If you're going to be grouped anyway, just leave one member of the group at the location as a "marker". Group members always show up on radar & can be targetted, regardless of the distance to them.

For sectors without bots that's a good solution, Beolach. It might be a bit harder to play that role when there are guardians flying around, though.

I think marker buoys are a really good idea, especially if they take up a small slot for the deployment mechanism.

That's what we do now, the problem is when group mining you have to sit there and wait for another group member to return to you. However, after mining enough, you learn to kinda remember where the roids are you are looking for ;)

/me waves hand

*These are not the roids you are looking for...*

wait, so what's wrong with players scripting bots again? i personally don't think that should be specifically hampered, but not necessarily catered to either. if a player can script a bot using tools which actually have value to players in general (3d coordinates) then what's the problem with that? to me it seems that the person writing the script would just be a very technically inclined pilot. or a person who get's a script from aforementioned pilot would just be someone who is "well connected"

Then they run their mining bot and come back to a stash of 1000 Heliocene, leaving the easily accessible roids way to hot for anyone else to use.

Bots are bad. You PLAY the game, not write something to play it for you.

Eeeeh. Sorry roguelazer. Didn't mean to suggest cheating. On Starfisher's point, I want to PLAY the game as well, but not search for an asteroid for 30 minutes.
It just makes sense that a spacefaring race would have a method of locating themselves spatially. So the whole location thing has been, ahem, "abused" in the past, I take it. By people who know the code well enough to write a script that can do this.
There is still so much for me to learn about this game...

I know this is an old thread, but i do have a few things to add to it, let the there be a bot like interface, let there be a new tool for pirites too. lets say when an astroid get's to an unspecified temp then the new tool lets the pirit know that an astroid is getting too hot and that is still being mined or not. throw a rench in boting and let's have some fun. now if you are not watching your bot then you lose ships and mining beems, that get's costly. I also want to show that if you are paying an axtra 10 dollers to have a bot. the game wins too.

P.s. if there is not a pirit around and they do not do anything about botting then your vo bots should have a mission of there own to anoy that bot that stay's to long.

I'd say this should take care of the heat issue. I would have to say if you are sitting to long anyway then you are not injoying the game. i also think that adding new levels to player be aware of pirites is a good idea, i think you should be able to become an afficail pirite in a system too. and to only be able to home in gray space :-) also there should be uit space in the midle of gray space,itans, and serco.

there is my two cents

I agree very much with the suggestions for the ability to open a note screen and also a way to store positions for cool or important places.

I really like the idea about coordinates readout as x/y/z. I understand the ability of making bots to cheat and that would be bad. I don't think it is wrong to tell or sell coordinates to friends or clients. Could there be a way to detect bots and penalize the perpetrators (HARD!)

I don't know how this would work. I am not a programmer. Could something query the bot when it docks with a station or enters station space, or something like the bots and pirates suggestions by "snowcatmen" as I understand them.

If the coordinate thing can't be worked around I agree with bouys for single or groups; BUT SOMEHTING! I think this important to improve game play and decrease useless wasted time looking for the same roids and stuff you've already found once.

Just use the background for reference and known jump in points to keep the variables down. Any type of nav system exact enough to locate a with any precision is also exact enough to be abused beyond all repair.

What if it were easy for non-programmers to write bots, and everyone had one if they wanted? Or maybe you could specify the behavior of your character while you're not controlling him/her? This would be especially moot then, no?

It's kinda like our approach to auto-aim. Someone could write an auto-aim hack, so we just gave everyone the same autoaim hack.

Back on topic, I've always been in favor of having beacons or buoys or whatever you want to call them (they're not actually buoyant, but they serve the same purpose :). A mechanism for sharing them is really key. Navigating to particular x/y/z coordinates isn't that easy, so having a visual marker would be a lot more convenient.

Tramshed, I don't see how you remember the positions of all the things you want to in the method you describe in all the different sectors you want to remember. I have found the technique you've reccomended useful in the short term, but not for recording my finds more permanently.

It sounds like the concept of beacons or bouys is more probable. Likely, it will take some finessing to do it right. I am confident the developers can do this elegantly, given the time and encouragement. They will come up with something typically cool that will satisfy this need. I feel something like this is very important to gameplay (to be reduntantly redundant) and to move play along more quickly.

On a more general note, it is very cool to have input with all the other players as the different layers of this onion are laid down. I so hope the developers can keep up this project and meet the goals they set for VO. I was really dissapointed when MOO III started out in development sort of like this, but ended up finishing the game prematurely. They had to move on because they ran out of time and money. What they ended up with was a very flawed, forgetable product. It doesn't look like the same scenario is likely to be repeated here.