Mark Abent

I'm going to say no. Because it's quite a lot of work. Especially with 3.14, we've changed a lot. So we've had to reset some things to bring not only the weapons and everything, but the ships together in a certain way that resets things for us. So the ships are a lot closer in performance. But as you said, our plan isn't just to keep it like this. Our plan is to discover what our new features mean for the game, because we can test things as much as we want, but it's got to get in the players' hands and then we can see what happens as the players make choices, and then basically it's how their choices influence the results of that. So if they pick certain weapon loadouts or pick certain ships at certain times, we can see patterns in this and that will shape the balance of the weapons and the ships going forward, but it's really difficult to balance all this in one quarter. So we've done it in stages where we're happy with the framework we have now, but I wouldn't say we're happy with the finer details within the balance because we're still figuring it out. So that's going to come over several releases, but it isn't something we're just going to stop now and go, that's it. We've got a dedicated team now to do this over every single release going forward.

So this is an intentional thing to draw things back to a simpler state and then start to build them back out over subsequent patches?

Yeah, that's basically it.

The cool thing, too, is as Rich and them are balancing stuff, they have a lot of analytical events that they research and look at to see what's happening throughout the entire PU and AC. So the one thing we always see a lot, too, is a particular thread or something like that, where they say that they're seeing a certain experience, which might be true in that certain circumstance, but we also have a lot of analytical events that happen throughout, so Rich could see the bigger picture of what's going on, that maybe that little small thing is something much bigger that's happening, and they do a lot of looking at and data analysis to see how the balance should go and where it's going right now. And there's always those fun players that are exploiting certain things. And it's like, how in the world did they do that?

Well, that problem existed before already, because a large ship like a Hammerhead cannot just evade the bullets. It has to tank the damage one way or another. But that specific use case actually came out of the playtest. We didn't see that in our internal tests. The behavior of kiting the ships at a large range and just trying to avoid the shots that way while still keeping the firing forward is something that we honestly didn't see before. It might sound odd, but it was like that. So we tried to counter that by reducing the range of the heavy hitters, like the cannons, the ones which have a shorter range now, to allow the fighters to get into range and take down the Hammerhead faster. Though I would still argue that it's not the range that is effectively defining how well a Hammerhead can defend itself. It's always the projectile velocity. And it came up in the feedback that the Hammerhead was supposed to get weapons with projectiles that just fly fast and thus give the ship a better chance to hit attacking fighters. We actually wanted to try that out, but the weapon system cannot do this at the moment. We can change the properties of a weapon contextually, but we cannot change the properties of a projectile. So once that kind of tech has been built in, we can reevaluate that thing. But for 3.14, it was not possible to address. That being said, we would still see any kind of gun gameplay as short-range gameplay. And we do have missiles for medium- and long-range gameplay. But it can be argued that looking forward, we can also implement other kinds of weapons which are more effective well beyond the close-range area.

There's also, once we get physicalized damage, things are going to change a bit where the Hammerhead is going to be, as you're saying, more of a tank beast, where it could take more of an impact. It has much thicker armor that the physicalized damage is just not going to be able to penetrate as well as the guns that it's shooting onto fighters. So right now it's probably going to be mostly just a health pool, while in the future when physicalized damage comes along, it's going to be a different type of game. It's where velocity and the projectile masses will be taken more into account. And you're going to see a different dynamic with that. But that's also going with what Dave was saying earlier. We're adding these incremental changes to get to where we want to go, and we don't want to just throw everything in all at once and unbalance the game. We're adding little bits of changes to see how well it affects the gameplay and getting player feedback to change some things with the analytical data.

I mean, that's the beauty of Star Citizen. You balance for the tech that we have now, and you anticipate the tech we'll have in the future. It's the same issue that we have with a bunch of other systems. We can't build the damage and the balance for tech that's not ready for the live game. So while internally we're preparing for all that stuff and having a lot of discussions and testing a lot of philosophies, it will have to get changed once we get to that point. But we're already having discussions internally about what that means. So it's like when we had a more recent one, the shield tech, where it was using SDFs. We rolled that out for a few different ships, and the community actually found some loopholes and bugs with it. We kind of want to do that with physicalized damage, too, once we get to that point: we roll it out, see what impact that has, and then make balance changes when it gets there. But yes, it will definitely change the game. And I know Rich is looking forward to it.

