Accidentally found a cheat, now I'm sad

[oddible]

Don't read this if you don't want a cheat to find stations in a sector.

Spoiler

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If you go into Manage Plots and try to place a plot it will show all the places you cannot place a plot = all existing stations in a sector, even ones you haven't found yet. I wish it only showed an unavailable message if I tried to place one on top of an existing structure.

[Imperial Good]

Exploit or feature?

Spoiler

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Trying to place down a plot in a sector will show all plots in discovered space and their owners, even for stations and structures you have not yet discovered. It will not show plots in undiscovered space, so there is still a strong reason to send scout ships to explore huge areas of the sector.

I personally see this as a feature since you have already explored (mapped) the space and so cannot re-explore it. This makes it very useful for finding fresh spawned KHK structures as well as Xenon stations that are rebuilt (if they rebuild them...).

[jlehtone]

In earlier game version it was all space, which indeed was less a feature.

[Raptor34]

I honestly don't see why they don't just update it live than needing to do this.
Maybe tie it to rep or something. All those recon flights the faction send must be doing something right?

[Twsted]

I personally see this as a feature since you have already explored (mapped) the space and so cannot re-explore it.

And for THIS specific reason is why Egosoft seriously needs to implement Procedural Sectors and Procedural Universe MAP.
So every time a player starts a new game, the entire map & sectors has changed. So nothing is the same.
THIS will make replay-ability skyrocket to 1000% Then people can share SEEDS of the map to other players, so they can play the same map as their friends.

I would also love to see 1000 sectors. I thought that by now you guys would have done this a long time ago already. By my surprise it wasn't. sadly.
Anyways, 3D software NODES features are great for this randomization. As a NODE called Random/Randomization
can help randomize more sectors with the content objects & elements that are within the game already and create new sectors - to help with creating 1000 sectors.
Yaa, Yaa, Yaa, maybe I've been playing with Blender too much.. Hehehe

[Tidaar]

Don't read this if you don't want a cheat to find stations in a sector.

Spoiler

Show

If you go into Manage Plots and try to place a plot it will show all the places you cannot place a plot = all existing stations in a sector, even ones you haven't found yet. I wish it only showed an unavailable message if I tried to place one on top of an existing structure.

I use this all the time to spot where the Xenon built their stations. Welcome to the club.

[Imperial Good]

THIS will make replay-ability skyrocket to 1000% Then people can share SEEDS of the map to other players, so they can play the same map as their friends.

It will also make debuggability hit the floor because now some issues many only be possible in specific seeds that have similar chance of being given to the player as the player has of being hit by a meteor in real life.

Practically every procedurally generated game has this issue. We all know of the magic, degenerate, seeds that Mincraft has/had. Another good example is classic old Empire Earth from 2000 where the random maps could randomly break so badly that a player literally started without a capital building. Terraia and Spelunky has it so that various dungeon instances can overlap based on seed, allowing potentially major skips or drastic changes in difficulty. The list goes on and on.

[Twsted]

I know for a fact that after I have played through this X4 foundations game 3 or 4 times maybe less, from beginning to end. I will get bored and move on to another game.
Just like I did with Terran Conflict. I didn't play TC after 2 play-throughs, until X4 foundations & a bunch of DLCs got released for it.

I understand your point, maybe don't make it expose a SEED and just make it procedurally generated. Or maybe egosoft doesn't have the skills to pull off procedurally generated universe and galaxies like ED and NMS does (who knows?, I don't know)...... But I can understand that point of view.
In Elite Dangerous is procedurally generated and (There are 400 billion star systems), and No Man's Sky is procedurally generated (There are over 18 quintillion planets in the No Man's Sky universe). And they are doing fine. - Just saying

something to think about. its 2022 going on 2023, are we going to push the envelope or stay stagnant with the old ways. (just kindly asking and kindly curious)
Also if I owned egosoft, I would implement the most used/played mods permanently into the game. (but thats just me)
Your own community is practically building the game. why not take advantage of that and permanently put the most used mods in the game.

