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| - The action of traveling in or through an unfamiliar area in order to learn about it. This is a key aspect in all the games.
- The world of Soluna is littered with various towns, provinces, kingdoms, continents, cities, etc. These places offer respite for weary travelers, alcoves where the denizens of the world can come and indulge in rest and relaxation. Each area of the world is governed by it's own sets of rules, being able to function and maneuver through these rules help keep the player out of danger. Various stores also inhabit these cities that provide specific services, and these services vary depending on the economic power of each of these towns. There are some quests and missions that alter the economic power of each city, with varying degrees depending on your success. Learn the mechanics of the town system in order to fully take advantage of what each kingdom has to offer.
- Exploration is used for finding mining spawns or hidden complexes.
- We've covered the user interface and game mechanics in a little detail in the previous user guides. Now, let's discuss some stuff that you'll run into as you begin your adventure in Norrath.
- Exploration is a member of the Adventuring group of skills that is available at character level 1. Raising this skill at or above your character level will incur an experience point penalty. As an Adventuring skill, Exploration can be raised passively, or actively by traveling from town to town. The amount of active experience points earned in Exploration is independent of the distance traveled between the two towns. This skill allows you to travel faster in zones with grey monsters (i.e. monsters 4 or more levels below your own).
- Exploration is a skill in Might & Magic: Heroes VII. This skill is available to:
* Darkblade, Ranger and Shaman at Grandmaster level;
* Avenger, Barbarian, Chieftain, Dark Prophet, Earth Shaper, Ebon Knight, Firebrander, Knight, Mystic, Priest, Shadow Slayer, Trickster, Warden, Warlord, Warmonger and Wizard at Master level;
* Alchemist, Archon, Battlemage, Blademage, Bone Guard, Confessor, Death Knight, Djinn Lord, Enchanter, Engraver, Inquisitor, Jarl, Necromancer, Runelord, Starsinger, Storm Caller, Thane and Thornsower at Expert level.
- Exploration in Starspan should be an ongoing, complex process. It is the general process whereby you find what stuff is in the space around your empire, from stars and to and . It also includes exploration of other civilizations that may be more advanced than you, about on your level or less advanced. Sensors you use to "see" with will operate in a bit more complex fashion than other space empire building games; there will be many types of sensors that "see" different types of things. Here are some examples of different types of sensors:
- Exploration is an important part of the game. There's big–picture exploration (moving out further and further into the galaxy) and little picture exploration, where you get to scout out, map, and land on the surface — which I guess you could call itty–bitty picture exploration. The itself will not be random. It will be a reproduction of local space and that doesn't really change much. The Sol System will also be pretty much the same from game to game unless they start demoting a few more planets... Refer to Port AvSquadron for a sample exploration scenario.
- Dwarves and half-orcs have darkvision, but everyone else needs light to see by. See Table: Light Sources and Illumination for the radius that a light source illuminates and how long it lasts. In an area of bright light, all characters can see clearly. A creature can’t hide in an area of bright light unless it is invisible or has cover. In an area of shadowy illumination, a character can see dimly. Creatures within this area have concealment relative to that character. A creature in an area of shadowy illumination can make a Hide check to conceal itself.
- The episode begins in the Ice sector as Aelita is running toward a tower. She enters it, deactivates it, and is subsequently rematerialized. Ulrich expresses how tired he is of fighting XANA. When Aelita enters the lab, she suggests they go back to Carthage to find data needed for her antivirus. Jeremie disagrees with her, but everyone else convinces him to change his mind. He tells them they'll go tomorrow night. When they leave the factory, it's already late at night. Yumi runs off toward home because she knows her parents will be furious.
- The Exploration Log keeps track of points you earn while exploring certain areas in the game. The Exploration Log can be accessed by clicking the icon that looks like a magnifying glass over a globe on bottom of the screen above the F3 button on the hot bar. The Exploration Log is broken up into 3 Categories and into 7 Sections. The Categories are Biology Exploration, Industry Exploration and Culture Exploration and will show the amount of points obtained in each category. Each category is different and uses different ways of obtaining points.
