Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Scanning and YOU
Developers explain the first tier of Star Citizen's pinging and scanning for 3.2: a 360-degree ping with narrowing angles, signal falloff, mining UI integration, and cooldowns. They also cover future scanner grades, jamming, decoys, group data sharing and mission tie-ins.
TL;DRPinging sends a 360-degree pulse detecting signatures beyond passive radar range and shows them as directional blobs that resolve when you approach, with a focused ping planned to give detailed position and data on one target.
Sure. So in the game, especially in the PU and what we'll be implementing into Squadron 42, you only have information about entities that are just around your ship in your passive radar. The exception being the quantum travel points because they're so far away. So it's oftentimes rather difficult to know about things that are outside of that radar distance. So what we wanted to do was give you some idea of, hey, are there objects around me that might be interesting to me? In this first tier of our pinging and scanning feature implementation, we give you the ability to do a ping. So you have a ping item on your ships now. When you do a ping, it basically sends out a 360-degree ping that gives you some general information about objects that are outside of your passive radar radius but within this new larger ping distance. So when you do a ping out, basically what you're doing is you're searching for signals, EM, IR, and we just implemented something called RS, which is the resource signature. So when you're able to detect those signatures that are outside of your radar distance but within the ping distance, you get back some basic info about these entities. And we represent them as blobs. So the entities that you detect will be put together if they're close enough to each other as this blob entity. That gives you a general idea of in what direction these things are, but not exactly all the information that you need to know specifically about it. So they're kind of like breadcrumbs. And then when you get these blob identifying markers, you can then make a decision to go, you know what, I want to check that out. So you can fly toward it and it will resolve when it gets within your radar distance. Right now we're implementing a feature in which you can actually do a more focused ping. So what that'll do is it'll give you better resolution on that particular item. If you focus enough and it's within this larger range of ping and the signal's strong enough, then you'll actually get the same information as if it was in your radar. So it could be really far away, but you do a general ping. You kind of know where it is. You start focusing your ping on it. And if it's within a certain distance and the signal's strong enough, you'll get for that ping duration an actual position and some data about that object. So you'll know it's a ship. You'll know it's a minable rock. And those are the two things that we have implemented so far in our initial tier zero implementation.
TL;DRThe mining UI integrates scanning to show a rock's composition percentages so players can decide if it's worth mining, with simple surface info first and detailed info after focusing, and a separate generic scanning UI still being worked on.
This is actually, as I stated before, we integrated scanning into the mining UI. And so this is the mining interface and it utilizes what we've implemented as far as scanning is concerned to give you the composition of that particular rock.
So what we implemented is the info that's on the top right. It gives you the percentages of composition for that particular rock so that you can determine whether it's worth mining in this case.
The mass field and the other portions. You can think of it as the scanning is the whole infrastructure: you have some object. It could be this ship right here. It has four layers of surface information. Depending upon what the thing is, it's very detailed to that particular thing. For the mineable rock, I think it was the mass and then some properties about what determines the gameplay aspects of when it will break and stuff like that. Then you have the extended information, which is your detailed information, which is, for ships, it will be your crew, your weapons, your cargo. But for the rock, it will be the actual contents of what's inside. And that's the stuff that you see on the top right, how much gold is in there, how much just dust or whatever the core insides of it are. So that's what we're seeing on this part.
So we have two levels of scanning. They all happen in serial, but the initial information is rather easy to get. And then after time elapses and you've hovered your cursor over the target that you want to scan, you'll get that real simple surface info, and then you'll go into the detailed info dump that you get from basically focusing in on that target.
And one thing to note too with the mining UI, we know the very specific information that we're going to pull. So we organize it specifically to the mining infrastructure to basically give you information that'll help you break the rock and cover information. There is another UI that's getting worked on which is the pure scanning where if you technically scan anything, it shows the information more generically, surface versus detailed. So when you unlock stuff, whatever that thing is, it's like, here's some information for you, while the mining is more specific to the gameplay around mining.
And we're implementing the bits of information you get for each entity type per entity type. And so we do need to take some time to determine exactly what info you get from, say, a ship versus a rock.
Not at this time. I'm not sure if it's really great to limit it to 2D. One aspect we can talk about is we want to be able to represent these blobs and these bits of info on your radar. We haven't gotten to that particular stage in scanning or pinging yet. We do show you where they are in space, but transferring that to the radar, because we need to work with the UI team in order for that to happen, we haven't gotten to that stage yet. So I think that's one place where we can represent it in 2D.
