2022-03-03 Bug Fixes

[martianant]

Is the inability to save off the starmap XML intentional?  Im not sure whether to file a bug report or to go to arena of ideas or what.

I really hope it's just a bug. The in game tool doesn't even work, and honestly I've never liked it compared to the many good 3d party options. It does the job for a player never learning of the 3rd party options, but honestly it's not like people wouldn't share them or anything. Not to mention it has some other fun uses. I like to chug it into map making programs and such.

[Rockinsince87]

Is the inability to save off the starmap XML intentional?  Im not sure whether to file a bug report or to go to arena of ideas or what.

I really hope it's just a bug. The in game tool doesn't even work, and honestly I've never liked it compared to the many good 3d party options. It does the job for a player never learning of the 3rd party options, but honestly it's not like people wouldn't share them or anything. Not to mention it has some other fun uses. I like to chug it into map making programs and such.

I've actually never had a problem with the in game tool. You do have to be careful when your using the tool as you can filter something incorrectly not get any results. I found myself using the built in tool more so than the 3rd party tools before the shutdown. Mainly because it was taking forever to download the map the more you explored!

EDIT: Just wanted to add how I use the in game too. Press the "clear settings" button on the right first, then select something like a resource and a desired Q level. I clear after each use.

[martianant]

Is the inability to save off the starmap XML intentional?  Im not sure whether to file a bug report or to go to arena of ideas or what.

I really hope it's just a bug. The in game tool doesn't even work, and honestly I've never liked it compared to the many good 3d party options. It does the job for a player never learning of the 3rd party options, but honestly it's not like people wouldn't share them or anything. Not to mention it has some other fun uses. I like to chug it into map making programs and such.

I've actually never had a problem with the in game tool. You do have to be careful when your using the tool as you can filter something incorrectly not get any results. I found myself using the built in tool more so than the 3rd party tools before the shutdown. Mainly because it was taking forever to download the map the more you explored!

EDIT: Just wanted to add how I use the in game too. Press the "clear settings" button on the right first, then select something like a resource and a desired Q level. I clear after each use.

I press clear settings. I set the range to 100. I set minimum quality to 1. I select "any resource." I hit search. Nothing happens.
I also recall the in game tool taking significantly longer to search than most of the 3rd party tools, but that is just from what I heard. I've never got it working personally.

My question really comes down to: why can't we have both? The in game one (if it works) is available for people right from the start. And the 3rd party ones available for those who want it. Any new player would be able to use the in game tool, or heard about the 3rd party tools from multiple sources. Literally "Best of both worlds" I don't think I understand why it's one or the other for this.

[Neils Iyssada]

Not gonna lie, there's something that's making servers lagging so severely that ships seem drunk, or don't move, or just plain crash on planets.
It created problems with buildings too, as they were rolled back two times for me.

[Rockinsince87]

Is the inability to save off the starmap XML intentional?  Im not sure whether to file a bug report or to go to arena of ideas or what.

I really hope it's just a bug. The in game tool doesn't even work, and honestly I've never liked it compared to the many good 3d party options. It does the job for a player never learning of the 3rd party options, but honestly it's not like people wouldn't share them or anything. Not to mention it has some other fun uses. I like to chug it into map making programs and such.

I've actually never had a problem with the in game tool. You do have to be careful when your using the tool as you can filter something incorrectly not get any results. I found myself using the built in tool more so than the 3rd party tools before the shutdown. Mainly because it was taking forever to download the map the more you explored!

EDIT: Just wanted to add how I use the in game too. Press the "clear settings" button on the right first, then select something like a resource and a desired Q level. I clear after each use.

I press clear settings. I set the range to 100. I set minimum quality to 1. I select "any resource." I hit search. Nothing happens.
I also recall the in game tool taking significantly longer to search than most of the 3rd party tools, but that is just from what I heard. I've never got it working personally.

My question really comes down to: why can't we have both? The in game one (if it works) is available for people right from the start. And the 3rd party ones available for those who want it. Any new player would be able to use the in game tool, or heard about the 3rd party tools from multiple sources. Literally "Best of both worlds" I don't think I understand why it's one or the other for this.

Press clear, and don't set a range or touch anything but the resources and Q. The rest of the filters do work yes but I do this method to make sure my overall settings are ok. Once I get data back I filter further. If your not getting anything after this, make sure you do a "Query Star Map" from the star map, whole galaxy no range. 

I don't see why you can't have both either. I do agree, that at least having the option is important for player choice.

