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Why did we rename chaff and flare?

TL;DRFlare and chaff were renamed to decoy and noise field to better reflect what they do with Star Citizen's multiple signatures and reduce confusion with real-world meanings.

Richard TyrerCore Gameplay Director

So essentially, the real world equivalents of chaff and flare are not necessarily how they're being used in Star Citizen, because Star Citizen has all these different signatures. So this is something that's been driven by Yogi as a fan favourite, and he was very passionate about changing them to be more representative of what they do in Star Citizen. So the flare has been renamed to decoy. So basically the decoy is creating a strong signal source for all seeker heads. So CS, IR, EM. And then the chaff is being renamed to the noise field. So the noise field is kind of creating this sensor dampening. And that's kind of what I was talking about before, because that actually was an extension of radar and scanning, which was with the core functionality of radar, and actually Yogi tied into that from what we were doing from the vehicle side. So that's kind of going in line with a signature being dispersed into the ambient that is dampening other signatures around it. So that's why it's being called a noise field. So it's kind of allowing people to hide inside almost a mini gas cloud. So it's about reducing confusion towards what people have an expectation of happens in real life versus the Star Citizen universe and how we're using it, because we use a lot of terms from a design point of view, and this goes across multiple different games, where you pull a term and you're like, okay, we're going to use this term to represent this thing that is based off reality. But a lot of the times, how you implement it or how you're using it in that particular use case in a game can slightly change the direct determination of what that actual term is being used for. And I think in this case, it was about clearing up the confusion. Now, obviously, in the short term, people are going to be going, well, hold on, I've already learned a lot of this, but we've got to remember that we're still in [alpha]. So this is about getting the right terminology and the right systems and the right underpinning in there so that when new players or old players alike are trying to explain it to new players, it has a consistency across what the real world is doing versus what's happening in game.

Star Citizen Live›All About Alpha 3.12·
Published on this date.11 Dec 2020