Star Citizen Live: Radar and Scanning

7 May 202100:58:511,757 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:03
hello everybody welcome to another episode of star citizen live uh radar and scanning q a i'm your host jared huckabee and if you've never seen star citizen live before somebody has in every show somebody's first show is where we take about an hour out of the end of our week and we chat with some of our developers about a topic that's usually currently in development now if you watched last night's uh uh semi late kind of very late episode of inside star citizen uh we introduced some of the changes that are upcoming to the radar scanning and ping systems we thought we'd follow that up today with a more in-depth conversation with two members of our vehicle tech team so let's introduce them now we've got sean tracy and mark aban how you guys doing
00:00:51
good good got coffee ready to roll yeah so uh every show is somebody's first show i know you guys have been on these things forever and ever and ever but let's take a minute introduce yourselves tell people who you are what you do for starter citizen mark we'll start with you sure i'm mark abend i'm one of the league gameplay programmers at the la studio and i primarily focus on ship technology and ship gameplay stuff i work on ships nothing but ships and all the ships and do you still bug smash i bug smash all day every day i just don't do it with videos anymore it took a lot in my head i'm playing it like when you work do you still do the narration just to yourself while you work
00:01:37
yeah sometimes i do it in meetings and sean has to tell me to be quiet sean that never happens sean who tells uh mark aidman to be quiet who are you and what else do you do right um so sean tracy i'm the tech director of content at cloud imperium games uh fancy title that really just covers three different jobs one of the one of the big ones and the reason i'm here is uh directing alongside john crew rich tyra the vehicle and actor pillars so that's where you know vehicle tech team is part of uh and because it's over in the la time zone uh you know i'm pretty one-to-one with uh with mark day-to-day as we go uh then on top of that is the tech art and tech animation directorship as a department and then is the game direction for theaters war arena expander and all that kind of stuff
00:02:24
so just a couple things and just a few a few all right so today's show is about radar and scanning again we had a short little primer in isc yesterday if you haven't seen it you know be sure to check that out uh we're gonna cover a little bit about what we discussed yesterday and then go into more detail let's start things off with a basic explanation for for folks here um what is radar ping scanning what what are the what do they do how are they different from another why do we need all three uh help us to understand what it is that we're talking about today sure um sean did you want me get this or you got it no go ahead okay great cool uh so um radar ping and scan are kind of like
00:03:12
um bundled together but they're kind of different concepts we think of radar as what you currently see um within your range it's your passive contacts you know you're flying around and you see a ship or you're flying around you see a station and there's information you see it's appearing you see the ui indicating that the thing's there whereas ping is more of i can't see something i'll ping out and maybe uncover stuff now that could either be something very very far away or something's heavily influenced by an ambient signature so you can't quite see it without a little bit of help the only downside of doing that kind of burst to kind of seymour is you kind of reveal that you
00:04:00
have done it so if i were to ping out and go find sean sean would know that i pinged but now i can maybe see sean and then scanning is more of what information could i get about that contact so a common flow is i could ping out i find um some like little blobs and maybe i could scan it and cover that oh there's something interesting that i want to go into that blob so i get closer and it appears as a contact and i re maybe multiple contacts and i could scan those to get other information so it's a way of expressing in the the world what's happening and maybe show some interest that may want the player to go toward that direction or avoid that direction all right now the vehicle tech team
00:04:50
works on like these core features the the these broad scopes these sets of tools that then you know other designers and stuff will go in and then choose from pick from play from when they're developing their ships i bring this up because as usual we put a thread up on spectrum where we collect questions ahead of time and we'll be collecting questions from the live chat here today uh questions about specific ships are generally the purview of ship designers and the specific ship teams you guys create the radar and scanning toolbox that they then pick from choose from and they choose this ship is going to be this good at this this ship is going to be you know this bad at this so questions about specific vehicles or spacecraft is basically not the domain of your
00:05:38
team so i wanted to get that out there because there were a lot of questions that's correct well this should do this and well this one you can make all the answers you want they just won't be accurate yeah um yeah so you you know that there you know a little detail within there too is that you know the vehicle tech team wasn't always the vehicle tech team that that only really happened last year um yeah last year or so and actually uh scanning and radar was one of the last um features and it gets developed like a feature and this is just something internal production he was uh that we deal with now the the intention of the vehicle tech team is that yes it's exactly as you described which is we're working on systems rolling out systems to content teams design teams whatever that is um but this one so happens to be an all-encompass feature it's not about marking up every single one of the ships or marking up
00:06:25
the entirety of the levels or or the um or the space stations or however else um it is still about bringing the system but it is one of the the last anyways uh you know we would call it like a tier one feature like a tier one team running it through like a feature team um just because it is a lot of work when it is because mark has to not only be a lead programmer he has to be a product owner at the same time he's got to chase around a whole bunch of different teams so that's just the evolution of vehicle tech team and not to despair while today's show is about all ship scanning and all ship radar in general we do have a show specifically about the ships themselves coming up as part of flea week and that's just in like two or three weeks i'm not a calendar so it's coming up soon so so save your questions about specific ships
