being able to pick the nav beacons back up, and I have been in a situation once before where I wished I could “clean up” the sector of my nav beacons; (queen kept moving, I kept marking her location, eventually I had so many out I did not know which was which).

GA

Humm.. okay, a bit of a recap (and the original thread for reference):

- Make dropping new beacons erase the old ones. ("11" replaces "1" and so on).

- Add a command to remove all beacons. Like maybe "/beacon clear".

- Add a command to drop beacons (?), like perhaps "/beacon drop". This might also require changes to capships, to make it work on capships.. I'm not sure offhand.

- Add a command to remove specific beacons, like maybe "/beacon remove 1" or some such.

I'm not so sure about "picking them back up". I mean, anything is possible, of course, but that sounds like there's a lot of potential for "accidental" pickups and frustration.

Does that sound good? Anything else, relating to Beacons?

I haven't played around with them but these additions/changes seem like good QoL addtitions.

Only thing I can add is it would be cool to make them explode with the gemini or lmine explosion animation instead of just seeing them vanish.

And while I'm at it a way to differentiate the beacons from a distance when targeted so if I were to tell someone to follow beacons sequentially they wouldnt end up going in the wrong direction; if such a thing isn't already implemented of course.

Beacons aren't physical objects, spidey, them exploding would be weird.

I thought they sat there like a mine (without the whole exploding on proximity part duh) and that they showed on radar/were targetable.

why can't we have "physical" beacons more immersion or whatever! :D

Ehh, okay.. I don't think we need "nav beacons as fireworks" right now. They're like markers on your HUD of a position in space, not a physical item.

Rather than just pie-in-the-sky wackiness, do we have any other feedback on Beacons that comes from actual experience in using them?

sounds about right.. are we certain they need to be labelled so prominantly too? a person with a long name takes up a lot of screen real estate (x10). its a big blue beacon in the sky.. the labelling could in theory take up more room than the beacon itself.

as long as we can recycle them and clear them i think that would be good.

sounds about right.. are we certain they need to be labelled so prominantly too?

I'm not sure.. but there are certainly cases where you may have multiple people dropping beacons, where some kind of differentiation may be important. The use-cases for Beacons haven't all been really well defined yet.

Anyway, I'm all for optimizing that as well, but maybe we'll approach that in another thread if it proves important, down the road.

I'll look into the rest of this and see what we can do.

So, this has been added over a few releases:

Tonight's 1.8.725:

- Added '/beacon drop' command to allow players piloting capships to drop navbeacons.

A couple of weeks ago in 1.8.723:

- Dropping an 11th navbeacon now replaces the oldest beacon instead of preventing it from being created.
- Added a "/beacon clear" command to remove all of the beacons you created.

I think that covers the majority of significant cases here. I'm not going to worry about explicit beacon removal commands right now: that gets more complicated, as we have to articulate what beacon is what number and display that, and then the user has to express that syntactically, and I'm just not sure how much this is even going to be used.

If, down the road, an explicit-removal command proves to be a "must-have" feature, then this thread can be raised again (or a new one posted, and link back to this one).

But, for now I'm going to call this completed.

these are actually pretty cool. i spent some time with them yesterday, and being able to better understand the relationship between you and all the beacons within the sector is definitely handy even as a point of reference.. plotting the paths of ships or even getting to know the dimensions of a sector.. helping new players mine without having to hover over them.. and more. at first i laughed but.. yea.. they are legit.

Can't wait to test them out; been away from my rig for a couple months now.

I'm pretty sure i'm gonna find them neat; but they'd be even cooler if they exploded too!