It is definitely a big challenge to keep on top of a live product, but also think of what's coming in the future and how we get to where we're going to be in the future. But the two do kind of align because we're always thinking about it. Which does make it difficult sometimes explaining to players that we've done this for a reason and we've done this in anticipation, or we've done this because this is what we have in the game currently, but it will change. And it is difficult to keep on top of that, but it keeps me on my toes and it keeps the team on our toes. It's part of the enjoyment, really, because we're always moving the tech forward. So it's always going to change. And for me, that's a really great part of Star Citizen: the tech's always getting better.

Firstly, that kind of approach is contradicting what we want and the general idea of energy weapons versus ballistics. But the other part of that is that our weapons do not have a shield damage property. It's the other way around. Our shields have a damage type property and every weapon dishes out damage of a certain type. Can be distortion, can be physical, energy, and there's a couple of others. And the shield has absorption and resistance values that counter that. So even if we wanted to do that, we couldn't do it right away. So this is nothing we can do for 3.14.

There's also coming along, which we want to do and talk about more, probably another point with the physicalized damage, our ship destruction. It's kind of arcadey still. Everyone knows it. I mean, we had it since the first AC. You hit the health pool of a critical part and the ship's dead. We, and I'm sure CR has also mentioned many times in the past, don't want that. We want it where you could damage certain sections and the ship could still be functional, but it doesn't just die. So we've also been talking for other systems like insurance, what does it mean that we indicate that a ship is in a bad state? Maybe all the power plants are gone or certain parts of the wing just make it inoperable, so the ship is basically dead but not dead. So once we get more aligned on what those critical areas are, we could reduce the arcadey death explosion. And that will get rid of those instant builds where you just ram a bunch of health and then it dies. So the problems that we're seeing now are going to be different problems in the future. It's just those things that we keep repeating, too. It's those incremental steps to get us there.

So there's multiple things there. First of all, I would draw the game card. If we had unlimited ballistic ammo ranges, you could sit 20 kilometers away from a Hammerhead and just kill it right there, given enough time. That's not fun. And there's not a lot you can do to counter that. The second thing is, if it just keeps traveling forever, you get into a situation where you need to track all these bullets on the client and the server. And given how high our fire rates are sometimes, it just wouldn't be maintainable. It would be very expensive. I mean, this is again the real-world question. Also in the real world, there's a lot of ammunition that has an integrated timer. So it blows up after having flown for three or four seconds just to not have some bullets hitting a poor guy on the street somewhere else. So I think it is okay just to go for the gamey part here.

I imagine the physics system, if it had to track every bullet that was ever fired infinitely across the entire system, that would cause some unnecessary...

That's primarily why we had a lifetime, back in Arena Commander 1. You can blame me.

This is not intended. Going back to what David was saying earlier, we are doing incremental changes to not completely break the game. The primary big change that we've done with radar scanning for 3.14 is to move it off of being vehicle-centric and make the system work with any generic entity that design wants. So the shift between 3.13 and 3.14 was to move the system over to that new system while trying to keep it very intact to what players originally had. Fundamentally, the system has had a huge overhaul that exposes a lot of things for design to change and fluctuate and add things. It's just we didn't add extra things in there because of time and because of balancing. So eventually, yes, we'll be able to add and incorporate other aspects into it.

You've got to get that Crimson Tide, Hunt for Red October: sending a ping out also makes you visible to other people.

There was something we were trying to get in for 3.14, but it wasn't going to make it last minute. I think we called it Signature Deltas, where when certain emissions come on the ship, we categorize them to help the player understand what's happening. One of those is ping, then quantum, and then even EMP. If enough EM and IR is getting emitted out of this object, we classify it somehow. And we didn't get the system in in time for 3.14, but when you emit a ping, the concept is it generates a lot of EM and IR so that not only do you get to see things when you ping out, but other people get to see that maybe you're pinging out or there's a contact pinging in that area. So you kind of expose yourself a bit when you ping out. Another thing that we didn't get to is power requests. Certain ships might require more power when they do a ping, and just balance, we haven't gotten there. Poor Rich actually has, I think, a change list to balance all the EM and IR signatures, but it's just one of those things where we don't want to shove too much into a patch and completely change too many things. And so we've tried it out and rolled the little bits and pieces of it out.