00:07:12
uh we got that show coming in a couple weeks but this show is all about the broad existence of radar and scanning what our plans are for the future so let's go straight to the thread here we allowed people to submit questions and then vote up which ones they wanted to see answered most there's been a lot of talk about how we're unifying the the the the radar the scanning some aspects of it between ships and fps uh when we are on foot will we get the radar data from our nearby ships pushed to our individual fps huds so that's probably a two-parter question first part i'm just going to iterate more on the radar technology so when vtt took this on we did have a lot of radar
00:08:02
and scanning functionality and even ping but it was a lot of systems that kind of built up from different designers and different features and when we took this on we wanted to unify it across the entire game so it could be used anywhere by any designer to facilitate different those original mechanics passive it's on your radar ping you go out and find it and scan you get information whether that's a mission whether that's on foot or whether that's on a spaceship or even on both so because of that star citizen you are not just a spaceship you are a person and you have a group of people and in the document for our radar scanning we do facilitate how and why we want to share information now the technology to do that is there
00:08:53
but it's not available yet for this current iteration the primary focus is for this upcoming patch will be for ships because we're going to iterate on developing this tech basically replace the old system with the new one and then add on extra features throughout patches so this tech will allow us to put it on to other things like players and on ships but the current one will not be exposed to players into an up and coming patch and one of those primary things is how do we get that information from a player on foot to a ship or vice versa now going back to radar ping and scan radar again is what's on your you know what's near you and what information we
00:09:41
could perceive as the the person playing now if i'm on a ship i'm actually going to see different signatures even different contacts because it's based on the ship radar you know if i have a small little radar i might see certain like i'll go with the prospector it's made for finding mining things so if i get on foot my fps radar might depending upon my customized loadout might see different things what my ship was seeing so it also depends on what the player has his loadouts on both the ship and on foot are that determine what he sees from his radar and ping now if you do line up both of them then you'll probably see similar information but again your ship is going to have a much more powerful
00:10:28
system than one that's on foot you know your ship might be able to see something far away on the planet but you go on foot you're not going to see it i mean unless you have some nuclear power plant i don't think your radar will be able to see things so that far away now your scan that is something we're looking at on how to send an information to and from the player because that is something you can transfer reliably because your scanner is meant to just technically you could have different things determine what you're you know if i have a medical scanner and i have a mining scanner they'll uncover different things but where we store it is something that the player could look at at any point in time once we unlock that information through a ui so radar-wise it depends on your loadout
00:11:17
scanning wise depends on your loadout but what information you uncover from your scanner in a later upcoming patch you'll be able to access that either on foot or on the ground hopefully that answers that question in a bigger way yeah there's and one other point to it and it's a little higher level it's just um when we when we re invigorated the tasks around scanning and getting that wrapped up and and completely done as well as squadron requirements uh one of the big parts and and again one of the big benefits to be able to direct the two different pillars the vehicle and and the actors is that we got to design this together um so what we didn't want was a whole separate fps radar system that just has no you know no ability to cross talk with with what happens in the ship
00:12:06
um ship scanning because ultimately you know we're both um and we should be able to transition the data uh between both so um it was a nice thing to be able to design this together um and it just so happens that the ship stuff you know was was obviously a little further along um in terms of uh the amount of time that's been spent on it over the years so we were able to get that done first and then we wait for the fps and everything's coming up behind it uh we've been talking in in general uh almost since the beginning of star citizen's development about this notion of when you're exploring you know when you're out in the great unknown and you're scanning and you're looking you're looking to discover things like jump points or wrecks or you know anything else that can be found the idea that you can save that data and then
00:12:55
transmit it to somebody else probably for a healthy amount of credits is that still on the table is that still our intention that is percent on the table and still but that's not something you'll see for 314. uh now we talked about you know avoiding the questions specifically about you know this ship the terrapin or whatever but in general uh will ships design specifically for scanning or tracking purposes and that's anything from a terrapin to a hornet tracker to you know a carrick or have more sensitive radars and ping tech available to them they can so um a lot of the work that we've done is to talk with designers on what
00:13:44
information they would like to have across different ships even on foot and what type of upgrade paths you would want radars and scanners to have and a lot of those type of things usually amounted to different type of signatures the strengths at which you can see them at even the strengths of how resistant they are to ambient even the types so we've unlocked a lot of information and a lot of ways to categorize information so that designers could make more stronger radar more stronger ping or more stronger scanners or unlock specific information we've also incorporated different ways that we could potentially unlock players to filter out that stuff but it still depends on what the designer said that this particular radar