TL;DRThey haven't reached scanner jamming yet but like the idea, and are prototyping spoofed transponder data and lowered signals as ways to hide or disguise ships from scans.
I would love to do that. We haven't gotten to that stage yet, but I think it'd be super cool if we had that rochambeau gameplay where you want to do what makes this good and then what's a way to counterbalance that so you can maybe defend against scanning. Sure, it's interesting to find out info about a ship. Maybe you don't want that info to be discovered. So implementing things like stealth gameplay, something which would be interesting would be if you had a ship that was really good at being a pirate ship and you wanted to smuggle cargo, we could make sections of that ship in which they're completely cloaked from that, or they can put out false signatures if you wanted to say you're just carrying slag, for instance.
And one of those ways we're prototyping is the idea that we have the four layers of surface information. What if you could spoof it? So pretend we have a ship and when it appears on your radar, it automatically just gives you the information: friendly, foe, faction, such. What if we had a way to provide players a way to tweak those settings so when it automatically comes up, that pirate ship is actually claiming he's a UEE friendly police ship. And then you look at it and you're like, wait a minute? So you start scanning. It's like, oh no, he's an asshole. He's going to kill me. He's a pirate. I'm going to go run away. So there's some things that we're toying with to get that level of gameplay. And one of those was the transponder. So I'm hoping to flesh that out in the future. But the scanning stuff is going to bring some fun stuff.
We can pretty easily do some of this jamming gameplay because the pinging system is wholly dependent on signal. If we could either return back lower signals or just give you the ability to be more stealthy, because your signals will drop to the point where they're not detectable even by the ping, you just won't show up as part of a blob when you do the ping out.
TL;DRFor the first tier, each ship's signal falls off with distance and a ping adds a larger detection radius, so visibility is the sum of detectable range and signal strength, with the numbers being arbitrary examples and UI messaging still to be solved.
Yeah, so we did it really simply for tier zero. I think this is just the best way to kind of understand how the signal strengths and distances work. I think in the past, maybe that was a little bit obscured and it's kind of hard to figure out if I have 1,000 EM, what does that really mean? So what we did was we just have a falloff of each signal unit. So if you are emanating 1,000 EM, it drops down to zero at 1,000 meters out. So you have this radius of signal that is constantly falling from your position. There's your passive radar range. This is you, and say you can look out 10,000 meters. If there's a ship whose signal falloff is within your passive radar range, it shows up on your radar. So if that ship was emitting 1,000 EM and your radar radius was 10,000, then at just under 11,000 meters away, you should be able to see that ship because the signal from the EM will drop down to one but will be within your passive radar. What we did for the ping was there's a secondary radius that when you do the ping, you can now detect signals that are at one or higher, but within this larger radius. So it's really just a simple calculation of what is your detectable range and what are the levels of signal strength that are without it. And just adding those two values up means whether you're going to be visible or not.
And obviously your detectable range will be determined by the sum total of your components and how you're running them, how you've got them tuned. And then the total of how far you can ping, or how effective, again, your sensor package, whether you've got an upgraded something like from a Terrapin or whether you've got a less than stellar one in something else.
Right. And so I think one issue that we need to solve is that we're not great at messaging out all this data to the player. And so once we implement the system, we need to work on the UI so that you can tell whether you're going to be detectable to other ships, whether that's on your HUD or it's in your signal MFD. And we can give you some simple, maybe some kind of bar, what you need to be under so that you're undetectable by ships.
Well, at least with this value, you know technically how far out someone would be able to see you. And if we have that ambient signature, like this is talking about with no ambient signature. So if it's 1,000 EM, I could see that person in 1,000 EM. But if you know the ambient signature is 500, it basically cuts your signature down to 500 because it's subtraction. So now you get that kind of stealth gameplay where if you lower your signature just about right and you know what the ambient is, you know how far out someone could theoretically see you.
We shoot out these numbers just to play around with ideas in our head, since it gives us ideas of, okay, 1,000, what does 1,000 mean? 1,000 meters, 1,000 EM, it just helps us as a human figure out what's going on in our heads versus what's going on in the game.
Obviously, like we just said, you want to build the system first before we figure out all the different ways to defeat it. But one might imagine that a scanner suite would be susceptible to an EMP just like anything else in the ship. Cut the power to the ship, cut the power to the scanners.
Sure, you should be able to shut it off. There are other subtle ways we could do that, because again, this is just simple math as far as your detectability. If we have a way just to reduce your signals, or at least reduce your detectable signals and have a reduction in what your ship is emitting, that could be one real easy way to give you a way to counteract being able to be pinged.
