Teaching people how to use an Atlas to find Gold on Lamblis is very frustrating because they are conditioned to think if an area is bright that a resource is there (it works for plants). I also experienced this frustration when I started.
Same issue with Iron on Level 1/2 worlds. You see the entire map fully lit, yet there’s barely any Iron, and barely any Gold on Lamblis, so why are the colors so bright?
Either an explanation added to the Objective that teaches you about Ore and Heatmaps is needed, or drastically lower how bright Iron appears on Level 1/2 worlds, and Silver and Gold on Level 3, etc.
The heatmap as far as I’ve noticed only shows relative strengths. So a white area on a planet with almost no iron ore, will have the most iron ore. Which can be 1 seam…
Exactly, it’s the colour that informs the ‘amount’ part, so green is ‘very few’ (why surface resources are generaly green), yellow is ‘a bit’, orange ‘quite a lot’ red ‘lots’
It might just be easier to use a standard star heatmap, such that all ores, plants, etc, use the exact same color scheme, instead of using green to designate anything.
Consistency, maybe. Could then put info in the game that gives relative numbers for the amounts to help players know, so if a player sees “orange” on the heatmap, they have an idea of just how many ores are going to be there.
How this Atlas works for the color blind though, I don’t know. In that case, it might just be simpler to use a single color of varying intensity.
The problem is then it’s really hard to tell the distribution because you dont really get a large smooth spread of numbers for a given resource, it tends to be more like: surface resource A 0-3 of them per chunk, but mostly 0. Surface resource B 0-30 of them per chunk, but mostly 20-30. Embedded resource C 0-1000… but mostly 800-1000.
With a single color scale it’s really hard to tell the dfference between say, 800 and 1000 even with a log scale. i know, because I tried it and could not get something that looked good or was useful, you would get a map with large swathes of reddish colour that you cant get any relative information from, surrounded by a really tight gradient or even sudden drop to just black nothing.
What we do with the resource maps right now, is do a histogram normalisation cutting off the top and bottom 2.5% of values to ignore outliers, and also a log scaling to get as much visual detail into a single 8-bit greyscale value that we then color-map based on the max-histogram value remaining. It means you can look at the map and know ‘white is where I should go, mid-color is only about 35% of the density as white and less than that is possible, but not much worth in trying’ whilst the colouration green - red gives you an idea of overall prevalence, so red is super dense, and green super sparce (again a log scaling)
A single color scale basicly just replaces all the nice grsdientation in the current maps with near solid colour, where the colour is just the colour that the maps already get given.
What we are going to change, is just the colormapping itself, so instead of always being basicly black - color - white, it’ll be a gradient of 3 colours so that it feels like a single color scale, but stilly being highly detailed and useful.
We are also looking at maybe normalising by the heightmap of the world so that you dont always just see mountains as white effectively, but would start seeing maybe a low-altitude area under-water as white because maybe not a lot of resources are there, but the number of ‘rocks’ is also really low so that the probability of finding a resource is higher overall than the mountain.
I had it wrong then? Every time I follow white areas I find a couple blocks of Gold, but usually never more than 4 blocks, in a 40 block radius of a well lit up orange with white spot.
I have never seen a red spot, even with resources you know is heavily there like copper or iron on Lamblis.
I am actually confused by this, when I try to compare it to my experience now. I don’t think white as in or under mountains now. Only if it is a hot spot for the resource loaded.
The atlas is always gradiented like black-colour-white with white being the densest on that world.
The colour is different depending on how much of the resource is on the world, so if its black-red-white then there is much more on that world than if it were black-yellow-white
well I was a bit confused as you can tell. Appreciate it. I guess I am trying to picture how I would see the difference on an atlas. To me I never noticed anything different with the colors other than orange means its starting to warm up in a generally large area, and yellow is closer yet, and white is right on top. And black/grey is not a sign of said loaded resource.
Unless your only talking about the color scales used in all the data you mentioned above, and not how a resource is popping on an atlas.
Not sure what’s up with it or that I might be misunderstanding the whole atlas but it always seems to show me inside a large area of water even tho I’m on a largish island on Arie…
Same thing happened on another planet, even looked the same to me, and yes, I was trying to find iron or silver.
Also I bought 2 atlasses which are 50/50 and they don’t show me anything at all. And I bought them a few hours, I assumed it was fixed… Anyhoo, I bought 1 for Lamblis hoping that it would show me something different this time when it has been fully discovered and instead it changed hue but the whole atlas was in that hue…
I got to agree, it’s stupid annoying clearing an entire section which is orange on an atlas and getting ZERO of that resource. I miss the beta days for gold and silver. Was just the right amount.