00:14:33
can do or this particular scanner can do you but sorry yeah i did to kind of support that a little bit is you know there there there is now three separate sort of functions of of our radar ping stance system that are all able to be balanced independently per ship per item um but then you've also in addition to that you've got those three separate ones then you've got three different signature types that again you could have a scanner better at detecting ces you could have a better scanner for em you could have better scanner for ir so there's a lot of um there's a lot of designer control now um and it basically gives them a ton of tools to make you know all the stealth kind of gameplay or really all the electronic warfare that we've been expecting to have within star citizen uh work as as as expected and as intended and with that we've been also
00:15:24
in talks with different um balance teams on what values these things do and how they interfere with each other so that we could get the electronic warfare we could get that stealth gameplay you know we always i keep going back to this into different examples sean really likes that idea that you have a big ship and you can maybe see it and you get a little bit closer and also there's a bunch of contacts because that big ship was hiding all the smaller ones so you know an upgrade path could be that you have a radar that's more sensitive to seeing those contacts further out than another one because it's ambient volume it could pierce through it more than another type of radar the downside could be more power just depends what design wants i just want goose to talk to me talk to
00:16:13
me it's not one pair it's two pair right uh no i always found that to be great but it is such a you know it it's obvious but but it takes some doing uh especially when you've got three different sort of signature types how you call them how you actually merge them and uh in the end that the challenge is how you balance them all um is is you know the first time we even took a look at it what the hammerhead was you know had more more signature than an idris and then you know if you were beside the hammerhead you would never get seen you know even at you know 10 meters or so so um yeah yeah i was inverted uh will turning off all systems allow us to get close to enemies without being picked up by passive scanning it's a good question because it kind of
00:17:01
it kind of depends it really depends one on the ship um so so what's happening within that chip even what's inside of it if it's cargo that's actually emitting ir or whatever that that could that could cause some problems or whatnot uh if it's not shielded you know um but it's also considered that there's always uh cross-section so cross-section is almost a visual thing um so if you're getting up to 100 meters for sure you obviously see it um and if you can see it you can probably see you now if you're behind them different story right you're probably not going to get called out but you may be picked up from ces in terms of your radar so you are you know you're going to want to try to include yourself so if you're approaching to zero to 100 meters behind asteroids and stuff yeah you're going to get it right up to him and he's going to have no idea you're there but i don't know how you're maneuvering with all your stuff turned off you know
00:17:48
so yeah uh it really depends um but all those tools are are there now and and you'll it you'll feel you'll know they're there um it'll be pretty obvious i think we actually have a test level that uh kirk tome was messing with where there's a um kind of like gas cloud that has high em and ir emittance so if something flies in there you're not gonna see it but if you get close enough if your radar detects cross-section you'll be able to see it so you know it really depends on what the other player's radar is and what your mission is doing to determine what you can see and how end of your ship like yes when we're talking about cross section it really is cross section like if you are horizontal to a guy versus
00:18:36
being top down your cross section is way less like way way less it is because it's um the shield technology that we're using is based off sdf stuff from physics and the beauty of that is it gives us a more accurate description of cross-section on the overall surface area so we're 100 using the physical representation of that ship so if you have one that transforms the different ways or even animates you're going to get different cross-section so like on the hammer head if you look at it like horizontally the cross section is a lot smaller than if you flipped it upside down then it's loud yeah that's super loud but but a gladius being a good you know decent uh fighter um like that coming at you knows first it has a very small cross section um so i may not
00:19:22
pick it up that's why the question is like it really depends depends but that's what's so cool about it that's you know again that's that's the system we wanted to bring in here that's why we make everything systemic what that depends we also wanted to add some stuff onto the ui to kind of help you with that so one of the things on there is the what your signatures are admitting versus the ambient levels that are happening so it kind of gives you an idea of how well seen you are versus what's happening in the environment the best way i describe it is like a thief visibility meter you know yeah for the um siphon filter maybe that's really cool yeah it's got a little visibility so you've got that ambient level so like a good example and this is more for
00:20:10
fps because they have the db signature so like sound um but if you're in a room that has a generator running it's super loud or whatever that ambient sound is going to be like full bar and as you run your ambience going to move up and down like this as as it is but it's probably staying below so that means you're stealth you're not detectable easily anyways up or passively from somebody else's radar but could they focus scan you could they ping you yeah they could still do all that kind of but mark you mentioned ui i wanted to throw out some notice the for folks who have already seen the segment that aired the ui is not finished it's still in progress everything that we show in isc is still a work in progress if we waited for everything to be final art you'd have one episode the week before a patch went