I think it's, yeah, I think it's 180. And then it starts going down to smaller increments. I'm not exactly sure what our increments are, but we'll have, I think, eight levels of scanning in which the angle of the things that you're detecting becomes more narrow, but the reward is that you're able to get results back from further away.
You can, but yes, you turn the ship to do that. I think what we'll be able to do is for ships that have the ability to have a scanner that's on a gimbal. The Aquila is another one that you'll be able to do these pings and scans directionally without having to turn the entire ship. That's the whole point of that.
TL;DRSkill comes from using narrower, focused scans after a general ping, which shrinks the large low-resolution blobs into more identifiable ones, a feature being implemented now though balancing is still ongoing.
That's a good question. I think there is an inherent skill in that because you do have the ability to do narrower scans; it obviously reduces the angle at which you can detect things. So one feature we're having is that you do the general ping, you kind of find out the blob info, and then you can focus on those blobs, do narrow scans and get more info back. And that is one feature that we're implementing at the moment.
And one thing to note with the blobs is when you do a 360, your resolution isn't that good. So if there's a bunch of objects here, the blob might be just a gigantic thing. You have no idea what's inside of it. You can see some big ones in the distance. You don't know if there's one object, a dozen objects. So it's like you do that low resolution, you see a bunch of things. You have no idea what's in it.
Yeah, we're still balancing this, but the general idea is the lesser signal you're getting, the larger the blob is, because you're getting less deterministic info about exactly where that entity might be.
And that's where changing your focus angle to focus in comes in, because if all these things are on the table and it's just a gigantic blob, and then I do a focus angle, it'll cut through and maybe I'll have three blobs now. I'll have one for that, one for this, and then one for his drink. So the more you focus in, the more odds that you're going to resolve what it might be and shrink down the blobs.
Not for the first tier, but that is something that we'd want to do for the future. Simple things like how powerful the scan is, how great the resolution is, how much power they use. When we eventually get to being able to damage internal items, how many hit points it has, what their wear is going to be, these are all things that we'd like to do.
And theorycrafting, you could even have something where if you have a less powerful scanner, maybe you can't pierce through a capital ship. Maybe you can't pierce through the shields. There's all sorts of fun stuff we could try out.
That is part of the plan for the future. We do want to be able to use the ping so that you can detect life forms as well. But sure, I want to know what's in your pocket.
The fun part about this whole scanning system is the way that it was designed, at least on the engineering side, we could technically implement this thing that scans anything. At least when we were testing it out, this won't be in 3.2, but we were using actors and items and vehicles and random stuff to scan to see what we could do. And in my testing, I had an actor on the ground, or a player, and I scanned him and I was getting all of his items. And then I put him in a ship. I scanned the ship and I was getting the player. And in my further testing, I even made it so I could scan further on that actor and get his items. So the system allows us to be flexible in what we want to provide the players. And we've been doing a lot of testing to see what we want to give and what not. But at least for 3.2, we're not going to go that far. But the system will allow it depending upon how far we want to take it.
And as kind of a preemptive move, when this was first prototyped, the UI for the pinging and scanning was on the ship HUD, and we moved it now to the player visor so that we theoretically could just put it on the player and then have a very similar type of gameplay in which you scan, but the targets you're scanning are people instead of other space entities.
And we'll continue on that too. The interesting thing we're trying to prototype and uncover is we have this thing called a data bank, and that's the thing that holds all our information of what's active, what you scanned and such like that. The player has one and the ship has one. So when you sit down in the ship, all the information goes to the ship and that relays it down to all the appropriate people. The cool thing is, and we're still in the prototyping stage, if you sit down in the ship and you start scanning something and it stores the information, when you leave, we have the ability to grab that information, now stored into the player. So there's some interesting things we could do where you go sit in a ship, you uncover some information, now it's in the data bank. What if we could take this information, put it on an item, and then you could give it to someone else who could then use that information?
And even before that, one thing we can do is you should be able to share that same info off to other members of your party or other crew members. And so if I do find a target that I want to attack, there should be no reason why everyone that's in a turret or is controlling some other weapon can't be given that same info. And then it should show up on the radar, and then we need to work on the HUD so that you should be able to message, hey, everyone attack this guy.
TL;DRThere is no reason scan data couldn't be shared with party members on other ships, and the design anticipates it, though the 3.2 release only gets the base core features in.
Yeah, there's no reason why we can't. Like I mentioned, the other team, the gameplay feature team, is working on the group system. So there is no reason why once you populate your object data bank with some info that you can't share it to other members, including other members that aren't in the same ship, that are part of the same party.