The intended design was always, of course, you hit a button and then the action happens. However, like some other systems that we've had, when we changed ping to always happen rather than only in scan mode, the community comes back with feedback that they would like to improve the game. So I actually just had this conversation with the radar team before this meeting. And even Yogi brought it up with me, I think, a day or two earlier. Even if we don't add the button to repeat the action, players will just make scripts to automatically do that. So we might as well incorporate that. So we literally just got the approval to add that to our backlog, to add that to the feature. So yes, we're going to do that at some point. I mean, players will just do it anyway, so might as well add the support.

But I mean, you could do it. Just be cautious that once we get the signature deltas in, you're going to be exposing yourself more frequently now that other people could see your ping.

Okay, so in general, from the feedback in our combat tests that we had before 3.14, the perceived time to kill was always too long for us. Because you could tape your fire button down and fire forever and eventually ships would explode, but it was not really meaningful. I think giving an exact time to kill is not really working because you cannot really measure it properly. Combat is very dynamic, and depending on how a pilot flies his ship, if he makes a left barrel roll or takes other maneuvers into use, the overall time to kill changes so much based on the individual pilot that it's not really useful for us. And also, the other thing with exact time to kills is that it kind of tells you, hey, you have an exact number you're aiming for. And I would say no. Because if you just look at numbers and then you have tools that data-mine the game data and try to draw strategies out of that, this is something we would like to avoid. We want to avoid the gameplay of building a meta build that will always be better than all other builds combined. So as such, for us it's not important to get an exact number, but rather to experience how these ships and fighters and shields feel, and if you as a player think they give you the advantage that you need. Because ultimately, we want to play a game and not read out an Excel sheet. So that's why we do not have a specific time to kill. We roughly know where we would want it to be, but this is some data we really don't want to give out, because we want people to enjoy it and tell us, hey, this is too long, this is too short, and then we adapt it accordingly.

I would add that as we improve the actual flight experience, as in moving your ship around in combat, we want to head toward a situation, which I think we've done a pretty good job of in this patch, where it's not a DPS race of just hold your gun down and then eventually the ship explodes. And so the result is that, particularly in this patch and going forward, combat is not about waiting for the health to go to zero or something. A simple naive way of doing it is, oh, you hold down your button, and then the ship blows up. And in the older patches, that was like two seconds. But the actual experience, like what Yogi is saying, when you actually have a fight with a real person, it doesn't feel like two seconds. And that issue is much more magnified in this patch, which is why this is the way we plan to do it.

And of course, we're using the phrase time to kill, but with physicalized damage and armor and stuff, at some point it's going to morph into a time to disable, I suppose, would be a more appropriate term.

It also depends what you're targeting, too, because now you have sub-targeting and more items are getting physicalized. If you want to kill the ship, maybe you aim at the power plant and it blows up. If you want to disable it, you shoot out the thrusters. If you want to just disable the guns, maybe shoot up the guns. The definition of a win is different.

It can be different.

I think, what a desirable experience... Yes, there is meta. And I think we're not necessarily working against that, because the players can still play the game and figure out the meta and make their own notes about it and try and learn about the game by playing it to then decide on what the meta is. And an ideal situation is a group of players play and they find that a certain configuration of components works really well. And then a different group of players start from a different starting point and discover that actually a different set of components is better. And that kind of variety in the community, that's desirable. And you're not going to get that by the game giving you just hard numbers. You're going to get that from people trying to learn about the game and quantify it and then having disagreements and discussion about it. That's what we really want.