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| abstract
| - Exploration is an important part of the game. There's big–picture exploration (moving out further and further into the galaxy) and little picture exploration, where you get to scout out, map, and land on the surface — which I guess you could call itty–bitty picture exploration. The itself will not be random. It will be a reproduction of local space and that doesn't really change much. The Sol System will also be pretty much the same from game to game unless they start demoting a few more planets... Inner Core systems will have some random smaller features but will have their larger attributes common to each game. Lets face it, when you make a trading game you don't put Genoa on the top of Africa or anything. As you head out down the lines and into the Scatter, then the system details themselves will be completely random. The farther out into the Scatter you go the more alone you will be — of course sometimes you think you are the first to land somewhere only to find out that someone else had some reason to want to be really alone. So part of it will be working to be able to get outwards into the different arms of the explored / colonized systems controlled by various . As you move out you will find more and more unclaimed planets ( or at least, not claimed officially ), which you can scan and map. And if you happen to spot something interesting, you can land as best you can and go explore that — could be ruins, ghost towns, features of interest ( flora, fauna or mineral ), someone's unregistered landing field, etc. Finish scouting a planet for a group — earns you deeper access to their territory. A decent deposit of minerals and a side–job delivering water to a neighboring colony allows you to upgrade your engine range and stock up on space parts. So you go further out there. You deal with more colonies, you find more unexplored planets. Maybe you choose to not report one because you want to use it as a secret storage drop. And so on and so on. As stated elsewhere, it is not a space fighting game. It is an exploration and trading game where you can get into some fights either in your ship in the black or on your feet on the ground. Try to picture a cross between Star Control and Mass Effect when it comes to planetary exploration. You will close survey a world with your shuttle — seeking points of interest while trying to avoid hazards if any. The map will be divided into sections where you will be able to tell at a glance if you can set down the shuttle or the Northstar. Sometimes this will be nearly on top of the point of interest, sometimes it will require a bit of a slog. Once on the surface you will be greeted with an instanced piece of terrain suitable to the world and biome which will include the point of interest, the landing point of your or and any menaces or unique lifeforms required. Somewhere between a mini game and full on sub component. It will also depend greatly on how much effort the player is putting into it. Are you just exploring to further whatever missions or plot line you are working on? Or are you trying to set up your own little trade route empire by finding spots for refueling bases or trade facilities? Though while you can set up various facilities, the player controlling dozens of starports and hundreds of facilities is not really the scope the game is aiming for. It will always be a bit more... personal. Think Star Control–y for the survey portions. Northstar will model a plant’s surface at the mid–altitude survey level as you fly over and map. Then wherever you land it will generate character scale terrain for a zone around you based on what terrain category you had surveyed from the air. Key mission sites and facilities will be anchored in special built terrain but otherwise procedural will fill out locations around your characters. Flying over terrain will be in the abstract / sensor view, while the graphical effort goes into places where you actually land. Important sites are constant once generated — plots of terrain which you do not lay down a marker for are forgotten and landing in the same quadrant later will generate another random terrain set. Thus simulating "I was here awhile back but I can't remember exactly where we landed that time". There will be buildings aplenty, other starships, streets, starports, offices and even the occasional military or bandit base. The Northstar world is very much about your characters doing business, chasing down clues and performing innovative jobs in all locations across known space. Along with that will go rural terrain like jungles, shorelines, deserts and a variety of airless / hostile environments. Maps with more than one floor if a building or starship also exist. Current plans for the map is to include some of the real area within roughly 150LY of Sol, in 3D. According to Google, that's some 21,900 stars within a 150LY radius, so maybe just the spiffier ones... Refer to Port AvSquadron for a sample exploration scenario.
- The action of traveling in or through an unfamiliar area in order to learn about it. This is a key aspect in all the games.
- The world of Soluna is littered with various towns, provinces, kingdoms, continents, cities, etc. These places offer respite for weary travelers, alcoves where the denizens of the world can come and indulge in rest and relaxation. Each area of the world is governed by it's own sets of rules, being able to function and maneuver through these rules help keep the player out of danger. Various stores also inhabit these cities that provide specific services, and these services vary depending on the economic power of each of these towns. There are some quests and missions that alter the economic power of each city, with varying degrees depending on your success. Learn the mechanics of the town system in order to fully take advantage of what each kingdom has to offer.
- Exploration is used for finding mining spawns or hidden complexes.
- Dwarves and half-orcs have darkvision, but everyone else needs light to see by. See Table: Light Sources and Illumination for the radius that a light source illuminates and how long it lasts. In an area of bright light, all characters can see clearly. A creature can’t hide in an area of bright light unless it is invisible or has cover. In an area of shadowy illumination, a character can see dimly. Creatures within this area have concealment relative to that character. A creature in an area of shadowy illumination can make a Hide check to conceal itself. In areas of darkness, creatures without darkvision are effectively blinded. In addition to the obvious effects, a blinded creature has a 50% miss chance in combat (all opponents have total concealment), loses any Dexterity bonus to AC, takes a –2 penalty to AC, moves at half speed, and takes a –4 penalty on Search checks and most Strength and Dexterity-based skill checks. Characters with low-light vision (elves, gnomes, and half-elves) can see objects twice as far away as the given radius. Double the effective radius of bright light and of shadowy illumination for such characters. Characters with darkvision (dwarves and half-orcs) can see lit areas normally as well as dark areas within 60 feet. A creature can’t hide within 60 feet of a character with darkvision unless it is invisible or has cover.
- We've covered the user interface and game mechanics in a little detail in the previous user guides. Now, let's discuss some stuff that you'll run into as you begin your adventure in Norrath.
