Artisan Archive

While chatting in /gu tonight, I stumbled on a droid idea. Now, chances are this is something I probably already read (from here or SWGCraft) and it sat in the back of my mind... anyway, taking a page from the bounty hunter droids, wouldn't it be nice if there were survey droids?

You could have the equiv of an arakyd which is sent out todetermine on which planet(s) a specific resource resides (or no planet). This could be as general as "Steel" or as specific as "Duralumin Aluminum". These droids should have "charges" like the arakyd, and their use could be tied to the user's survey skill level. Next, we get to the seeker equiv... once *on* a planet, you could release the survey seeker which would return the general area(s) of the planet with the highest concentration of the specified resource.

It would also be nice if one (or both, but probably better on the seeker) of the droids would return the stats of the resource(s). [Yeah, I really dislike not being able to manually survey a resource the day it spawns because the "density is too low".]

What would this do for DEs and the game?

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  It would provide another consumable droid to help the long term income of the profession


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  It would add another money sink to the game


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  It would remove some of the "boring" parts of the game -- while I can appreciate resource shifts, these droids would reduce the time spent collection information on the new resources


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  It would make droids a more important part of the game as all crafters become more "droid dependent"

Now, is this something I stole from these forums and had just forgotten? *Grins*

Oh, yeah, I still want droids to be able to take power and credits to my harvesters and remove the collected resources!

- Rhose
Droids by Rhose
Starsider - Tatooine (2557, 3387)

Its been posted many times. Its still a good idea as are a lot of them that come in and post.

1. Survey Droids

2. Droids to pay maintenance to harvester and deliver power and BLL to retrieve the resources from the hoppers of said harvesters.

3. Droids for musicians to let them cure battle fatigue in the field like a doctor can heal with a droid.

4. Droids for houses to reduce maintenance costs.

5. Walking vendors patrolling the city

6. delivery droids. (someone orders a part from you and you stick it in a droid and send it on its way, it meets said person and they can take their stuff out of it.)

7. Slicer droids

and a few more just can't think of them off the top of my head.

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Nerfmenot wrote:

...

3. Droids for musicians to let them cure battle fatigue in the field like a doctor can heal with a droid.

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I love it. I can see the DraftSchematic in my head

Requires:

One Amplifier

One Speaker System

One Sub-woofer (optional)

One MirrorBall (optional)

"Disco. Disco Droid."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah."

"Disco. Disco Droid"

"Hey, baby"

"Disco. Disco Droid"

(rinse, lather, and repeat)

Tycho.

What would rule, is a new line of "disco droid" personality chips... you can get anything from the "Bach" personality, to "Moby", to "Isaac Hayes". YEah! Can you dig it?

I have some ideas for surveying droids.
So far I have come up with two different ideas.

I) This droids helps you locate a resource only.
You tell it what resource to look for and the denstity in %. And then you tell it to go fetch.
This can be done when you step out the door from the starport or whatever.
The droid could have a limited operating range of for example a 5km radius.
The droid sends you an E-mail/Tell when it finds the resource or if it has failed.
This works very much like BH seeker droids. Survey droids could come with perhaps 5 charges.
Some of you might wonder why cant the droid also get me the Stat of the resource.
I say it would be too easy and you could do this without being an Artisan.
This would definetly get us a steady income and we could make different kind of survey droids.
There could be Chem/Mineral/Flora modulesthat you can insert in to the survey droiddepending on what resource you are looking for.
Too balance this you could change the radius and at which stage in the DE skilltree it
will become possible to build this type of droid.

II) This droid works like above but it finds which planet a certain resource is located on.

- Verm

Great idea. It will never happen. Here's why:

It has been stated repeatedly by the devs that things like structures, and pets/droids as well I believe,technically do not exist until a PC happens upon them in-game and forces them to load. So, these survey droids once out of your sight (or the sight of another PC) would, under the curent system,cease to exist and not be tracked as an independent entity by the server. I doubt this would be an easy to fix, of if they'd even want to. If the server had to keep tabs on all these survey/ harvester (a separate suggestion made numerous times in other threads), the lag, particularly on the larger servers like Eclipse, could become a problem.

Don't ask me how my factory can manage to send me emails when I'm away from it. I can't figure that one out either.

A good ideathat has been suggestion a dozen times already though.

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IsaacPalinander wrote:

Great idea. It will never happen. Here's why:

It has been stated repeatedly by the devs that things like structures, and pets/droids as well I believe,technically do not exist until a PC happens upon them in-game and forces them to load. So, these survey droids once out of your sight (or the sight of another PC) would, under the curent system,cease to exist and not be tracked as an independent entity by the server.

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Actually, this limitation of the game engine would make survey droid easy to implement. A survey droid would be a 1 shot or charged probe droid that would just run off,vanish when out of range, and something will be flagged on the server so thatyou receive anemailof thewaypoint of the resource you are looking for 10 minutes later. You don't actually need the droid to go to the waypoint,the server already knows where the resources are.Bounty Hunter droids behave in much the same way.

Ah. Touche. I spoke too soon. The server already has a map of the entire planet with resource concentrations plotted out. If done in that way, I suppose it would be relatively simple. It would still be neat to be out hunting and see a survey droid buzz by sending out survey pulses.