Is it new that now you won't see shot down drones if you use your detector on a planet on foot? There was a troop ship that my base has shot down, I went there but I noticed that my detector yields not the red waypoint as usual. Has something changed in 1.7.3 ?
Yes, although I am not sure it happened in 1.7.3. In previous versions the HUD displayed the red dot for a drone until it despawned and now the marker disappears as soon as you down it. Personally I would have prefered a changed state (i.e. target goes from red to amber for example) but that's not how the change was made. Not sure of what prompted it, but my guess would be that new wave-o-drones attacks were cluttering up the HUD and doing it this way lets the player focus on active targets. When you down something now you need to get a rough idea where it falls and then hunt down the smoke plume once it's safe to do so.
Thanks imlarry, I now notice that this doesn't happen to normal drones, but apparently only to bigger patrol vessels or troop ships. With normal drones (rocket drones etc.), they fall down if dead and you can still use detector to locate them, even after reloading the game. Your explanation must be the one why it doesn't apply anymore to bigger vessels.
Drones are also "loot containers" so they have a timer after death, CV types (patrol vessels) are not same class of entities and have a different "despawn" set of rules. But "Troop Transport" is also a loot container so it should remain after death to be looted, and their "stay timer" has been (recently?) upped from 150 to 300. CV types are in the "POI" category regarding "HUD display" (if I read correctly) and when a POI is dead (core busted) usually its icon is not supposed to show anymore.
Weird. My base just downed these two drones- no red dot and neither the ship or hand operated detector brought the marker back. Went out and shot both a transport and regular drone down as wall and same story. This was in a Reforged Eden save but I didn't think the ability to modify this behavior was exposed in the configs. I'll have to try it with fresh start a vanilla game.
Fresh vanilla game in 1.7.3, sbp, bring in my cheap SV (Dink) along with some 15mm & proPacPower, and then off to hunt Zirax. Killing drones is a great way to run your EXP up fast! 8^) This guy was red, died & disappeared, and neither SV or hand-held detector would bring his red dot back for me. If I didn't know better I'd suggest A/B testing but since there is no related UX feedback being asked for that doesn't make sense; no idea why your detectors can resurrect the dots but mine can't. Incoming drone is the one that still shows on the HUD.
Thank you for taking the time. I will look closely to it when going on playing, if it repeats too much I think I'll make a bug report arranging a situation where it can repeat. I don't think it's intended to hide these waypoints, in the past they went away only when the object despawns after some time. Dead drones or killed troops will stay for about 3 minutes real-time in-game allowing you to loot them, IIRC troops will not show-up with a waypoint when using detector, but downed drones or ships definitly will, that was so in the past game versions I played. Just to note that we are not discussing some 'peas' here... When playing, these waypoints are important: it makes a huge difference in combat wether these downed objects are 50m or 200m far away, in the second case I would let them go if the risk is too high.
All good here, I kinda enjoy playing the metagame of "WhatsItDoingNow" ... I will say one thing I like about the disappearing dot change- after coming home after a salvage op (major CV engine haul- woohoo!), only to immediately have your base attacked ... it's really satisfying to see/hear the flashes of your turrets on the closed shutter door and see the red dots wink out.
When I kill drones the active red-dot marker disappears, but if I perform a scan then I can locate them again. This may be different behavior in my instance, though, because I modded the HudInfo property for drones in EClassConfig.ecf: Code: HudInfo: true # false
Try bliping with the hand-held scanner. Last I recall, this did show the radar marker for downed drones. Pretty sure this was a change made several versions ago.
My build wasn't showing it but I hadn't seen EClassConfig.ecf config settings ... my drone entries were set false. I'm going to try tweaking them to see if it changes the vanilla behavior and then triggering a check to bring back the default file and looking at those entries again to see if the file hadn't been updated at some point along the way. Totally fine running things the way they changed it but my hand scanner wasn't seeing the downed ones as recently as last week which didn't sync with what OP was describing.
