Scanning and radar, where are we at, what are our goals, what are we pushing towards now?

Sure, I'll start off. So as has been clear, scanning has been the greatest experience in the world. So what we're doing is we're trying to make it so that, A, it's easier to find entities in the vastness of space in the CIG universe. And once you do identify them and get up to them, you can scan them and get worthwhile information that you want from the entities. It's not, unfortunately, as simple as just putting in what information you need from it. Each entity type needs to be set up so that we receive information that's useful to the player when you do scan. It's two experiences but one system. So we have FPS scanning. So you're scanning when you're on foot. And it's going to be mainly focused on other AI or other living entities. Then we have ship scanning. So when you're in the pilot seat or the scanning seat of a ship, what information do you glean back from doing the scan? So in the past, I think we got the ship class, the pilot or the owner, and the health of the ship. We wanted to expand that to more useful things, like what's the weaponry of the ship? Armor of the ship? Does it have cargo? Is it going to be worth raiding and emptying out the cargo bay of that ship? And then we can layer on gameplay later on. We actually have smuggling gameplay, like the Star Runner could maybe, in the lower cargo area, that can be shielded from a scan. Again, to a previous point, why would you make the whole ship out of that? But it's part of the gameplay. We'll figure out some lore to make it so that you can obfuscate the scan results there. And then figuring out all the info and then expanding it to other entities. We want to be able to scan Port Olisar or other space stations or any ground-based stations. Doing ships within ships is a thing that's coming sometime soon, and we want to be able to get that info as well from the scan. But before that, we need to find the ships. Now we need to just find all entities. And so expanding pinging and getting better results from the blob that we had. So we did some work previously to allow you to find mineables. That took some time. But it's still, I think, an experience that we need to improve upon. But at least you were able to do pings, find mineables on planets or in the asteroid sections, and then be able to kind of pinpoint where those mineables were so you could take your mining ship over and then mine the rocks. We want to make that experience the same across all entity types. So if you're looking for a particular mission goal or another ship or another player, combining all those systems together to make it so that doing the pings and doing the scans is a worthwhile experience and intuitive. Some of the systems that we've been doing that with is we've been modifying the detection of entities. So right now we're using signatures. We do have EM, IR, CS as far as our signatures are currently implemented. We're going to be expanding it. We do have dB, decibels, that we don't fully utilize. We want to expand it, make sure that those signatures are working so that you can, say, hide behind a wall, or you can, as a ship, if you're a small ship that's generating really low signatures, you can sit next to an Idris that's generating incredibly high signatures and then hide within the space of that Idris so that from the perspective of someone else's radar, they only see the Idris. And all of a sudden, oh, there's like five escorts on there that I didn't get to see because they're being hidden by the Idris itself.

Helps give a reason to fly in formation, because when you're flying very closely together and your signatures can bleed a little bit, it gives you a bit of an advantage for hiding your numbers.

To go back to what Kirk was talking about, it really comes down to those signatures. That's what scanning is all about. Scanning is the electronic gameplay, electronic warfare gameplay that goes on. And it will result in better or worse situational awareness for the player. That's what it comes down to. And each of those signatures have differences, right? How they work together. In a gas cloud, the EM and IR is going to be hard to pick up. There's just a ton of noise. There's other things happening within that gas cloud that are going to make that hard to pick up. But again, if the cross section, CS, is so large, then it might make up for that. And that's where you're going to go. Now, some of the stuff that's been added on top of it has been info of the given ship. For example, how many people are in the ship? What are they? Who are they? How deep can that scan go? And all that kind of stuff is actually coming back. What's really nice about this feature overall is that we've been driving it from a pillar standpoint. And I mentioned it before that we have this core gameplay and then the vehicle pillar. This is all being attacked together. So FPS scanning and ship scanning are all generally using the same systems. They just really rely heavily on different signatures. So to go back to one of them, Kirk mentioned dB, decibels. Doesn't make a ton of sense that a ship in space is going to be making a whole bunch of noise, but it makes tons of sense that a character or even an item is going to make a lot of noise. So what's interesting is if you have a generator in a room that's emitting a ton of dB, you can actually stomp around that generator and nobody's going to pick you up in the dB sort of thing, because you kind of get that, I call it thief gameplay, where you're in the shadows or whatever you're being. [garbled passage] But there's no really absolute value within them. And that's what has been getting worked out, especially on ambient signatures, CS and whatnot. So again, all of those signatures, they all have different sort of rule sets that you can include with or do things to, to benefit or detract from being able to be scanned or not. Just one last example, maybe. For example, when we go active missiles, if you're going to this active sort of combat mode with missiles or whatnot, it's very Hunt for Red October kind of moments, like an active ping, right? As soon as you go active, you are super hot on that radar. So you're going to be able to be locked on. But you also know that that guy's turned on his missiles and everything. So he's about to shoot me, whether or not you're going to do something. So again, it is about the signatures informing the situational awareness for the player. That's the general intention.

Yeah, we're implementing the actual signature tech and detection. And then we'll take a pass afterward. Well, our particular team won't, but we'll have one of our teams do a balance pass so that all the ships are generating signatures that are within the ranges that they should be. And then same thing for players, same thing for anything that would be generating signature and interacting with other signatures around it to change the gameplay. And then in Sean's example, we put a sun somewhere in the galaxy and it's generating a ton of EM and IR, and directionally. So you can do the thing where if you position yourself between the detector and the entity that's generating all the signature, you can effectively hide right in front of the player in plain sight, because you are within the array of the giant signature that's emitting from behind you.

The other big fun thing is with all these changes, there's no point unless you have some good player feedback. So a major revision to all this is also adjusting our UI so that we could show this information in something that's more meaningful. Our scan UI, I think in the current release, kind of just has like a list of information. Now we're trying to organize it into more meaningful ways, like a general area saying, here's information on the ship or the player, the name, the wanted level. And then there's like an interior area that tells you, here's some of the cargo contents we found, some of the weapons that we found. Then there's like an exterior. And group the information in a way that the player could scroll around. And the other big change to this thing is making it more data and design driven. So design now has the ability to make a scanner that finds things for medical. A scanner that's made to find things that's more for like pirate cargo. Design can now make upgrade paths to specific tiers of scanning. That won't be in the initial tier. This framework just allows this gateway to open up for design. So there's a lot of fundamental changes on the core gameplay and what design can do with it thereafter.

Yeah, to Mark's point, players have been asking for the one system that I think works right now the best with our signature system, which is mining, to be able to filter out for particular mineables. If you're using one of the smaller ships, you don't want to find the big rocks. Conversely, you don't want to find the FPS rocks if you're in a big ship. If you're not in the ship, maybe you don't want to find rocks at all. So we're implementing that system. And then we'll have a way for the players to be able to filter out the signatures that they're particularly looking for by some dashboard control.