This game could be so much bigger and playing ball with the big boys. Why are we not pushing for that? just curious.

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[Targ Collective]

Randomisation has problems for developers, and the primary problems rely on something that is inherent - unpredictability. Seeds are a debugger's nightmare. Each piece needs to not break and fit all the combinations of the rest of the seeds. It's like checking a jigsaw of, in your suggestion, a thousand pieces. And the pieces can fit together differently. If that isn't nightmarish enough, every unique fit needs to work.

If what you want is artistic signal noise - if that is how you approach it, which is the only way to make it work - then you've solved the problem; a desert world will always be a desert world, a lush world will always be a lush world. Whether you're playing Terraria or No Man's Sky, you will always have a certain proportion of whatever you're looking for in scope, whatever you have learned the natural proportion of the seed to be. Then you get bored. Need Pyrite? Find a desert world. Need Uranium? Find a rad biome. It becomes a checklist of 'have I mapped that seed yet'?' I promise you that can get boring.

x4 doesn't have No Man's Sky style scope, but I don't think that's the dev's fault. I genuinely believe that they would take the time to build lore around 200-300 sectors, and use a starting template and evolving conditions for a unique feel. X4 does have seeds and randomness. But they are around ships and economies and building stations in various places. You're looking at the canvas and saying 'how small and boring'. Look, it's the canvas. You are Missing The Point. The universe is small because they would like ordinary people to run it, people who don't have to invest in a server farm for one game. They want the game to be replayable - do you want to change the starting conditions? You can do that. Do you want to shape the Universe so the Terrans take over the Universe? In normal play you can't do that because they only have some sectors which they are 'allowed' to contest by the scripts. But you aren't restricted to normal gameplay because there are mods.

That's right, there are mods. The dves have embraced mods since For Ever. It's a sensible adaptation - people get more value for money out of the games and will reinvest in further games in the series. The mods, by the way, can sometimes add sectors. But I don't know of a thousand-sector one because every ship has to be emulated, every ware tracked, and You Will Not Have Smooth Framerates Today.

No Man's Sky is a wonderful game that has utilised nonlinear signal noise and miraculously made a playable game out of it. They have done fantastically well. Some of the things they have done have been theorised to be impossible, and they proved those things possible. It is like endless artistically raked sands, as far as the eye can see, and that's awesome. They have mastered Scope Creep.

X4 is different. It is the digital equivalent of an artistically detailed jewelled egg. Made with tremendous patience and care, you can learn every detail if you wish, yet every artistic appreciation will add another layer of history to the story of your player character, the Player-Corporation of Layered Beginnings.

Go on. *You* do better than that.

[Imperial Good]

The main issue with randomness in overall map layout is tying everything together coherently and reliably. As an example take the first part of the Paranid storyline. During this sequence you have to shoot ships, lockboxes, retrieve an item off a destroyer, find someone in a monument in a hazard region, follow them to another monument, navigate a maze and then fight a fleet battle.

Currently this is mostly statically assigned around the universe. The monuments are always in well defined locations. The ship you get the item from is always in a specific Xenon sector. The fleet battle and fight sequences are well spaced such as to avoid excessive interference. All these sequences and locations have been heavily tested and from my experience work very reliably.

Now imagine not only the universe links are generated using a seed value, but also the sectors themselves. Now how could this go wrong? Maybe the monument is placed in a nonsense location such that asteroids end up intersecting it. Maybe the fight sequences happen in a seemingly empty piece of space but due to universe layout it is a massive traffic lane and so the player ends up being interfered with. One person randomly ends up with the monument sector being a Xenon sector due to universe layout placing it between 3 other Xenon sectors which quickly take control of it making the storyline not viable for early game. The lockboxes to be collected end up spawned inside a mine field so instantly explode. One of the monuments in 1 seed fails to spawn because it gets removed due to setup for another storyline or part of the universe. See how many ways this could go wrong and how much has to be considered?