- Exploration is a member of the Adventuring group of skills that is available at character level 1. Raising this skill at or above your character level will incur an experience point penalty. As an Adventuring skill, Exploration can be raised passively, or actively by traveling from town to town. The amount of active experience points earned in Exploration is independent of the distance traveled between the two towns. This skill allows you to travel faster in zones with grey monsters (i.e. monsters 4 or more levels below your own).
- The episode begins in the Ice sector as Aelita is running toward a tower. She enters it, deactivates it, and is subsequently rematerialized. Ulrich expresses how tired he is of fighting XANA. When Aelita enters the lab, she suggests they go back to Carthage to find data needed for her antivirus. Jeremie disagrees with her, but everyone else convinces him to change his mind. He tells them they'll go tomorrow night. When they leave the factory, it's already late at night. Yumi runs off toward home because she knows her parents will be furious. Yumi hopes to get home unseen, but her parents were waiting for her the whole time. Her parents keep drilling her on why she gets home so late. They ask her what's wrong, but Yumi says that nothing's wrong, citing her report card as an example. After Yumi goes to bed, her parents agree that they will have to be more strict with her. The next morning, her parents insisted that they walk her to school. When they arrive at the school gates, Sissi mocks her. Later in the day, Yumi tells Ulrich, Odd, and Jeremie about her predicament. Jeremie says she needs to regain her parent's trust and should stay away from Lyoko. Yumi objects, but Jeremie says he'll give her a play-by-play update. That night, Aelita, Odd, and Ulrich are virtualized into Lyoko's Forest sector. Jeremie materializes their vehicles and they proceed to the edge of the sector. At the sector's edge, Jeremie types in the password:SCIPIO. Immediately, a Transport Orb descends down to Team Lyoko and whisks them away, to the heart of Lyoko. Meanwhile, Jeremie receives a call from Yumi, who tells him that she is thinking of them. After she hangs up, she climbs into a hot bath and sulks. When the three arrive in Carthage, the three-minute countdown begins. Jeremie thinks that stopping the countdown is the key to exploring further. After running down the blue stairs, Team Lyoko reaches a blue room, made up of irregular blocks. Jeremie tells them that Carthage changes its topography whenever someone visits. The three start running, but they end up going around in circles. At an intersection, Aelita tells them to go left, but after she runs in, she gets shot by a Creeper. She backs out of the corridor and Odd destroys the Creeper with his Laser Arrows. Jeremie tells Ulrich to leave a mark at every fork in the path and go left. If they already see a mark, then they should go right. They follow his advice, but it leads them to a dead-end. Jeremie detects a switch in the room the three just left. The three see the switch, but it's high above them. Odd jumps up to touch it, but he loses all his hit points to laser fire. Ulrich also loses all his life points and the countdown runs out. Suddenly, blue walls rise up on all sides, trapping Aelita. In the lab, Jeremie realizes that Odd and Ulrich haven't rematerialized. In Yumi's house, everyone is doing their own thing. Yumi and her father are playing chinese checkers when she gets a message on her phone. Yumi goes into the hallway and calls Jeremie back. Jeremie tells her to get to the factory as soon as possible. In Carthage, the Scyphozoa is approaching Aelita's position. At Yumi's house, Yumi's mother goes into her daughter's room, only to see an open window and a doll under her bed sheets. Immediately, her parents go to Principal Delmas and Jim to see if they know where she went. Yumi enters Lyoko's Mountain sector. As she approaches the edge of the sector, her vehicle is shot down by Roachsters. She runs to the edge and Jeremie summons the Transport Orb, which takes her to Carthage. In the dormitory of Kadic, Sissi reveals Kiwi, Odd's dog, to Principal Delmas, Jim, and the Ishiyama's. She orders it to track down its master and it runs off. The dog leads them to a manhole in the park and they enter the sewers. Back in the Carthage, as the Scyphozoa gets closer to Aelita, Yumi encounters a network of security lasers. As she tried to get through it, she touched a laser and lost ninety hit points. To make things worse, the Scyphozoa captures Aelita and begins to suck out her memory with its tentacles. With only two seconds left, she touches the switch and to countdown stops. In addition, a wall seperates Aelita and the Scyphozoa and a pathway opens up for Yumi. Yumi follows the path to a never-stopping elevator and jumps aboard. She grabs hold of Aelita as the elevator passes by. The elevator leads them to an interface on the outside of the massive blue sphere. Sorting through the data in the interface, Aelita realizes that this is the supercomputer's data and Carthage is where XANA lives. Aelita sends Jeremie the devirtualization codes for Carthage, so that he can materialize Odd and Ulrich. Yumi and Aelita hop onto the Overwing as the Mantas begin to attack. Meanwhile, the adults have reached the factory. Just as Jeremie opens up the data stream, a Manta shoots Yumi and she falls of the Overwing. Aelita takes control of the vehicle and flies it into the data tunnel, arriving in the Mountain sector. She goes to a neutral tower and is materialized through Code: Earth. With the materialization codes for Carthage, Jeremie materializes Odd, Yumi, and Ulrich. When they take the elevator back up to ground level of the factory, the adults are waiting for them. Jeremie presses the switch to take him back down to the lab, but Jim gets in. When the elevator reaches the lab, Jim is stunned by all the technology and forgets about getting Jeremie. Jeremie activates a time reversion, bringing them back to morning. Yumi is being walked to school by her parents. She tells them that she comes home late because she's in love. Yumi walks up to Ulrich, who asks, "What did you tell them?" Her response was,"the truth".