Right now for 3.2, we're just getting the base core stuff in, but we're designing it with all these ideas in mind that we could try out this stuff. It's like, all right, the information that we're storing, all the scan data, is so lightweight and tiny that we could transfer it to other players. Then the question becomes, how do we do that? And then that's when we start playing with it. Oh, we have this fleet system now. Let's start using that to send information. It opens up... Yeah, I can't wait.
Plus, getting this information and encapsulating it into this item that's in your object data bank allows us to do gameplay like what does selling of information mean? What does data actually mean as far as a commodity? And so a mission could be go find out precisely what the coordinates of this target are, and then come back to me with that info and I'll give you some UEC for it.
TL;DRDecoys and falsified scan data are possible in principle since encoded data can't be verified offline, and they're theorycrafting detection-grade cat-and-mouse gameplay, with scan-alert warnings scheduled for later.
Why not? The way that the data, we call it encoding, once the data is encoded, we don't have any information of what that target is anymore, because you're supposed to be able to have this information offline. So if you have a way of disrupting the data or falsifying the data, there's no way that other player would know. So it opens up that interesting gameplay if we could unlock that somehow.
Unless they somehow had a better scanner suite than your decoy. It's always a game of cat and mouse gamesmanship. I get a grade C asteroid decoy thing that I put out there and it transmits like it's an asteroid. And it'll fool all sensors grade C or below. But if I've upped my power plant so I can afford a sensor grade B, I'm going to see that asteroid, but it's going to be a little fuzzy. And if I have an A, it just tells me that's a decoy, you dumbass. Again, I'm theorycrafting here, but that's the kind of gamesmanship that we've been talking about.
Yeah, that seems super mean, but it's just data. So there's no reason why we can't give you the ability to manipulate that. So we could do things with hacking. You can spoof that data by hacking it, or you can maybe even hack the actual data you get back from your own scan, and so you're spoofing it on an item level.
Even more theorycraft, what happens if you scan something you're not supposed to? You have the information, and then someone comes onto your ship, corrupts all the data because you shouldn't have that information, and then leaves off into the night. It opens up some fun possibilities.
Actually, you know what, you brought up a point too. So one aspect of scanning that we have scheduled in the future is, I don't oftentimes want to be scanned, and so we need to inform anybody that's in a ship that's being scanned, hey, someone's scanning you. Right now, the ability to scan is automatic. Alarm bells should go ringing as soon as you're being scanned, because it's usually kind of a threatening gesture. So if you have a huge pirate ship that's scanning the contents of your cargo bay, I kind of want to know that information.
Well, that kind of goes with the idea of the transponder that we're toying with, where it provides the information, but if you turn it off, you have to actually scan it to uncover it. And that also goes into the gameplay of if you falsify it, that's how someone could go, oh, he's not UEE, he's a pirate.
And we can also allow you to mark these items, or the categories of items, as active scannable or passive scannable, and then even allow gameplay in which you can actually change the status of that type on your ship by doing things like getting a better jammer or having a ship that inherently has more stealth capability in that regard.
Sure. I think that's something that we'd want to implement, and I think we'd want to do other interesting bits along with that feature, like maybe it is harder to penetrate buildings that are of stronger material, and give you some gameplay that isn't just: is it scannable or not.
TL;DRYes, pings will have a cooldown built into the ping item, not yet balanced, and they're also toying with ideas like power drain or rising EM emissions so frequent pinging reveals your own position.
Yes, it's part of the ping item itself at the moment. We haven't quite gotten to balancing that yet. Obviously, when we're developing it, we want to be able to ping as quickly as possible to see the results. But yeah, that is a feature in which there'll be a cooldown time so that you can't go crazy with the pings.
And at the same time, we're toying with the idea of if you ping, maybe you spike up your power a little more. So if you continue to do it, maybe you're going to drain your power, and then someone's going to go, hey, there's someone pinging over there, comes up to you, but you're not prepared because you have no power.
Maybe your overall EM emissions go up with each ping. Ideally, you want to wait until your EM goes down a bit before you ping again. Otherwise, you're just broadcasting your own location.
Right, here I am. But that's the whole push-pull. Yes, you're getting information back about the things you want to find, but you're also making yourself a vulnerable target by announcing to everyone that you're there.
TL;DRMerging scan data is already anticipated in the infrastructure, with timestamps used to keep the latest information, though how it works as gameplay is still to be figured out.
