BUG: Remote exploration doesn't work at all! (Needs fix ASAP!)

[maxolina]

If you use another ship other than your player ship to explore a sector, either by using the "explore" command or by manually giving it waypoints to fly around a sector, it will appear that he lifts the "fog of war" from the sector map, but he actually doesn't reveal any stations at all. Once you enter the sector yourself you will have to manually explore it all over.

How to reproduce the bug:

1. Buy a small fast ship with a pilot.
2. Send it to a sector you haven't yet been to.
3. Have him explore the sector either by using the "explore" command or by manually setting waypoints.
4. Notice how the map appears to be without fog of war but you cannot actually see any stations.
5. Fly to the sector in your player-ship.
6. Boom, now things will start to appear on your map.


This is game-breaking for me as I spent all my initial money on a fleet of auto-explorers in the hope that by the time I'm done with the HQ missions I'll have a decently explored map. Too bad it was all for nothing, they literally didn't explore anything, and now it's even harder to manually explore because there's no fog of war to tell you where you've been to already and where not...

[maxolina]

I have found an additional exploration related bug:

The automatic "explore" command causes the sector you use it in to unnecessarily zoom-out on the map.

This is because it appears that the ship using that command will fly to the edge of the map, go back and fly to the edge in another direction. However, when the ship flies to the edge the map actually zooms out revealing additional hexagons in all directions, so the next time it will fly to the edge it will go further, hitting the edge again and causing the map to zoom out even more.

This keeps repeating causing your maps to be unnecessarily zoomed-out and therefore small in the overview.

How to reproduce:
1. Use the "explore" command and target the centre of a sector.
2. Watch how as the ship flies to the first edge, more hexagons appear in the sector. You can see that the hexagons got smaller by comparing before / after with an adjacent sector's hexagons.
3. The ship will then fly in another direction, but it will not stop at the previous limits, it will try to go right to the current sector edge, which is now further away from the centre than it was before.
4. By the time it is done (which takes a long time as the ship doesn't seem to use "travel mode" when exploring), the map will be very zoomed out. Perhaps unnecessarily so.

[xomg]

The Explore command doesn't even work for me. The ship just flies (slowly...) to the marked location, floats a few KM in a random direction, crawls back towards the marked location, and just seems to loop this behaviour forever.

[Wou]

Rumor is you need an experienced pilot to "explore" properly. But since leveling up of pilots is not working we're struck with 0 star morons not knowing how to fly in circles.

Not sure if that's true though

[onsen]

I don't think I have same problems as maxolina.
Just to make sure I tested it.
I had sector with 4 factories discovered. I put my scout to explore that sector and he reveled 3 more factories at the bottom as seen in the image. Without me being present in that sector or revisiting it again.


I have another explorer ship who reveled whole sector and he didn't make my map smaller so far.

I was passenger on the explorer ship and they do use travel mode. Just not for long.

From my observations ship is exploring all 3 XYZ axes, that's why it takes really long time to explore sector and it might look that he is revisiting same places.

[Zarjazz]

From my observations ship is exploring all 3 XYZ axes, that's why it takes really long time to explore sector and it might look that he is revisiting same places.

That's the impression I get too which makes not a lot of sense since every sector I've explored manually has all the stations and items of interest within the XY axis.

[captainradish]

One thing that's definitely not helping is the pathetically short scanning range.

[Zhurgan]

I have a similiar, yet really different and bizarre exploration issue. I set a ship to (auto) explore a sector (zone, or whatever it is called) and then I have noticed that some time after he has 75 to 80 percent explored, the fog returns completely but shifted (see attached images) so that part of the fog is outside the zone and the ship I sent to explore is now outside the area they were exploring (and the list of owned ships shows it is still exploring that zone).



One other thing, shouldn't Data Vaults, Lock boxes, and Anomalies be set to be marked so that a player can go back and look at the find later? You can set behavior to mark any abandoned ships that might be found (although none of my ships have so far, so that may be broken as well)?

Edit: After some additional play time and paying closer attention to that I was seeing on the map, What I am seeing and dealing with is exactly what you are referring to. It doesn't explain the fog of war or why my ships (all 5 of my exploration ships are currently doing this) are so far outside the sectors, but the expanding sector part I can see clearly.