00:20:58
live and that's all you'd ever get so always keep in mind that when you watch something on isc especially when it's earlier in the quarter that you're looking at a very very work in progress and so it's an interesting thing with the ui is that ui that we actually shown in that video for the the scanner and the ping is actually not the ship ui we have a whole new spectrum of ship ui that we want to do for scanning and radar that we just not ready to deliver yet so we're actually utilizing the fps scanning ui so you actually get a glimpse of what's to come in our ships now tell your friends amuse your enemies everything in isc
00:21:46
is very work in progress all right uh as a follow-up question from the chat we talked about you know we're still intending to make the data collected through scanners and stuff you know shareable with with other vehicles uh have we started working on how like like that system like how that's actually going to be are we talking like physical data data chips is it is it uh i think we got to beat beat to death the the design of that and i know tony very specifically is very very keen to to talk through that end and to work that design out so i wouldn't say much there um in terms of the system though yeah definitely uh the the system itself we've got a basically a data bank of objects that can be stored because it's short of you know selling it as an item or or
00:22:34
you know giving it to other players or whatnot uh we've also got to do a couple other things even before that that that will lend itself to it so like the first one is being able to share uh contacts and all that kind of stuff within your ship to just other people in your ship like a gunner or something like that so number one we gotta do that number two we gotta be able to share stuff to party um you know like if you got a friend in the party you got whatever um we want to make sure that we're kind of going the direction and and to use a sort of a battlefield term uh they called it squad site uh but it's basically like you know everybody in the same squad can kind of see the same stuff they're sharing radar targets um and how the system kind of deals with that because you know you may be good at detecting this but this guy's better at detecting this i think it's super cool because actually the party can be laid out in such a way that you've got a ship that's really really
00:23:20
good at getting cs you've got another one that's better at im there's another one that's going to em and then there's another one that's actually you know the the loudest signature in your group so it's actually clouding you know the rest of you guys being stealth together so i i love that there's that dynamic but we've got to get there and then once we've got that cool then then we'll package that up and put it in a shop and maybe we do something about it but i'm sure tony will want to talk through the actual design of that course before the cart uh yeah victor tramp's like jared we i'm like i read the comments some people still need to be told all right uh moving on will radar or scanning have its own interactive mfd yes on um so radar i know some of the bigger ships
00:24:08
there's been ideas of having like a radar globe and then being able to interact with what your actual radar is doing there's different designs on that but the one that i'm more familiar with is the scanning mfd we've been going through it i'll back pedal and say this is not something for 314 this is something that's up and coming um we've been in talks with ui and other teams on what that mfd is going to do and what information should it have so going back to scanning it you're going to unlock a bunch of information you're going to you know if i lock mine they or go to a mine able and i find that it has a gold or if i go to sean's ship and i find that it has a weapon or even gold that information gets stored in my object data bank on the ship
00:24:56
that mfd's goal is to show you that information so if i go to scan a ship i'll get the nice ui and i'll see all the information there but if sean's gone i can't look at that information again hence the mfd the mfd is supposed to be that window of memory of what i scanned in the past so the good news is we in the object databank we have that whole underlying system where we actually save that information there we just don't have a way for the player to uncover it the only way you could uncover it if sean comes back and you try to rescan them then we show all the information that was there so the scan ui is going to be that housing of i scanned a bunch of things maybe i could look at what was there in history and even maybe have a way of transferring it somehow
00:25:44
because that's going to be the ultimate thing is what do i do with it do i bring it with me on foot do i transfer it to another party or do i sell it or can someone i i think calex had the idea of another designer on vtt he wants to steal it i could go and scan it sneak aboard my ship and steal it so why not it's on the ship we just have to have ways of accessing it there's a ton of ideas that we want to have fun with uh there's a couple of the questions in the chat is about uh are about wanting the co-pilot or another seat in a multi-crew ship be able to do the scanning and stuff like that and that just comes down to operator modes right yes and no um so each of the seats as of right now they could they have their own
00:26:31
operator um sub-context so if i'm piloting i could be flying and if someone guys in the back with a scanner on this turret he could be in the scan mode now if he scans something it gets saved into the ship's data bank and what's cool about that is if um me and sean are in a cut list he's scanning someone and i'm in combat shooting and flying whatever information he unlocks i'll see it too and this is there in 314 like the everyone in the same ship in the same seats the scan information is shared across the entire ship so it's it's you could have buddies that just scan everything and everything go for it right it's all about making
00:27:20
sure that information gets to everybody else that's on the show yes a lot of uh information to send received to different people and folks who will be learning more about operator modes and how that affects multi crew next week on ise uh can we please have the functionality to choose or filter what we actually scan for good news um good news so scanner-wise that's still in a discussion of how much the players can actually have control over but design-wise they're designed to set up to be medical information or law information that determines what you unlock there's still discussion on what to allow players to filter out in that scan mode
