FreeOrion

I would love to be able to *easily* find ancient ruins or monster nests or even, that specific ship (by name) that I just had in front of me.

I am very impressed with your game. I read those authors and remember those fictitious places in those books.

But, I can NOT remember the names of that series of books where aliens on a partial Dyson sphere are encountered by humans in a generation ship equipped with an engine the aliens want. The humans send a party to investigate the mysterious ship and they are captured to be added to the aliens collection of intelligent servants gathered from the alien's exploration of this galaxy and the aliens are intelligent dinosaur, originally from Earth. Their leaving in the Dyson ship was what caused the Dinosaur Great Extinction Event. Anybody remember the names of those books?

BTA wrote:I would love to be able to *easily* find ancient ruins or monster nests or even, that specific ship (by name) that I just had in front of me.

Try the Objects Window. You can search for planets filtered by "HasSpecial" --> "Ancient Ruins" (or the various monster nests). Of course, it is only going to list planets that you have actually discovered already, exploration is a major aspect of the game. Implementing some kind of locator signal for such things could be possible, but to avoid it being too much of a giveaway it would have to have a significant research and build cost and be a bit vague. It could perhaps be implemented as a player-owned field that is randomly located (perhaps moving around) in the largish general vicinity of the desired planet/system, where the field has high stealth so is only visible to the owning player.

As for ships, I expect you could also do that with the Objects Window, listing only ships and then sort by name, then double click on its listing to center the Map Window on it.

Anybody remember the names of those books?

That kind of reminds me of some Larry Niven, but it's been too long for me to be sure.

I am not finding the object window, is it not in the Ubuntu 17.10, .0.4.7 build?

It's one of the window buttons on the top right of the screen, it should be there in all versions (if it's not we've got a serious bug).

Alternatively, for most things the Pedia entry lists all instances of the item (ship design, special, etc), so opening a pedia window for a specific special will give you a link to all planets with it on that you know of.

BTA wrote:I am not finding the object window, is it not in the Ubuntu 17.10, .0.4.7 build?

I haven't used that version specifically, but you ought to be able to find the Objects window button in the bar in the upper right. The icon looks like 3 bubbles. It's fourth from the left, between the crown (Empires) and beaker (Research).

Ctrl+o should also be the default hotkey to toggle open/closed the Objects window if it's the same as on my system.

OMG :speechless:

I use Objects to look for planets. I did not know I could change the existing tab or descriptor to another characteristic or set a blank tab to select for another characteristic.

Freeorion becomes more impressive.