I do agree that having some variation with universe layout would be nice and improve replayability. However it does not need to be random to achieve this. Simply having a few pre-defined flavours of universe would suffice. For example there can be a beginner flavour where there are fewer Xenon and lawless sectors with more defined borders. There could be an expert flavour where additional Xenon sectors are added near core sectors of the factions and there are a lot more neutral sectors which the NPC factions fight to control. There could even be a conflict flavour which adds additional gates and border sectors between waring factions to encourage conflict. This flavour approach has the advantage that there are a limited, well defined, number of states to test and that much state is shared in common between them. For the Paranid storyline example nothing major would change from base game between them as all those locations would be in common, with other parts of the universe having changed around them.

I would suggest starting a new topic if you want to continue this since it has deviated from the original topic.

[Diroc]

I know for a fact that after I have played through this X4 foundations game 3 or 4 times maybe less, from beginning to end. I will get bored and move on to another game.
Just like I did with Terran Conflict. I didn't play TC after 2 play-throughs, until X4 foundations & a bunch of DLCs got released for it.

I understand your point, maybe don't make it expose a SEED and just make it procedurally generated. Or maybe egosoft doesn't have the skills to pull off procedurally generated universe and galaxies like ED and NMS does (who knows?, I don't know)...... But I can understand that point of view.
In Elite Dangerous is procedurally generated and (There are 400 billion star systems), and No Man's Sky is procedurally generated (There are over 18 quintillion planets in the No Man's Sky universe). And they are doing fine. - Just saying

something to think about. its 2022 going on 2023, are we going to push the envelope or stay stagnant with the old ways. (just kindly asking and kindly curious)
Also if I owned egosoft, I would implement the most used/played mods permanently into the game. (but thats just me)
Your own community is practically building the game. why not take advantage of that and permanently put the most used mods in the game.

This game could be so much bigger and playing ball with the big boys. Why are we not pushing for that? just curious.

.

The limits imposed on the effect of the Seeds allow the universe to function consistently. Not breaking storylines and having races not wipe each other out is much better than a mess of overly random stuff. I'm not to familiar with No Mans Sky but with the numbers provided, I doubt the developers really care if the parts work well with each other. Building a storyline into that framework just doesn't seem like it would make much sense. X4, by comparison has less randomness but remains reliably functional. It isn't a random mess of encounters and pieces, it's a cohesive universe with a simulated economy. Factions build the stations they are lacking to keep their economies working. Disruption of the economy has real consequences. Everything the player does (Or doesn't do) affects the universe. Ships move around the universe doing specific things with purpose to keep the economic engine working.
The premise that bigger is better and a universe of infinite dice rolls is somehow better is seriously flawed.
Different variations of the same pieces slapped together randomly does not make a game with depth. Nothing you do changes that situation There is never any significance. It's lazy on the part of the developers and it's boring.
Nothing is cohesive and there are no knock-on effects that ripple through the universe when disruptions happen.

We aren't pushing for that because shoot and loot space games are already common enough.

As you play X4 and shape the universe around you, an understanding will emerge.
In X4, you can control the knobs of the universe, not some cosmic dice.

[oddible]

I do wish there were SOME variability. I don't need 1000 sectors (good god can you imagine the core of my GPU melting through the center of the earth?). Though I have played through several complete playthroughs of X4 and I still look around for different sectors to set up my home bases. I wish the PHQ wasn't tied to Grand Exchange though - wish it was more relevant to your starting location.

[Raptor34]

I'll accept 1000 sectors when the people who want it buys me a system that can play it smoothly.

[MarcusInVR]

I personally see this as a feature since you have already explored (mapped) the space and so cannot re-explore it.

And for THIS specific reason is why Egosoft seriously needs to implement Procedural Sectors and Procedural Universe MAP.
So every time a player starts a new game, the entire map & sectors has changed. So nothing is the same.
THIS will make replay-ability skyrocket to 1000% Then people can share SEEDS of the map to other players, so they can play the same map as their friends.