My issue was at some point in the game after you been to a hundred or so sectors in the same galaxy, the export function would take 10-20 minutes or more and for me it was crashing the client every time at some point. I'm only guessing this is why he removed it. 

The reason I am answering back this way is I don't want any new players to get the wrong idea that the in-game tool does not work because it does work 100% if you know how to use it. I just used it right now to show you. 

[Celarious]

Can confirm the ingame tool works, just make sure to clear settings first

[QuakeIV]

Clearing settings and then queueing a basic search for industrial resources (ore, vulcanite, oil, etc) above Q250 (that is to say more than one resource at a time and setting 'one natural resource must be found at the minimum quality') causes it to freeze for about fifteen minutes at which point I gave up.

It by all appearances seems to be far worse than exporting and running it through some python scripts I wrote to do various custom searches (including finding industrial resources, finding corrosive gas giants, finding a habitable planet with a habitable moon around it, and other custom criteria).

Frankly so far we have been having more success searching manually on my end. Its possible it works fine for very small numbers of explored systems but for me its already not working.

[martianant]

Okay, if I only ever select one resource it seems to work okay. If I select multiple or try to use the "one natural resource at this quality" it returns no results.
But this now brings me to my next issue which is ease of use compared to the 3rd party programs. I can take my entire xml starmap, run it through the program, and it spits out the highest Q locations for each resource. This makes finding colonization locations incredibly easy. With this tool, I will need to manually go through every resource, set quality, inspect each result (or progressively run the search increasing the quality each time until it drops all but one), for each resource. Sure, it works but dang is it going to be tedious.

I've also been manually combing through the systems like Quake, but it will get unusable once I start getting much more exploration done.

I've had slow xml exports in the past like you talked about, I'm sure it could be optimized in some way. I've never had it crash my game though. Maybe I've just never had as many systems to export as you have?

[Rockinsince87]

Okay, if I only ever select one resource it seems to work okay. If I select multiple or try to use the "one natural resource at this quality" it returns no results.
But this now brings me to my next issue which is ease of use compared to the 3rd party programs. I can take my entire xml starmap, run it through the program, and it spits out the highest Q locations for each resource. This makes finding colonization locations incredibly easy. With this tool, I will need to manually go through every resource, set quality, inspect each result (or progressively run the search increasing the quality each time until it drops all but one), for each resource. Sure, it works but dang is it going to be tedious.

I've also been manually combing through the systems like Quake, but it will get unusable once I start getting much more exploration done.

I've had slow xml exports in the past like you talked about, I'm sure it could be optimized in some way. I've never had it crash my game though. Maybe I've just never had as many systems to export as you have?

Yeah it's gets out if hand when you start traveling around a lot at warp. You do a search and you get a loading bar where it's searching through 20,000 plus solar systems and its stupid slow. It searches through systems you just happened to warp through, works the same with exporting. 

Tweaking the range of the search and that helps significantly. I wish you could set a range limit on export. That would solve quite a bit.

[martianant]

Okay, if I only ever select one resource it seems to work okay. If I select multiple or try to use the "one natural resource at this quality" it returns no results.
But this now brings me to my next issue which is ease of use compared to the 3rd party programs. I can take my entire xml starmap, run it through the program, and it spits out the highest Q locations for each resource. This makes finding colonization locations incredibly easy. With this tool, I will need to manually go through every resource, set quality, inspect each result (or progressively run the search increasing the quality each time until it drops all but one), for each resource. Sure, it works but dang is it going to be tedious.

I've also been manually combing through the systems like Quake, but it will get unusable once I start getting much more exploration done.

I've had slow xml exports in the past like you talked about, I'm sure it could be optimized in some way. I've never had it crash my game though. Maybe I've just never had as many systems to export as you have?

Yeah it's gets out if hand when you start traveling around a lot at warp. You do a search and you get a loading bar where it's searching through 20,000 plus solar systems and its stupid slow. It searches through systems you just happened to warp through, works the same with exporting. 

Tweaking the range of the search and that helps significantly. I wish you could set a range limit on export. That would solve quite a bit.

Well I explored a total of 6 systems, and now when I try and search for a single resource the client freezes and crashes. Very cool.

The export range could be limited. It only exported what you queried the map for. So instead of selecting the entire galaxy, you could set it to X sectors. Then get that data and hit export. I'm at least 90% confident that would work because I would always select 1 galaxy and never get info about the other galaxies I had data on in the export.