Mark Abent · Lead Gameplay Programmer, LA Studio

That pretty much goes back to what the designers want to set up different scanners and radars to be. I have a feeling that when you first get the system up and running, you want to expose everything, and then you want to decrease it down and make different variants to indicate different upgrade paths. So that's kind of what we're doing for the ships right now. So all the ships are going to have basically similar radar and scanning, and then different ones will get exposed and broken out to be stronger and more flexible in what they can do, because now the system allows it. So I imagine the same thing's going to happen with FPS. Now, FPS doesn't have as many variations as ships. There's dozens of ships, and they each have different roles and goals. So they're going to have a lot more complex items that determine how you scan and radar, whereas for FPS we might have a few dozen, and then over time more of them come out. So the initial ones will probably allow you to do the same gameplay loop as now, where you can scan mineable rocks and you could ping them out and find them. And then I'm sure there will be upgrade paths that the mining team or even the FPS team will decide to branch out, or restrict other ones to focus more on a goal. You can make a scanner or radar more focused on bounty hunting versus mining. Having one to do both is more of a gateway to make the branching paths work.

Sean Tracy · Tech Director of Content

Yeah. And to expand a tiny bit on the harvestables, the mineables: the whole intention with this system, and a big part of the changes and why it took as long as it did, was it needed to be designer-friendly enough that it was an arbitrary component that we can add to any entity. So if we want to just make a box have a crazy EM, IR, dB, whatever, just set it on the entity. It's all very straightforward as far as the designers go. So we could just add these components on these arbitrary ones, and it's all up to us what that signature is and how strong that is and what entities get them. So it's nice because, again, for Squadron and things like this, mission components or mission entities can have these. You can add them to pretty much anything.

Mark Abent · Lead Gameplay Programmer, LA Studio

To go on more with what Sean was describing: in the past, we had that XenoThreat event, we had a little bit of radar scanning. It was mostly trying to hook it up to an existing system that didn't quite support it. And the designers got really far. But the new system will be a lot more flexible. So if we were to go down that path again, they could relay more information and unlock the mission better based on what information you get and how quickly you get it, based on your radar or your scanner that you have. So designers now have a lot more open-endedness in what information they want to give to players. And especially once we have more branching paths, that determines what information you get. So it's cool, because if you have a medical scanner, maybe if you scan this thing for a mission, you're going to uncover a different path than if someone has a bounty hunter scanner. Now, these aren't real scanners right now, but the idea of what design can do with them for their missions is exciting.