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Give me the dime store version of pinging and scanning.

TL;DRPinging sends a 360-degree pulse detecting signatures beyond passive radar range and shows them as directional blobs that resolve when you approach, with a focused ping planned to give detailed position and data on one target.

Kirk TomeLead Systems Designer

Sure. So in the game, especially in the PU and what we'll be implementing into Squadron 42, you only have information about entities that are just around your ship in your passive radar. The exception being the quantum travel points because they're so far away. So it's oftentimes rather difficult to know about things that are outside of that radar distance. So what we wanted to do was give you some idea of, hey, are there objects around me that might be interesting to me? In this first tier of our pinging and scanning feature implementation, we give you the ability to do a ping. So you have a ping item on your ships now. When you do a ping, it basically sends out a 360-degree ping that gives you some general information about objects that are outside of your passive radar radius but within this new larger ping distance. So when you do a ping out, basically what you're doing is you're searching for signals, EM, IR, and we just implemented something called RS, which is the resource signature. So when you're able to detect those signatures that are outside of your radar distance but within the ping distance, you get back some basic info about these entities. And we represent them as blobs. So the entities that you detect will be put together if they're close enough to each other as this blob entity. That gives you a general idea of in what direction these things are, but not exactly all the information that you need to know specifically about it. So they're kind of like breadcrumbs. And then when you get these blob identifying markers, you can then make a decision to go, you know what, I want to check that out. So you can fly toward it and it will resolve when it gets within your radar distance. Right now we're implementing a feature in which you can actually do a more focused ping. So what that'll do is it'll give you better resolution on that particular item. If you focus enough and it's within this larger range of ping and the signal's strong enough, then you'll actually get the same information as if it was in your radar. So it could be really far away, but you do a general ping. You kind of know where it is. You start focusing your ping on it. And if it's within a certain distance and the signal's strong enough, you'll get for that ping duration an actual position and some data about that object. So you'll know it's a ship. You'll know it's a minable rock. And those are the two things that we have implemented so far in our initial tier zero implementation.

Reverse the Verse›LIVE - Scanning and YOU·
Published on this date.1 Jun 2018