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Will we be able to scan planets to see what resources are on them, like life forms, percent of oxygen, water, weapons, or weather, for instance, and collect that kind of data before we land on them?

TL;DRScanning planets for resources, weather or life forms is technically possible with the new system, but whether it gets added depends on content teams, and no commitment is made.

Mark AbentLead Gameplay Programmer, LA Studio

Yes, of course. I wish. So one of the big fundamental things that we've done in our tech for the scanning is trying to think of how we could get anything scannable and how we could unlock that information. So we built out a system to allow us to create ways of getting information, either through async calls or through immediate data. Like cargo takes a while to get. So when you're scanning it, you may not get it right away, because we have to go send it to a server, which sends it to another server that eventually comes back to you. So having a planet be scannable to tell you that information is achievable, because we have that whole system there and we could put it in to unlock that information and send it to the player. Now, whether or not we're going to add that is a good question. That's where Vehicle Tech Team builds out the technology to allow other teams to use those foundations to add that information. So while it's possible, I can't say yes, that's something that's going to go there. Behind the scenes, the planet works, and the resources that are there are something we could obtain. So maybe in the future, that is something we could expose to the players: hey, maybe there's a severe weather storm here, or there's cargo, or there's a bunch of gold on this planet somewhere, go find it. And you could ping out; that actually would be kind of cool emergent gameplay. So the system is flexible. We just have to start adding it in based on what other content teams and feature teams would like it to do. So we should totally tell the mining team, hey, there's this cool idea.

Star Citizen Live›Radar and Scanning·
Published on this date.7 May 2021