00:28:07
radar we actually did a lot of back-end fundamental stuff to allow players now there's no ui so you won't be able to access this 314 but the foundation because remember vehicle tech we build the foundation of is there and we have a way for players to turn on and off certain signatures even turn off certain contact types one of the discussions we've had and seen across the community too is they want to be able to turn off certain contact types because you get the portals there and there's like a billion turrets well why not allow you to turn it off or have it off by default and then you could turn it on so behind the scenes designer set up what kind of contacts you can see and the player can then opt in on which ones he wants to have
00:28:55
we just need to have a ui to expose that information maybe that could be the radar mfd it really depends how in-depth we want to get it but the functionality behind the scenes again is there it's a common refrain the the ui is one of the only uh well one of the few departments that touch every single aspect of the game so they are always in incredibly high demand uh so well they're very vital because they you know every aspect is how requires ui oh yeah every everything um are you going to change the awful cube scanning visual and making [Laughter] so good news right go ahead
00:29:45
good news is um we actually had the graphics and vfx teams help out concept new ideas of how we want to have this blob so we did get rid of the box i'm sorry the box is gone and it got replaced with more of um fuzziness that there's some object within there because the whole idea of pain is that we don't know what's there or where it all of it is it's more of a general area there's something here or a bunch of things here and you don't know what it is it requires you to either focus more ping so you can reveal contacts or get closer but the idea is just you know there's something there
00:30:34
so the ui i'm sorry the vfx all got changed now we wanted to move the vfx to be more on the player's lens to indicate that it's more of a system that's happening and relaying the information to you on the 2d because it's not a 3d in the world effect that happens but the old effect was kind of 3d now we didn't quite get all of that there because there's some stuff we want to do with the player ping and radar so we kind of have a hybrid right now where it's still in the 3d world but it looks like what we're going towards with that on lens vfx so we did get rid of the box it is still in the 3d
00:31:21
but we want to move it more into the 2d so it overlays on top of things you know one of the complaints we've always seen too is you you ping out and it's you can't see the box because the mountains blocked it well we want to get rid of that so that it's mostly on the ui so you go okay there's something there you just have to fly towards it so we're getting there and we're improving the effects and as jared said earlier this is not final we're continuing to develop the vfx so when you guys see it please put in your comments because i'm sure we will take your feedback and make modifications as it goes but for 314 it's a hybrid to get us where we want to go yeah and like what you'll see and you know mark described it really is is is uh depending on the distance
00:32:09
depending on the signal of the thing it'll be wider or more narrow it's meant to be resinging in that's kind of the thing you know there's something there you just don't know what it is you don't even know how it's shaped you just you have this you have a blob of a bunch of different um meshes that that it looks like and the closer you get the more it resolves and then the closer you get to that you actually get a contact and so so basically if you're coming into a system and you're you're willing to kind of give away your position because if you if you hit paying that that pretty much is going to notify everybody that gets hit by the ping that they've been hit by a ping so it's like walking into a room and going hello and then somebody way off in the side goes hello and you're like okay they're over there and but that's the whole idea with this is that there's this broad phase ping then you have passive radar as you get closer you've resolved to contact then you scan
00:32:56
to get the info that that is the loop i'm going to send those two wave files to fill pure small wood and see if he can't replace the audio that the pings make with that x please do at least in game dev uh we talked a lot about uh a ship radar and scanning because that's what you know what's coming with 314 fps radar and stuff will follow shortly after uh will fps radar be able to discover harvestables mine-ables what will it be able to discover what can you tell us that pretty much goes back to you know what designers want to set up different scanners and radars to be uh i have a feeling we're gonna the first you know when you first get the system up and running you kind of want
00:33:44
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 the similar radar and scanning and then different ones will get exposed and broken out to be stronger and more flexible on what they can do because now the system allows it so i imagine the same thing is going to happen with fps now fps doesn't have as many variations as ships are there's dozens of ships and they each have different roles and goals they're going to have a lot more complex items that determine how you scan radar whereas fps one we might have a
00:34:32
few dozen and over time more of them come out so the initial ones will probably um allow you to do the same gameplay loop now whereas you can scan mindable 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 fps team will decide to branch out and or restrict other ones to focus more on this a goal because i i mean there's you can make um 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 yeah um and to expand a tiny bit uh
00:35:21