One other aspect of this, too, is going to be scanning. Depending upon what you want to do, we're going to have different scanners give you different information. If you're a mining prospector or something like that, the scan that you're going to get on another ship is maybe not what its guns are. Maybe it's not any good information about combat. Whereas a fighter ship, when you scan something, it's going to tell you how combat-ready that is against you. Whereas a more security ship is going to want to scan and give you maybe how much bad cargo you have in there. So it also depends on what we want to give the players when you scan and what information to get based on the role of that particular ship or what they're trying to get at. A medical scanner is going to give you something different than someone who just wants to blow stuff up. If you go in the game and you just want to blow a bunch of things up, eventually the idea is you're going to run out of money. If you blow up a cargo ship or a Prospector that has a bunch of valuable cargo, you just lost it all. You want to disable that ship and maybe capture it, but that's going to make that Prospector maybe call in his friends. So a lot of it right now is how can you get away from just making the gameplay blowing people up? How do you incorporate different information so that different gameplay aspects can come out of it?

I mean, you're going to get the people that want to blow stuff up. But if you repeatedly do that, how are you going to get money to continue to blow people up?

Yeah, that's all my fault. So that's one of those ones where we've taken the Sabre and we've gone, right, we think the Sabre fits here. But again, that's not final balance. I could have pushed it too far into that bad zone where it doesn't fit quite right. But that's where we can react to this and we can work on that in the future. But it would just move back to a baseline that we thought would work for the ship. But it's been one of the ships that hasn't quite fitted where we thought it would fit. So we can definitely look at some changes, because I think it's got quite a weak yaw compared to where it should be. But that's also a consequence of the way the ship is as well. But we can work with that, and we can definitely improve it.

One thing also to indicate, too, is if the Sabre is bad, it would also be really, really nice to know why it's bad. We see this a lot on the forums. Someone says, this is broken, this is bad. If you can provide an extra bit of detail, that would actually really help us understand why you think it's bad. Any bit of context other than the words 'it's bad'. Now, granted, there might be a chance that there's a bug and it's bad in the case that it doesn't fly; that I get. But any extra input on why you think it's bad, please put it in there. Because when we scroll through the forums, any extra bit of information helps us gather and build why a certain thing is the way it is.

And also, it's not just a question of it being bad in flight, because as a comparison, it could maybe have worse flight than a similar ship, but the Sabre could excel in a different area. So that's definitely something we've looked at, where we've tried to give ships different reasons for being what those ships are. And there's some ships where that's not possible right now, that they fulfill their complete role, I would say. But it's coming.

I mean, the ships are not being tuned without some context. So specifically for 3.14, we added a couple of measures that tell us, hey, what is the rough dogfight performance we can expect from that ship? And the Sabre is actually not that bad if we look at the raw numbers, but I get why players don't like it that much. But this is also because the role that the Sabre is supposed to excel at is not very well developed yet. So don't melt them down. They will play their role and they will have their proper space in the combat environment going forward.

So radar, ping, and scan are kind of bundled together, but they're kind of different concepts. We think of radar as what you currently see within your range. It's your passive contacts. You're flying around and you see a ship, or you're flying around and you see a station, and there's information you see appearing; you see the UI indicating that the thing's there. Whereas ping is more of: I can't see something, I'll ping out and maybe uncover stuff. Now, that could either be something's very, very far away or something's heavily influenced by an ambient signature, so you can't quite see it without a little bit of help. The only downside of doing that kind of burst to see more is you reveal that you have done it. So if I were to ping out and go find Sean, Sean would know that I pinged, but now I can maybe see Sean. And then scanning is more of: what information could I get about that contact? So a common flow is I could ping out, I find some little blobs, and maybe I could scan it and uncover that, oh, there's something interesting that I want to go into in that blob. So I get closer and it appears as a contact, and maybe multiple contacts, and I could scan those to get other information. So it's a way of expressing in the world what's happening and maybe show some interest that may want the player to go toward that direction or avoid that direction.

