Temperate Rating in Trailer

While I too prefer text to show the scale for weather/temp/etc the bar rating system could work but I have a few thoughts on it.

On the rating bar, the colors can be a bit more muted with the bar it's rated at being more vibrant

The color bars may be troublesome to those within the spectrum of color blindness "I'm not color blind so no first hand experience with that here"

One more thing which could be very nice, if upon scanning the planet an alert stating a planet is dangerous for various reasons...

IE

Hostile lifeforms

Surface Temp exceeds lander specifications -- too hot or too cold

Toxic Atmosphere

Earthquakes/landslides/etc

I just got an idea about formatting these indicator bars a different way to show ideal conditions at the center of the bar, while extreme conditions move to opposite ends of the spectrum on the display.

As an example, the current bar might look like this for a hot world like Pluto Venus or Mercury:

But what about formatting it something like this?

Or something to this effect. Perhaps showing ideal conditions at the center of the bar would give players a more immediate sense of how hot/cold, active/inactive, alive/dead a world is compared to ideal conditions on Earth or another "M-class" world?

Just a thought for another way of quickly interpreting planetary information from orbit.

Wait... Pluto isn't a planet so it's possible someone will name a planet with a close orbit to a sun Pluto in some other solar system

I've been saying it since the Pluto debate started... Sci-Fi long ago came up with the term "planetoid" that we have, until now, had no use for.

Why don't we just call Pluto a "planetoid"... it ends the argument and gets use out of an up until now useless word.

Whoops. Was thinking Venus and typed Pluto. 

By the same token, on a "planetoid" like Pluto, the indicator could slide left of center and be a cold blue color, versus being right of center and a bright orange or yellow color.

I'm not exactly an expert at the terminology for this stuff, but this may be referred to as a semantic scale when it measures something in two directions, versus a differential scale that only measures something in one direction.

This made me think, in SC you could land on any planet that wasn't a gas giant... but some were so dangerous only an upgraded lander could even attempt it.  And even then, the worst of the planets were still pretty much suicide.  I hope they keep this aspect, it seems like a little thing but it actually a big thing that made SC feel "real" in a way.  If a planet had a surface, you could land on it.  It might be suicide, but you could try it if you wanted.  And sometimes you would risk trying to land pretty much right on a purple to quickly grab it and zip back to the ship in an almost touch and go landing.

Keeping the ability to try and land on any planet with a surface would be a good thing.

Actually that'd be a nice thing, being able to mine gas giant for certain gasses "Helium / Hydrogen / Etc"

^ I've brought that up a few times as well. SC2 had no gas planet exploration; would be great if there was a way to upgrade your landers for atmospheric flight so that you could explore gas worlds that don't have any surfaces to land on.

I agree whole-heartedly, but I almost feel like this probably falls under the same category as the underwater exploration we had suggested earlier. I'd love to see it, and I think it has a lot of potential, but they've already said they won't likely go in that direction. Mods-HO!

I've never liked games that have you "scoop" from an atmosphere, it really is a pretty boring activity.  A lot of times, things sound good just thinking about them, often because it seems "realistic".  But you always have to stop and consider what that activity actually amounts too in the game.  Do you really want to have to skim an atmosphere for 3 minutes just to fill the fuel tanks?  I'd rather pay someone at a base and have it happen instantly.

Nobody said anything about skimming an atmosphere to fill fuel tanks.

It's the same thing.  Whether you are doing it for fuel, or resources.  It's kind of a boring activity.  I like using Elite: Dangerous as an example of this kind of stuff.  That game is comprised almost entirely of things that sound good on paper, but are actually boring and repetitive, and unnecessary, procedures.  One of the things that made SCII so great is that all of the activities you were asked to do were actually fun.  Explore the galaxy, fight another ship in an arcade game, play an arcade game lander game, learn the story in conversations with aliens.  There were no "nonsense procedures" in SCII.  When you "go to warp"... you do it basically by quickly falling through a hole in the map.  Not... 1) Retract weapons, 2) fold wings, 3) reach top speed, 4) charge hyperdrive, 5) line up ILS indicators, 6) warp.  Procedures like that sound cool on paper, and might be in the game the first 2 or 3 times you do them, but quickly become boring and monotonous... and that is the impression of the game the player is left with in the end.  Repetitive and boring.

Ah yes, because one game's approach to something must inherently be like another's.

Good thing you have potential gameplay ideas all figured out for us ahead of time.

That's kind of the definition of a game designer:-)  It's been done many times before, it's not something you have to guess at.  Have you played Elite: Dangerous?  It is a perfect example of this because it is almost entirely a connected series of boring, repetitive, and needless procedures.  If you are talking about some type of alternate exploration map to a land map, that would just be another type of map for lander exploration and that might be cool... although a lot of work for just a slight variation on the lander game.  But that could work.  I just don't want to see "meaningless procedures" in the game because it sounded really cool on paper.  Falling through a hole to go to warp is a lot better than some type of 6-part procedure for doing that, especially in this type of game.

For those "procedures" to actually be cool you need to make a "Falcon IV" like space ship simulator that is far more complex than most people are capable of learning to play.

EDIT:  I say all this... and my own starship simulators have the intricate "Ghost Beacon Skip" procedure, haha.  But I deal with that by making sure there are never more than 3 or 4 Ghost Beacon Skips over the course of the entire game, so it doesn't get repetitive and just retains all that "gravity locked bridge shaking coolness":-)

Elite: Dangerous really straddles the line between "boring" and "well if i fuck it up, this totally destroys my ship or costs me hundreds of credits STRESSFUL" - but honestly the biggest thing about it is it's absolutely beautiful and crazy to play with a virtual reality headset. Like, holy shit. But it's also SO FAR from what I want with this game, which is basically "TALK TO ALIENS, PLOT PLOT PLOT." Elite is almost the opposite of that, and basically the only thing uniting them is SPACE 

I also agree that we shouldn't get bogged down in details, cause Star Control was always about the "big picture" and overarching plots and dynamics to me. 

Honestly, I'd rather just get numbers for the things which are easily quantifiable, like temperature or gravity. 

As for more abstract things like vulcanism or weather, I think bars are fine so long as it's clear what they refer to. Planet type can just be a category which is displayed.

With gas giants, it would be strange, I think, to explore both rocky and gaseous planets with the same lander. Maybe you need a different vehicle to explore them. 

Neat idea and I agree; maybe to explore really different worlds you'd need an entirely different type of technology, rather than just an upgraded terrestrial lander.

Hadn't really thought of it that way.

What do you mean neat? It's 

You need to read here:

https://forums.starcontrol.com/479700/page/1/#3651241

The wonders of pseudo-scientific technobabble... it's an "amphibious" lander.  It can fly in an atmosphere or act as a hovercraft over land.  It actually already looks like this.

It is actually a lot of work for the programmers/artists to also include "landing" on gas giants as far as I can see, for what you get out of it.  Unless... and I don't know if this will work, but they will, they can "fake it".  If "painting the ground" and then putting a "layer of mist" over that "ground backdrop" can make it look like you are just inside the atmosphere of a gas giant, like the scene in B5 of the White Star hiding from Agamemnon in Jupiter's atmosphere... then they could do this.  It would actually be landing on a planet as they have right now, but the "backdrop" of the "atmosphere colored" land combined with the  layer of "cloud/mist" makes it look for all the world like you are not on land.

If this works, they can do it, because then it is identical to the planets they already have... just painted differently.  "It's A Kind of Magic":-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p_1QSUsbsM