on the harvestables the mineables um the whole intention with this system and a big part of the the changes and what it took as long as it did was it needed to be uh designer friendly enough that it was an arbitrary component that we can add to any entity um so like if we want to just make a box have a crazy em ir db whatever uh we just set it on the entity it's um it's it's all very straightforward as far as a designer is concerned um sorry you hear me yeah yeah she wants to do scanning um so we could just add these uh components on these arbitrary uh ones and it's all up to us uh what that signature is and how strong that is and what entities uh get them so it's nice because again for squadron things like this you can have mission components or mission entities can have these uh you
00:36:09
can add them to pretty much anything i want you to know you had a wonderful opportunity for a cat scan joke and you didn't take it and oh i missed it oh and i will be bringing that up at your annual review yeah fair enough uh to go on more with what sean was describing um you know in the past that we had that xeno event we had a little bit of radar scanning um it was mostly tried to hook it up to an existing system that didn't quite support it and 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 block the mission better um based on what information you get and how quickly you get based on your radar
00:36:57
or your scanner that you have so the designers now have a lot more open-endedness of what information they want to give the players and especially once we have more branching paths that determines what information you get 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 it's the idea of what design can do with them for their missions is exciting okay um [Music] will scanning ever be skill or knowledge based rather than just holding a button yes and no so we've gone through different ideas of
00:37:46
what it means to be a skill based and there's some ideas to get it to there but what we wanted to focus on is again getting it to working where everyone knows how it works and once we get to that level then we can maybe add extra things that make a skillful player unlock information better i don't know what that means yet because it's still ongoing discussions what and how we can make it more skilled but one of the things that we're bringing into it to kind of bring that gameplay into there is scanning is now tied to the signatures and the detection of an object so if you have a ship far away that's like on the edge of on your radar and you scan it you may not get all the information
00:38:34
about that object unless you get closer just because the emissions that it's making and it is off the edge that you can't quite see it really good so you could see sean has you can see a ship but maybe you can't see his contents and you have to sneak up on him to make your um signatures not too far out so you could scan him to see if he has anything better so there is a bit of emergent gameplay that comes out of there but the whole process itself um skill based is still ongoing on what that means and how we could deliver it to a player and again we're focusing on getting um the basic system there and we'll modify it as we go
00:39:21
a lot of it's too is we'll watch what players do and maybe add different things for different skill sets yeah i think there's a couple still a couple layers in there that that that do have there's a bunch of player agency now um and and whether or not you want to call that skill or not it really depends situationally what it is uh but you know they can focus again on it they'll know what they interference is according to the signal of the the scan target so again if you you've got a lot of interference you're going to want to focus more and that's again a little bit of a skill you've got to know to do that um and if you don't know how to do that you're going to take that much longer to scan so that's just speaking of the scanning independently but like just again the whole electronic warfare suite there's plenty of skill involved um and a lot of it has to do with just situational awareness and knowing yourself
00:40:08
right checking the ambient levels am i stealth am i not stealth has somebody pinged me have i ping somebody else do they know where i am you know all those sort of layers of it um is the little cat and mouse kind of gameplay that i think we want out of this and the skill i guess out of that too is you know if you design your ship to be less emission based and you're aware of how well those emissions can go determines how well you could sneak up on someone and scan them to relay that information back or just go all hands on board and try to take over that ship but if you have a ship like a hammerhead that's emitting something crazy you're not going to be able to sneak up on someone because you're you're just loud not with that attitude uh but it's what it's what chris likes about all of this right it's all about preparedness to go
00:40:56
to the thing that you're gonna go to and then and then adapting in this situation but it is the the forward thinking and a bit the agency that you have to make those decisions on the way in uh we talked earlier uh in the show mark about uh kirk and his text level uh with the gas cloud that has all the uh em interference and stuff like that um do we know i realize this is a question for the environment team and not for you but i'm just gonna i'm gonna ask because folks in chat are asking do we have an idea of when that stuff might actually make it into the persistent universe jump from a test level to um hopefully soon tm so what known ambience has a direct imp just well there's two different types of ambience so there's ambience that a bigger ship
00:41:44
in fears onto a smaller ship or something bigger emissions and fears onto a smaller missions and that will never 100 bleed out the emissions it's more of a modifier so that you could even if you're really up close to it you'll eventually see it and then there's more of an environment ambient where this one is you have to be above it in order to see the object so in order to know what those values that we need are we need to have reasonable signature generation across the board and the first pass of that is going to be um working with vet on what emissions should we be seeing so that we can get reasonable ranges for uh ping for regular regular radar
00:42:32
passives and nozzles for scanning once you're there then we could take those values and plug them into the environment so that you could have more stealthier areas like an asteroid field could completely hide cs and you're completely allowed with em and ir but we have to be careful what those values are because we want them at a range that makes it harder to see not completely blind players so we will have some areas that emit ambient because we're going to toy with values to get it there and once we have a baseline of how we want this stuff to get we're just going to keep pushing more and more until eventually more systems have it and then ambience everywhere but 314 wise we will ambient level within the pv yes that is that is not like way far away