A random seed number is the ultimate compression.

Elite Dangerous also uses a seed to generate the galaxy - so all players see the same thing, although it does not exist on the server. For X4 it would work exactly the same. You'd only need the seed (maybe a text field somewhere for custom starts?) and that would be it. Savegames can be passed around too, but would rely on that seed.

Implementing millions or even billions of stars and sectors using a seed would be no problem at all. Not all sectors are used at the same time. Only those with activity need processing.

[mr.WHO]

For me it's a feature, not a cheat - if I had to sweep the whole huge sectors just to find some last lone KHK or Xenon station I'd go nuts - thanks to this I save much time and sanity.

[dtpsprt]

I do wish there were SOME variability. I don't need 1000 sectors (good god can you imagine the core of my GPU melting through the center of the earth?). Though I have played through several complete playthroughs of X4 and I still look around for different sectors to set up my home bases. I wish the PHQ wasn't tied to Grand Exchange though - wish it was more relevant to your starting location.

A good point that many pople either forget or not take into account:
Everything is interconnected through the "butterfly effect"... Just a single ship generates interactions with every other ship it meets and station it lands (or even attacks). Most probably our molten CPUs will drill a hole through the Moon if we play during the day (the Moon is on the other side of Earth) not able to cool enough through the intervening vacuum and 0K of space!!!
As for the PHQ tied down in Grand Exchange I have stopped playing ready starts long ago and use custome ones, where it can be anywhere in the Universe (Try Matrix #9 for kicks)...

[jlehtone]

Implementing millions or even billions of stars and sectors using a seed would be no problem at all. Not all sectors are used at the same time. Only those with activity need processing.

Yes, "only the sectors with activity". A key feature of X Universe is that all sectors have activity all the time. Everything is processed, always.

Besides, (most) NPC stations are at random locations. OP stumbled on method to efficiently (re)explore sectors in order to find the NPC stations. The issue is not that you can foretell position of each station, if you have played the game before, like it was in Xbtf and X2.

Locations of (most) initial NPC stations at start of game are more or less procedurally generated, with some randomness. X4 has seed. You can read it from savegame and plug it into Custom Start to reproduce the Galaxy. Essentially, if you don't use real randomness, procedural generation is deterministic -- nothing but a different way to encode/store the initial description of the Galaxy.

[Socratatus]

If you mod a game to make things easier or edit the files to make you super good or unkillable, that's a cheat.
If you find a way (without any editing or modding), just playing the default game, to get behind the engines of a super destroyer bristling with all kinds of guns but it forgot to put anything in the rear to blow you away with if you were smart enough to get there, and has no escort, so you beat it with a little pissant fighter (just by being very, very patient), then it isn't a cheat. You just got smart- happened even in real warfare sometimes.

[Twsted]

I'll accept 1000 sectors when the people who want it buys me a system that can play it smoothly.

Gaming companies shouldn't have to negate their progress just because people are running games on potato computer. Just saying.
We need to evolve. And we cant evolve if everyone is constantly waiting on the slowest guy in the crowd. This game can be so much better, but I guess people would rather be stagnated & be stuck in the old ways.
Maybe its the limited skills people have who knows.

Ill just leave this here. !! In hopes that some day we will progress & evolve into something better.

WATCH:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gry36cT3TdI

DETAIL EXPLANATION VIDEO: Polygons no more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47I2N_l47mw


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[oddible]

If you mod a game to make things easier or edit the files to make you super good or unkillable, that's a cheat.
If you find a way (without any editing or modding), just playing the default game, to get behind the engines of a super destroyer bristling with all kinds of guns but it forgot to put anything in the rear to blow you away with if you were smart enough to get there, and has no escort, so you beat it with a little pissant fighter (just by being very, very patient), then it isn't a cheat. You just got smart- happened even in real warfare sometimes.

I believe the term is "Exploit" when you take advantage of the programming to do something that doesn't fit the expectations of the game. Use it if you want, it is still cheese.