Suggestion: Spots explored by geolgists should remain visible

The icons themselves are here.
The color dots seem to be too big, the "no resource" icon is not different enough from the "not explored" state,
and the "Water" icons are just rough sketches.
So, not very good currently but it helps to transport the overall idea.
Maybe the whole thing is too complicated to program anyhow, lets hear our coders.

Personally don't see the need for this, since as you mention it is easy to keep an unbuilt mine around as a reminder. (Wells I generally just build because water tends to be everywhere on most maps.) Though, it has annoyed me that when I send out geologists to scout an area and while I'm busy doing other things the signs disappear.

Also, would it not be simpler to just increase the lifetime of the signs or perhaps keep them around forever? The latter would probably not be a good idea since they would cover up the entire map :( Especially I wonder about the house icons with waves as they might be confusing since they look similar to the icon for ports.

Yes, there are easier ways probably to simply stop the annoyance of missing the geologists' results,
and a real need does not exist, I agree.
I was thinking about an ideal solution this time, not about a quick solution with little effort.
If you truly start thinking of it, the build help seems like the right place to display the geologist's information.
Just like the info which size of house you can build in a certain spot, you need it, when you want to build and it is not in the way when you don't. And you could have the information that you have gathered permanently at your fingertips.
I tell you how this idea emerged: I like to play WL with my son and his frinds on the LAN. Lately we discovered that we have more fun to play the "no fog" starting condition and chat a bit while watching each other's progress. We have come to print out the map (without resources shown) and mark the spots we have already explored there. So I discovered that the band-aid of building unconnected mines, is suboptimal. For one thing, I like to build shortcuts through the mountains, and must take care not to connect those mines by accident, for another the spots close to the flag I used with the geologists can only be marked after the flag is gone, and that can only be when they have finished their work.
So this really is all a bit of a nuissance.
I think it's a smart and elegant way to do away with the band aids sourrounding geologist's exploration (and would have even solved the problem with the markings being visible for the enemies, that we had for a long time), but I fully acknowledge that this is a comfort feature, and unless some coder takes a fancy to this idea, it will probably never happen.
The signes themselves are just the "first ideas", and there are a lot more ways to display the info.
Hmm--- my "port possible" icons are _very_ different. They use use the old, green, square icon for large buildings and have an anchor overlayed, not waves.

Sorry about comparing it to the port icon. I didn't actually check, just based it on memory. Still, both would contain waves.

I think that the resource discovery and mine placement logic does need discussion as it seems it affects and frustrates players. Widelands should not play itself but the players shouldn't find themselves doing things that they feel are not fun.

Forum post for discussion of problems and solutions: http://wl.widelands.org/forum/topic/1014/

Setting to incomplete for bug sweeping.

[Expired for widelands because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

As food for thought: We could add a layer that displays the amount of resources (similar to the buildhelp) that have been surveyed. A mine could keep this updated - the miners are down there getting up to date info on a daily basis.

Problem is how to visualize the absence of information then, i.e. distinguish a non-surveyed field against an empty one.

[Expired for widelands because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

I think disappearing results of geologist survey is part of fun in widelands, so I would preserve it as it is now. If anything had to be changed I would extend lifetime of signs as suggested above.

+1 to #11

Since I don't find the time to play a lot, I don't know what time would be appropriate. If I need them later, I always keep the messages in my inbox, because then I can still center the view on them ;)

+1 for #11 and #12

Because this is a very old bug and i couldn't remember having similar topics or comments on widelands.org in the last year i set this to invalid. Feel free to change it again.