- The Exploration Log keeps track of points you earn while exploring certain areas in the game. The Exploration Log can be accessed by clicking the icon that looks like a magnifying glass over a globe on bottom of the screen above the F3 button on the hot bar. The Exploration Log is broken up into 3 Categories and into 7 Sections. The Categories are Biology Exploration, Industry Exploration and Culture Exploration and will show the amount of points obtained in each category. Each category is different and uses different ways of obtaining points. The Sections are Northern Islands, Atlantis, Portobello, Hurricane Island Mystery, Storm Voyage, World Ocean and Yizhou Defensive Battle. Each section has a unique set of rewards which can be obtained when you have earned a certain amount of points. Each reward is different in each Section.
- Exploration is a skill in Might & Magic: Heroes VII. This skill is available to:
* Darkblade, Ranger and Shaman at Grandmaster level;
* Avenger, Barbarian, Chieftain, Dark Prophet, Earth Shaper, Ebon Knight, Firebrander, Knight, Mystic, Priest, Shadow Slayer, Trickster, Warden, Warlord, Warmonger and Wizard at Master level;
* Alchemist, Archon, Battlemage, Blademage, Bone Guard, Confessor, Death Knight, Djinn Lord, Enchanter, Engraver, Inquisitor, Jarl, Necromancer, Runelord, Starsinger, Storm Caller, Thane and Thornsower at Expert level.
- Exploration in Starspan should be an ongoing, complex process. It is the general process whereby you find what stuff is in the space around your empire, from stars and to and . It also includes exploration of other civilizations that may be more advanced than you, about on your level or less advanced. Sensors you use to "see" with will operate in a bit more complex fashion than other space empire building games; there will be many types of sensors that "see" different types of things. Here are some examples of different types of sensors:
* Telescopes This would be an optical sensor, much as we have today. A telescope, in game terms, should have the capability of seeing an object of size X at some standard range (say, 1 AU) and takes Y amount of time to see what it can see with a Z degree field of vision in its sky. To play out a simple example of how this would work with made-up numbers, let's say we have a "Hubble telescope" that can see an object 1000 meters across, and it takes 1 month to scan 1 degree. To complete a 360 degree slice of its sky would take 1 month * 360 degrees = 360 months (or 30 years). Each degree of sky it can see an object 1000 meters across or larger at 1 AU; the closer an object is, the easier it can see, so the telescope could see an object 100 meters across if it is 0.1 AU from the telescope, or going in the other direction, trying to see stuff orbitting a star 10 light years away, the objects would have to be more than (roughly) 63,000 km across (this means it could see Jupiter [142,984 km across] or Saturn [120,536 km across] at this range, but not Uranus [51,118 km across], Neptune [49,528 km across] nor the smaller planets of our Solar System).
* Sensing equipment By contrast, this type of equipment doesn't really "see" so much as sense what is at play upon it. You stick a piece of sensing equipment (such as a magnetic sensor) aboard a ship and if you want to know, say, the magnetic field of Neptune, you'd have to send the ship to Neptune for it to work (the magnetic field of Neptune would act upon the magnetic sensor, allowing it to record the data and send it back to your home base at Earth where your base computers could then assemble a model of Neptune's magnetic field). This detail and seperation seems complicated, and really it is, but all the player basically needs to know is that, at the beginning of the game, telescopes see light and energy and while you can see huge things like stars for quite a distance, things like ships (which aren't even 1 km across) you won't be able to see until they are relatively very close. The notion here is that space -- even just our galactic corner of it -- is fantastically huge, and because it is so huge, its filled with way too much stuff for you to be able to see all that easily. Exploration, then, becomes not just important, but a challenge, something you have to plan out in advance ... new technologies for seeing and sensing things, improving your existing technology since even a seemingly tiny improvement in the resolution of a telescope can suddenly bring a lot more distant planets into your view. You can also invest in more infrastructure ... with telescopes, for instance, you could have a ring of telescopes orbitting your star and have a data processing sensor coordinate and process their scans to make many widely-scattered telescopes act as one giant one better able to filter out noise.
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