That's probably a two-parter question. First part, I'm just going to iterate more on the radar technology. So when VTT took this on, we did have a lot of radar and scanning functionality and even ping. But it was a lot of systems that built up from different designers and different features. And when we took this on, we wanted to unify it across the entire game so that it could be used anywhere by any designer to facilitate those original mechanics. Passive, it's on your radar. Ping, you go out and find it. Scan, you get information. Whether that's a mission, whether that's on foot, or whether that's on a spaceship, or even on both. So because of that, in Star Citizen you are not just a spaceship. You are a person, and you are a group of people. And in the document for our radar scanning, we do facilitate how and why we want to share information. Now, the technology to do that is there, but it's not available yet for this current iteration. The primary focus for this upcoming patch will be for ships, because we're going to iterate on developing this tech, basically replace the old system with the new one, and then add on extra features throughout patches. So this tech will allow us to put it on to other things like players and on ships, but the current one will not be exposed to players until an upcoming patch. And one of those primary things is how do we get that information from a player on foot to a ship or vice versa.

Now, going back to radar, ping and scan: radar again is what's near you and what information we could perceive as the person playing. Now, if I'm on a ship, I'm actually going to see different signatures and even different contacts because it's based on the ship radar. If I have a small little radar, I might see certain... I'll go with the Prospector. It's made for finding mining things. So if I get on foot, my FPS radar might, depending upon my customized loadout, see different things to what my ship was seeing. So it also depends on what the player has as loadouts in both the ship and on foot that determine what he sees from his radar and ping. Now, if you do line up both of them, then you'll probably see similar information. But again, your ship is going to have a much more powerful system than one that's on foot. Your ship might be able to see something far away on the planet, but you go on foot, you're not going to see it. I mean, unless you have some nuclear power plant, I don't think your radar will be able to see things that far away.

Now, your scan information, that is something we're looking at on how to send that information to and from the player, because that is something you can transfer reliably. Technically, you could have different things determine it: if I have a medical scanner and I have a mining scanner, they'll uncover different things. But where we store it is something that the player could look at at any point in time once we unlock that information through a UI. So radar-wise, it depends on your loadout. Scanning-wise, it depends on your loadout. But what information you uncover from your scanner, in a later upcoming patch, you'll be able to access that either on foot or on the ground. Hopefully that answers that question in a bigger way.

Yeah, and one other point to it, and it's a little higher level: when we reinvigorated the tasks around scanning and getting that wrapped up and completely done, as well as Squadron requirements, one of the big parts, and again one of the big benefits to be able to direct the two different pillars, the vehicle and the actors, is that we got to design this together. So what we didn't want was a whole separate FPS radar system that just has no ability to crosstalk with what happens in the ship scanning, because ultimately we're both, and we should be able to transition the data between both. So it was a nice thing to be able to design this together. And it just so happens that the ship stuff was obviously a little further along in terms of the amount of time that's been spent on it over the years. So we were able to get that done first, and then we wait for the FPS and everything coming up behind it.

They can. So a lot of the work that we've done is to talk with designers on what information they would like to have across different ships, even on foot, and what type of upgrade paths you would want radars and scanners to have. And a lot of those types of things usually amounted to different types of signatures, the strengths at which you can see them, even the strengths of how resistant they are to ambient, even the types. So we've unlocked a lot of information and a lot of ways to categorize information so that designers could make stronger radar, stronger ping, or stronger scanners, or unlock specific information. We've also incorporated different ways that we could potentially allow players to filter out that stuff, but it still depends on what the designer said that this particular radar can do or this particular scanner can do.

To support that a little bit: there's now three separate functions of our radar, ping, scan system that are all able to be balanced independently per ship, per item. But then, in addition to those three separate ones, you've got three different signature types where, again, you could have a scanner better at detecting CS, you could have a better scanner for EM, you could have a better scanner for IR. So there's a lot of designer control now, and it basically gives them a ton of tools to make all the stealth kind of gameplay, or really all the electronic warfare that we've been expecting to have within Star Citizen, work as expected and as intended.

And with that, we've also been in talks with different balance teams on what values these things do and how they interfere with each other, so that we could get that electronic warfare, we could get that stealth gameplay. I keep going back to this in different examples: Sean really likes that idea that you have a big ship and you can maybe see it, and you get a little bit closer and all of a sudden there's a bunch of contacts, because that big ship was hiding all the smaller ones. So an upgrade path could be that you have a radar that's more sensitive to seeing those contacts further out than another one, because of the ambient volume. It could pierce through it more than another type of radar. The downside could be more power. It just depends what design wants.

