One thing that would by handy would be a directional indicator in the HUD.... perhaps something like a compass and a vertical angle indicator. If you draw these in the hud and vary the angle based on the orientation of your ship as compared to the sector plane, then it would be easy to gauge how far you've rolled, and you might have an easier time finding roids again...

Even faint gridlines drawn at a distance would be really helpful.

Space debris. Learn to read them :)

I'm fairly good at reading the space junk and roids for positioning but even I would like to see some kind of direction indicator. I see no reason that this can not be added. or at least bring back your coordinate system from beta or alpha, whichever had it.

[edit nevermind]

hey apex sorry i edited, just had a whole new idea... its below.

uh.. ananzi. a weapon port for a cockpit device?
I don't think anyone would use that.

I wouldn't mind seeing outfit mods that use up CU space though.

[Edit] heh, ananzi you edited your post right as I responded

john: I don't think you fully understand the hippos of beta/alpha. They would not solve this problem. However, [on topic]

I think this is unnecessary. A critical skill of piloting is being able to determine your orientation without any game-provided crutches. It's really not that hard. In fact, I play with space junk off. Better FPS, and once you know how to tell where you're going, you don't need it.

So your telling me that all the pilots in the world just fly by the conture of the earth, that they use no guidence telematry from ground and space based stations to tell where they are. I know this is just a game and that the zones are very small but being able to quickly determine where you are going in relation to where you were going is a good thing and should be added. I personally do not have a problem with it but it seems that a lot of people do, perhaps as you have stated, up until they figure it out after hours of playing, but do we really need to make everything so difficult, it's JUST A GAME. A simple compass is not that big a deal, I do not see why everyone makes it such.

OK I like this .. here is my design.

It could be like old sea navigation.. you use reference points in the stars, and triangulation, and instrumentation to help you.

It should be hard enough that a 'robot program' cannot be built using it. It should be easy enough so people can actually use it.
It should be hard enough, though, so that prospecting and mining do not become trivial.

I envision specialized navigational equipment. A 'navigational scanner'.

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Here is how it works:

You know where the good-ore asteroid is, (two over from that blob that looks like a dinosaur..) but you want to give more precise directions to your buddies.

So, you buy a 'navigational scanner'. You fly to the sector. You find an easy-to-describe asteroid... like 'The last ice crystal at the end of the string, towards the planet'. You fly up to that asteroid, really close, like 1 meter. This is your 'origin point' asteroid.

Then you pick out two other objects that are easy to describe, like a big planet, and a sun, and you 'fire' your navigational scanner at each one of these for a few seconds.

Since three points define a plane, or two lines that intersect, your ship now has a base plane with itself as the origin point. Since your ship is so close to the asteroid, the asteroid can be considered the origin point. Hence the name 'origin point asteroid'.

The ship computer will now give you a continuous readout of your Yaw and Pitch with respect to this base plane and origin point. So now you point your nose at the distant 'good-ore asteroid' and write down the yaw and the pitch. Probably you want to use 'i' to 'zoom in' here, for even more precision.

However, once you move forward backwards up or down, the scanner will turn off, and the yaw and pitch information will appear no more. This will also prevent 'robot' progrmas from abusing vendetta by flying with numbers scraped from the screen.

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Your buddy, to use this, will have also buy a navigational scanner... then fly to the sector, fly to the origin-point asteroid you described, and fire the scanner at the two distant 'reference points' you described, and then rotate her ship until the pitch and yaw numbers match what you gave her.

Hopefully this will result in the 'good-ore asteroid' being dead center in her HUD, and she can fly straight to it.

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toooooo much work for something soooo simple

John the only difference between my idea and Furious' idea is that in mine, you have to make your own reference planes.

In his, everyone has a 'built in' reference plane that is the same.

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I just happen to think that mining is already too easy and the money from it could unbalance the game.

