Mark Abent · Lead Gameplay Programmer, LA Studio

Sure. One of the biggest things that we've taken the liberty of doing is trying to get rid of the restriction of distance. So before, the radar would have a flat distance of how far it would see things, and that's it. And your passive radar, basically your regular radar, is only going to show you the things that are technically streamed in on your machine, because those are the things that are active: you could target that, you could shoot it, you could interact with it. Ping is mostly supposed to be the thing that says, hey, there's stuff out here that's maybe further out than your worldview. That could be, in our immediate near release, a few dozen kilometers away, to where we want to go once we get server meshing in, where they're a few hundred thousand kilometers away. And what we're doing with the technology is, when you ping out, we've changed the whole system to do an async query, so that once we have the API for server meshing ready, we could query the backend to find things that are of interest to the radar that you have, and then report it to you as a blob or even as a potential contact, depending on how far you are. And since we know what that information was, because it was all information that was just stored off in a databank, we could uncover it and store some stuff in the blob, so that when you ping out and you see a blob far, far away, you could scan it and go, there's something in here that's of interest to me. I could go fly in that direction and then proceed with more of the gameplay of pinging, and then eventually it comes onto your contacts and you can see it. That's where we're heading. So the immediate step is replacing our existing systems and removing restrictions so that you can see things that are streamed in. And then once we have the server meshing technology there, we'll hook up those hooks so that we could uncover the information that's been streamed out, and even across different servers, because it's in the local system. And then relay that to you as either a point that's saying there's an active contact here, or a blob. And then you could scan it to uncover whatever information is relevant to your scanner or the objects that are there. So that's where we're heading, and that's what the backend system for radar and scanning is utilizing to move towards giving players the ability to find things further out.