I just want Goose to talk to me. 'Talk to me, Goose. It's not one, it's two.' I always found that to be great. It's obvious, but it takes some doing, especially when you've got three different signature types, how you calc them, how you actually merge them. And in the end, the challenge is how you balance them all. The first time we even took a look at it, the Hammerhead had more signature than an Idris, and then if you were beside the Hammerhead, you would never get seen, even at 10 meters or so.

It's a good question because it kind of depends. It really depends, one, on the ship. So what's happening within that ship? Even what's inside of it: if it's cargo that's actually emitting IR or whatever, that could cause some problems, if it's not shielded. But it's also considered that there's always cross-section. So cross-section is almost a visual thing. So if you're getting up to 100 meters, you obviously see it. And if you can see it, he can probably see you. Now, if you're behind him, different story. You're probably not going to get called out, but you may be picked up from CS in terms of your radar. So you're going to want to try to occlude yourself. So if you're approaching to zero to 100 meters behind asteroids and stuff, yeah, you're going to get right up to him and he's going to have no idea you're there. But I don't know how you're maneuvering with all your stuff turned off. It really depends. But all those tools are there now, and you'll know they're there. It'll be pretty obvious, I think.

We actually have a test level that Kirk Tome was messing with where there's a gas cloud that has high EM and IR emittance. So if something flies in there, you're not going to see it. If you get close enough, if your radar detects cross-section, you'll be able to see it. So it really depends on what the other player's radar is and what your mission is doing to determine what you can see and how...

When we're talking about cross-section, it really is cross-section. If you are horizontal to a guy versus being top-down, your cross-section is way less, way, way less.

It is, because the shield technology that we're using is based off SDF stuff from physics. And the beauty of that is it gives us a more accurate description of cross-section on the overall surface area. So we're 100% using the physical representation of that ship. So if you have one that transforms in different ways or even animates, you're going to get different cross-section. So like on the Hammerhead, if you look at it horizontally, the cross-section is a lot smaller than if you flipped it upside down.

Then it's super loud. But a Gladius, being a good, decent fighter, coming at you nose first, it has a very small cross-section. So you may not pick it up. That's why the question is like, it really depends. But that's what's so cool about it. Again, that's the system we wanted to bring in here.

With that 'depends', we also wanted to add some stuff onto the UI to help you with that. So one of the things on there is what your signatures are emitting versus the ambient levels that are happening. So it gives you an idea of how well seen you are versus what's happening in the environment. The best way I describe it is like a Thief visibility meter.

Thief or Syphon Filter. Maybe that's really old. Yeah, it's got a little visibility meter. So you've got that ambient level. So a good example, and this is more for FPS because they have the dB signature, so like sound: if you're in a room that has a generator running, it's super loud, that ambient sound is going to be like full bar. And as you run, your signature is going to move up and down as it is, but it's probably staying below. So that means you're stealth, you're not detectable easily, or passively from somebody else's radar. But could they focus scan you? Could they ping you? Yeah, they could still do all that kind of stuff.

Yes. Radar: I know for some of the bigger ships, there's been ideas of having a radar globe and then being able to interact with what your actual radar is doing. There's different designs on that, but the one that I'm more familiar with is the scanning MFD. I'll backpedal and say this is not something for 3.14, this is something that's upcoming. We've been in talks with UI and other teams on what that MFD is going to do and what information it should have. So going back to scanning, you're going to unlock a bunch of information. If I go to a mineable and I find that it has gold, or if I go to Sean's ship and I find that it has a weapon or even gold, that information gets stored in my object databank on the ship. That MFD's goal is to show you that information. So if I go to scan a ship, I'll get the nice UI and I'll see all the information there. But if Sean's gone, I can't look at that information again, hence the MFD. The MFD is supposed to be that window of memory of what I scanned in the past. The good news is in the object databank, we have that whole underlying system where we actually save that information. We just don't have a way for the player to uncover it. The only way you could uncover it is if Sean comes back and you try to rescan him, then we show all the information that was there. So the scan UI is going to be that housing of: I scanned a bunch of things, maybe I could look at what was there in history, and even maybe have a way of transferring it somehow. Because that's going to be the ultimate thing: what do I do with it? Do I bring it with me on foot? Do I transfer it to another party, or do I sell it? I think Calix, another designer on VTT, had the idea: he wants to steal it. I could go and scan it, sneak aboard my ship and steal it. So why not? It's on the ship. We just have to have ways of accessing it. There's a ton of ideas that we want to have fun with.