Money is not the issue here. If making it so that you can tell where you are in space destabalizes the economy of Vendetta then there is already a problem. I agree that it would be easy to add an "add-on" to a ship to allow this feature, and support it comepletely. But, I don't think that making someone create there own plane is not the right approach. If it were universal it will be easier for everyone to understand and use and it just needs to be as simple as a x,y,z number sceme. We don't need to re-invent the wheel here.

If mining causes those who mine to make too much money too fast then nerf the amount of money per unit. Or, beef up the other stuff to make it stablize. And as for those of you that think that they are sooo special cause they can navigate by sight alone, it's not a matter of if I can, but do I really need to when I could be doing something more productive. It's not like anyone is forcing you to use the compass or coordinates anyway, it's for those who wish to use them.

I still refuse to stand by anything that even makes remotely possible the creation of autopilots.

how is this an auto pilot? Really?? This is more about being able to find a point in space with "0" referance points.

What I am suggesting would be to simply draw the compass on the screen. If someone can figure out a bot to read that, then all is lost anyway.

Take a look at this and see how THE NASA SPACE FLIGHT SIMULATOR implements this... it's elegant, effective and it would be near impossible to write bots to use.

http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/~martins/orbit/orbit.html

If you want to keep mining from getting to easy, just have wandering hostile NPCs that periodically show up in mining sectors. That'll keep the miners looking over their shoulders.

I was just brainstorming. Dont blow a gasket john.

Since jump-in points to a sector are random within a few hundred meters, it would seem impossible to write an autopilot miner using only the pitch/yaw compass for feedback. If you tell someone 'go to the last ice asteroid, then look up 35 degrees and over 12.4 degrees', that would work.. right? Itd be heck of hard to write an autopilot that 'went to the last ice asteroid'.

Anyways, maybe the way the price-of-ore drops with increased supply, that will solve any 'money problem'.

the NASA thing works because it's in orbit and there's a frame of reference, ie. the planetary horizon.

What I would like to do is to be able to 'drop' a nav beacon that maybe only you could see or maybe group members, too. Then you could easily find your way back to where you want to go.

The problem with crosshairs/directional indicators is that what are they in reference to? Obviously they could be in reference to x,y,z in 3d space but that's really supposed to be arbitrary and have no bearing on anything in the game.

rogue, you are saying that autopilots are remotely possible? I'm confused.

(I don't think the possibility/reality is in any way 'remote')

Sounds like the intent here is to locate 'stationary' objects. Why not just an additional scanning function that remembers the location of the 'painted' object in terms of the game's internal coordinate system? This list of 'painted' objects could be just another config file on the client side that the game reads and allows you to select from when you are in the sector containing the 'painted' objects. Selecting an object from the sector list brings the listed object up on the radar. As long as the commands that process this listed data are kept within the game executable (not scriptable) then no bot programming is possible. As an additional precaution, the targetting scanner would only work on certain 'stationary' objects, perhaps only roids at first(additional game content may eventually result in other kinds of stationary objects), but never station docks or wormholes as they are already visible on the radar from anywhere in the sector. Sharing these lists would be possible by posting them on web sites for download, attachments to email, etc.
Downsides:
1) Makes mining easier(subjective judgement here)
2) If stationary objects get moved or removed as a result of game changes, existing lists could have bad data.
3) Could require additional game code and player interface to manually maintain lists.
4) May require lists to be finite in size; having the game process a list of every stationary object in the game could be a real performance problem.

The NASA thing uses the plane of the ecliptic when you aren't actually orbiting a planet. But that's getting too nit picky. This is where the balance between playability and reality needs to be balanced. Pitch/Yaw/Roll could just be set to 0,0,0 based on your starting position/orientation when you warp in, or based on the sector coordinate system. No need to overcomplicate this.

The whole notion of the Nav screen relies on an implied reference of some sort; otherwise the map would have been impossible to draw. That map, as we see it, has a center and four corners, all of which are potential reference points.

Old school Star Trek geeks remember that ST had worked out a coordinate system of some kind; I can't remember the details. It was extrapolated from the polar geometry Earth navigation uses now, with some [arbitrary?] "Galactic Center" of some kind.