00:43:22
that's that has to come with this because otherwise the whole ambient signature sort of side of it is kind of mood um so there will be a ambient level plus uh coming from the ships chad is like jared asked a one question it's my show i'm the boss i can do it every once in a while there's a lot of good information in there uh let's see will we be able to scan planets to see what resources are on it like life forms percent of oxygen water weapons uh or weather for instance and collect that kind of data before we land on it uh so can we start with this can we star trek this mark yes of course i wish so one of the big fundamental things that we've done
00:44:11
in our tech for the scanning is trying to think of how we could get anything scannable and what 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 sent to a server which says it's another server that eventually comes back to you so having a planet be able to 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 now whether or not we're going to add that is a good question that's
00:45:00
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 but i know how kind of the behind the scenes of the planet works and the resources that are is something we could obtain so maybe in the future that is something we could spot to the players that hey maybe there's a severe weather storm here or there's cargo or there's something on the 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 emerging just have to start gameplay it in based on what other content teams and feature
00:45:49
teams would like it to do okay so we should totally tell the mining team hey we got there's this cool idea with the engine uh somebody somebody play star marine uh with the introduction of fps radars will we also see the removal of god-eye bounty markers for pvp bounties it's gonna be a question for the pvp bounty guys i guess uh i would assume so because the whole thing with with with bounty part of the gameplay is finding them right so it's not not super fun if you if you have this uh this infinitely long and always on screen you know go here um that's that's pretty straightforward
00:46:36
uh you know and i wonder and i'm sure you know they're gonna have a bunch of layers like if it's a certain bounty level maybe it starts getting that bad like a gta 5 star kind of thing like like okay everybody insert this guy he's right here uh let's let's avoid him but i don't want to answer on the path how close you are to the com relays and the security stations where that information is getting relayed or whatnot but again and if you know you have a bounty on you again you're going to change the stealth gameplay stuff right you're not going to be loud you're not going to be going into systems pinging and all that kind of stuff so i would i would i i would expect as much but uh yeah we have to see as the fps stuff comes on yep well i guess you know this is that boundary thing is kind of going with um how other things goes you kind of expose a system with 100 here's everything and then you
00:47:24
start bringing back stuff with different upgrade paths and bring it into other systems so at the time that was made radar and scanning couldn't give them that information or way to do any way of uncovering stuff or going to find where that bounty is so it's now available so maybe that is something that could get exposed so that you ping out and maybe you kind of go okay he's over here but again that's going to be more of the feature team working on that particular how they want to use radar scanning to do that sort of information uh we'll save that for the next time uh uspu is on or something there we go uh as a follow-up to that uh what can you tell us about
00:48:11
counter scanning tools aka jamming so um radar is based 100 on the signatures and the and we do have and i was saying you know environmental ambience and um nearby of another object emitting but there's also kind of a third one and this is when a chaff is emitted it actually generates a volume of ambience so you can't see in between it in it or out of it so if someone makes a big enough ambient field that's how chaff blocks out you like a missile lock or how you're actually able to see that object so um bringing that emerging gameplay of how we can make you know
00:48:58
maybe those little bits of ambient fields around um is something that actually was talked about there's there's a concept of a radar jammer which literally if you activate just spits out a bunch of ambient fields around you you know we did something similar with the um the interdiction where you jam and it blocks things from quantum traveling we could literally do the same thing with radar where you blind stuff um around it it's things that are feasible but it's again one of those things do we from you know is it something that a ship does is something that a player brings onto the foot you know tech wise we're there we will bring it design wise ship just needs to say this is its purpose and then we'll start utilizing it and then
00:49:46
the other thing is interference with so we do have stuff in our design dock that we're going to bring forth through next patches as interfering with scanning because if you're scanning something and your ship has precious cargo or even stolen stuff we want you to be able to kind of block that so that there's counter of interference so that if i security scans you you're not going to see the bad goods but if he has a strong enough radar he's going to be able to find it so detection from radar and ping there's a possibility of a jammer or the has a way of doing it we just have to incorporate that on the feature teams or on ships and way of interfering with scan
00:50:32
is stuff we're going to be introducing uh through different patches yeah so yeah mark pretty much touched on all the active met you know all the active sort of ecm stuff that we have which is you know chaff works like an acm thing electronic countermeasure uh right now um it just happens to have the exact same signature that we do want to mask and that's why again you've got ir missiles you got em missiles this is the whole reason for those and the same thing will work with um but some of the passive stuff again like the the the whole uh player agency and and just being able to set yourself up uh on the ship side uh any mark talked about the interference or or or the lack or the the stronger your signal is the less that interference is going to affect you so basically if you can remove stuff from your ship or turn off things within the ship
