Can you scan people?

That is part of the plan for the future. We do want to be able to use the ping so that you can detect life forms as well. But sure, I want to know what's in your pocket.

The fun part about this whole scanning system is the way that it was designed, at least on the engineering side, we could technically implement this thing that scans anything. At least when we were testing it out, this won't be in 3.2, but we were using actors and items and vehicles and random stuff to scan to see what we could do. And in my testing, I had an actor on the ground, or a player, and I scanned him and I was getting all of his items. And then I put him in a ship. I scanned the ship and I was getting the player. And in my further testing, I even made it so I could scan further on that actor and get his items. So the system allows us to be flexible in what we want to provide the players. And we've been doing a lot of testing to see what we want to give and what not. But at least for 3.2, we're not going to go that far. But the system will allow it depending upon how far we want to take it.

And as kind of a preemptive move, when this was first prototyped, the UI for the pinging and scanning was on the ship HUD, and we moved it now to the player visor so that we theoretically could just put it on the player and then have a very similar type of gameplay in which you scan, but the targets you're scanning are people instead of other space entities.

And we'll continue on that too. The interesting thing we're trying to prototype and uncover is we have this thing called a data bank, and that's the thing that holds all our information of what's active, what you scanned and such like that. The player has one and the ship has one. So when you sit down in the ship, all the information goes to the ship and that relays it down to all the appropriate people. The cool thing is, and we're still in the prototyping stage, if you sit down in the ship and you start scanning something and it stores the information, when you leave, we have the ability to grab that information, now stored into the player. So there's some interesting things we could do where you go sit in a ship, you uncover some information, now it's in the data bank. What if we could take this information, put it on an item, and then you could give it to someone else who could then use that information?

And even before that, one thing we can do is you should be able to share that same info off to other members of your party or other crew members. And so if I do find a target that I want to attack, there should be no reason why everyone that's in a turret or is controlling some other weapon can't be given that same info. And then it should show up on the radar, and then we need to work on the HUD so that you should be able to message, hey, everyone attack this guy.