Yes and no. So each of the seats, as of right now, has its own operator subcontext. So if I'm piloting, I could be flying. And if some guy in the back were to have a scanner on his turret, he could be in the scan mode. Now, if he scans something, it gets saved into the ship's databank. And what's cool about that is if maybe me and Sean are in a Cutlass, he's scanning someone and I'm in combat shooting and flying, whatever information he unlocks, I'll see it too. And this is there in 3.14. Everyone in the same ship, in the same seats, the scan information is shared across the entire ship. So you could have buddies that just scan everything. Go for it.

It's all about making sure that information gets to everybody else that's on the ship.

Yes. A lot of information to send and receive to different people.

So scanner-wise, that's still in discussion of how much the players can actually have control over. But design-wise, they're set up to be medical information or law information that determines what you unlock. There's still discussion on what to allow players to filter out in that scan mode. Radar: we actually did a lot of back-end fundamental stuff to allow players... Now there's no UI, so you won't be able to access this in 3.14, but the foundation, because remember, Vehicle Tech, we build the foundation of stuff, is there. And we have a way for players to turn on and off certain signatures, even turn off certain contact types. One of the discussions we've had and seen across the community too is they want to be able to turn off certain contact types, because you get to Port Olisar and there's like a billion turrets. Well, why not allow you to turn it off, or have it off by default and then you could turn it on? So behind the scenes, designers set up what kind of contacts you can see, and the player can then opt in on which ones he wants to have. We just need to have a UI to expose that information. Maybe that could be the radar MFD. It really depends how in-depth we want to get it. But the functionality behind the scenes, again, is there.

I like the cube. Good news is we actually had the graphics and VFX teams help out and concept new ideas of how we want to have this blob. So we did get rid of the box. I'm sorry, the box is gone. And it got replaced with more of a fuzziness, that there's some object within there. Because the whole idea of ping is that we don't know what's there, or where all of it is. It's more of a general area. There's something here or a bunch of things here and you don't know what it is. It requires you to either focus more ping so you can reveal contacts, or get closer. But the idea is just there's something there. So the VFX all got changed. Now, we wanted to move the VFX to be more on the player's lens to indicate that it's more of a system that's happening and relaying the information to you in 2D, because it's not a 3D in-the-world effect that happens. But the old effect was kind of 3D. Now, we didn't quite get all of that there, because there's some stuff we want to do with the player ping and radar. So we have a hybrid right now where it's still in the 3D world, but it looks like what we're going towards with that on-lens VFX. So we did get rid of the box. It is still in 3D, but we want to move it more into 2D so it overlays on top of things. One of the complaints we've always seen too is you ping out and you can't see the box because the mountains blocked it. We want to get rid of that so that it's mostly on the UI. So you go, okay, there's something there, you just have to fly towards it. So we're getting there and we're improving the effects. And as Jared said earlier, this is not final. We're continuing to develop the VFX. So when you guys see it, please put in your comments, because I'm sure we will take your feedback and make modifications as it goes. But for 3.14, it's a hybrid to get us where we want to go.

Yeah, and what you'll see, and Mark described it really well, is depending on the distance, depending on the signal of the thing, it'll be wider or more narrow. It's meant to be rezzing in. That's kind of the thing. You know there's something there, you just don't know what it is. You don't even know how it's shaped. You have a blob of a bunch of different meshes that it looks like, and the closer you get, the more it resolves, and then the closer you get, you actually get a contact. So basically, if you're coming into a system and you're willing to give away your position, because if you hit ping, that pretty much is going to notify everybody that gets hit by the ping that they've been hit by a ping. So it's like walking into a room and going, 'Hello.' And then somebody way off to the side goes, 'Hello.' And you're like, all right, they're over there. But that's the whole idea with this: there's this broad-phase ping, then you have passive radar. As you get closer, you resolve to a contact, then you scan to get the info. That is the loop.