Disabling Sensors System-wide

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

In v5.70 there is an SM option to disable all sensors in a particular system. It is located on the Sensors tab of the system map sidebar. Once activated, there will be no detection phase for ships and planets in that system until it is turned back on again. The reason for this function is because one of the downsides of a multi-system Earth start is the number of detection checks grows exponentionally as you add extra races. If you happen to be playing a game in which you want to start multiple races on Earth but there will be a period without the likelihood of combat, you may want to disable sensor checks in Sol for a while for performance reasons. I think this option will be used rarely but it will be very useful in a few specific situations.

Steve

[Nathan_]

Are passives the biggest offenders due to there not really being a cap on detection range for them?

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Are passives the biggest offenders due to there not really being a cap on detection range for them?

It's really the fact that each race runs its own sensor check routine and tries to detect every object of every other race. So assuming every race has 10 ships and each one tries to detect each ship of every other race, 2 races will be 100 checks. 10 races will be 10,000 checks. Its actually more efficient than that in reality as sensors are tracked on a per fleet basis and as soon as one fleet detects something the other fleets don't bother to check it. However, more races means more fleets and each race tries to detect all ships of all races.

The early game of a large multi-earth start can be very slow in performance terms and this is an effort to get over that initial hurdle.

Steve

[chrislocke2000]

I can also see this coming in as very helpful where you have opened trade routes with NPRs. I've certainly found a huge number of interupts in my current game due to my freighters moving in and out of his systems and vice versa.

Actually an option to disable sensor checks in friendly systems may be a good extension of this?

[Nathan_]

There should be a way to block/filter out neutral/allied ship events through event update -> filter events button.