So at least in the scanning and encoding section, I've already been anticipating merging stuff together. So when you basically encode the information of something that you have unlocked, we timestamp it with the server time. And so when we merge stuff together, we try to make sure we get the latest information. So if someone scanned Stanton two days ago or someone scanned it an hour ago, when you merge the information, we're going to have the latest. So combining stuff is definitely part of the infrastructure, but how we go about doing that from a gameplay standpoint, well, when we get there, we'll probably have to scratch our heads. We could merge it this way and that.
And it does have to happen at least for the player and vehicle, because, like I said, they have two data banks. If we have two sets of scan information, we have to merge them somehow in a way that makes sense to the player.
TL;DRHiding and detecting are meant to be balanced against each other, with smugglers able to conceal cargo and stronger scanners able to counter it, and the first goal after basic scanning in 3.2 is tying it to missions.
Balance. If you have a ship that's supposed to smuggle stuff, you want to be able to hide it so when someone scans it, they're not going to see it. But at the same time, if you're in a section where you have a very high-powered scanner, you should be able to detect it if the appropriate gameplay settings oblige, because that's the idea of balance. You have your way of hiding, but someone has a higher way of detecting. It's going back and forth. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of iteration on it to get that feel and fun out of it, but it's going to come one day.
I think I can see that our first goal after getting this basic scanning and pinging in 3.2 is find a way to tie it to missions. So you want to be able to use your ping to generally find out where a target might be, and then as you start doing more focused pings and then eventually scan it, that will be the mission completion, because you got basic info of where things are and then now you're trying to find out which thing that you found is the correct target.
A simple way you could do that is if we make an emergency transponder. It's somewhere in space near Stanton. Go fly around Stanton, do your pings. You find some maybe worthwhile candidates for the targets. Eventually, you resolve one that you scan and is that item you're looking for, and that spawns the mission for you.
TL;DRScanners are currently internal items like power plants, with external or turret-mounted placement possible later, though Kirk Tome personally wants damageable internal items first.
Correct. That's not fully implemented. In fact, the implementation we have, I know people know it's just a turret without any weapons on it. But I think we'd want to implement it by putting it on the actual turret item.
Yeah, the tier zero is get it fleshed out, put it on a location. That's what we've done with systems in the past until we're actually able to get their actual physical location. So further out, yes, you're going to have locations on them, especially the one you just said.
But regarding externalizing these items, my personal opinion is we need to get the ability to damage internal items first, because I want to be able to knock out people's power plants and the shield generators from outside the ship. And I think when we get to that point, then whether the scan item is defeatable by shooting the scan item that's internal on the ship, or by destroying the turret itself on the Aquila, will be a thing.
TL;DRFiltering scans by type, such as only resource signatures, is planned for a later tier but not the first tier, and would mostly filter what you see rather than what the ping returns.
Yeah, so something we have tiered up in a future tier is you do want to be able to filter out the results. And so if I'm only looking for a resource signature, give me the ability to go on my radar and go, the ping is only for resource, please. That is something that we have planned and we'd love to implement, just not for Tier 0.
And I would imagine if you're going to filter, you get maybe a better resolution result for that thing. If it's all the same results between filtering and not filtering, you might as well scan for everything just in case.
I think the filtering will probably be not on what you actually get as far as the results of the ping, but more the info that you see. So I want to filter out everything but the resource signatures, and so you kind of get rid of the other noise that you may not be looking for.
TL;DRAn ambient system, not yet in the game, is planned to let environments like sandstorms, asteroids or stars mask signatures and make hiding possible, though these are things they're toying with.
That ties in with the ambient. We have an ambient system that's not quite in the game yet, but future. On the planets you would have different levels of different ambience, infrared, EM, that's basically all over in pockets, and there was the idea of having the ecosystems have different levels, so that when you're on the planet and you're going over and scanning stuff, maybe different things appear because you're in a swamp. There's heating pits or something that increase the ambient temperature. If you're in the top atmosphere, there's more stuff than if you're below. But if you're below, maybe the cross-section increases, because that's how you hide in the planet. But yes, there are things we're toying with in the ambient system.
I think maybe one simple way to look at it is the ambient system would almost be like the reverse effect of how the math works. And so say something at some point is emitting a thousand EM, what it may actually mean is that it reduces the EM detection by that amount for things that are just around it. So they act as a mask.
Exactly. So going with that, if you had a pocket of sand, maybe it increases the cross-section ambient noise a bunch. So if you're inside of it, no one could really find you.
Yeah, that's ultimately the gameplay we want to accomplish. I want to be able to hide behind an asteroid. Or I want to fly near a star, and that makes me less detectable for EM or IR. But I'll probably melt. But hey, you want to do the Icarus thing? Go for it.