00:51:19
that are that are louder that is your you know effectively a passive counter measure you know effectively pat you're countering uh whoever else is scanner as best as you can right now but the ecm's is going to come from chaff and then uh further to that you know i would hope that from an operator sort of scan position um we could do more but uh in the meantime it's all ambient interference and uh current signature levels um then the active one is chaff like for example for the tank i want smoke right then that should get obviously it should just call out the cs right why would you have a cross section you can't see the tank um so it's it's things like that why are you shooting i'm just i'm hiding ourselves exactly i'm just a particle effect leave me alone uh yeah and of course you know there are always as a follow-up to that question
00:52:07
there are always the the ships that come with you know dedicated scan resistant cargo compartments and stuff the mercury star runner uh i think the phoenix like shielded cargo yeah exactly what one of the constellations is supposed to have a shielded area stuff like that yeah and it doesn't make you immune to the scan all it does is it really increases the amount of interference so it's going to take forever for the guy to actually scan the whole way yeah so it's either going to take you longer or it's going to or it's you know for the different levels of scanners and stuff it might protect you from like the first three levels of scan but if somebody you know upgrades to scanner 5 you know and and that's a good note actually and it is part it was part of the feature set and it was part of the the the criteria that we set up the feature on uh was that partial scans give you partial info and actually depending on the
00:52:54
interference there you're only going to get a certain level of information off the ship so you know for example if there's a ton of interference you're going to get the fact that it's a ship maybe the name of the ship maybe even the pilot but you're not going to get anything else you have no idea about the weapons you have no idea about anything you're either going to have to get closer focus if you can you know do a whole bunch of stuff to to make that happen in video games nothing is absolute there there there's there's a there's a there's something you do and then there's a counter to that well yeah that's the idea and just feeding back to the player that's what's really important to us is that you know people learn and play with the system uh because they've got feedback and they know what's happening um you know and this this is the big thing that's changed just based on the old scanning um like we used to have mfds with little im and uh uh em ir um uh graphs but they weren't even you know they were just flat numbers they said
00:53:41
they had no there was no relative anything so you knew it went up but like you don't know how much that really went up and why that matters um so there was no way to learn uh what the what the scanning was doing so now it's a little more it's a little more clear um and immediately fed back to the player i think one of the things i hope for is you know it is false signature generators being able to you know be being able to you know fly in something like a gladius or something and and look like i'm a idris you know just just to freak people out you want a thumper for out of outer space yes yeah yeah i'm with you yeah um all right we are nearing the end folks uh let's let's let's do a biggie here let's talk long-range scanning uh this has been one of the you know
00:54:30
questions that we've had in the game for a while now it's with the advent of server meshing on the horizon and calling out things here and there you know somebody is on one server while i'm on another server and stuff like uh how are we working to prepare ourselves for that for to make sure scanning doesn't have to be completely redone again when when that day comes sure um 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 kind of have a flat distance of how far it would see things and that's and you know when you have your passive radar uh you're basically a regular regular radar that is only going to show
00:55:18
you the things that are technically streamed in on your machine because those are the stuff 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 maybe further out than your world view they could be in our immediate larry release a few dozen kilometers away to where we want to go once we get server meshing in that where there's 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 for fine things that are of
00:56:07
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 data bank we could uncover it store some stuff in the blob so that when you ping out you see a blob far far away you could scan it and go there's something in here that's of my i could go fly that direction and then proceed with more of the gameplay of pinging and then eventually it comes on your contacts and you can see it that's where we're heading towards so the immediate 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 hooked up
00:56:55
those hooks so that we could uncover the information that's been streamed out and even across um different servers because it's in the local system and then relay that to you into either a point that's saying there's an active contact here or a blob and then you can scan it to uncover whatever information is relevant to yet scanner or that the objects that are there so that's where we're heading and that's what the backend system for the radar scanning is going to is utilizing to move towards uh giving players the ability to find things further out all right gentlemen well that's it it's uh it's two o'clock here local it's the end of your your tour duty this week i gotta let you guys because i know you've got meetings
00:57:42
and stuff to go to uh mark sean as always thank you for taking the time uh out of your busy schedules to be here with us uh fps or fps and ship radar and scanning everybody it's been starts in live be sure you check out isc uh came out yesterday for some more information and an early look at some of the work in progress ui underway and uh come back to isc next week for a look at capacitors and operator modes and missile operator modes and the missile rework and all kinds of stuff that's uh that's going to change the future of dog fighting combat so uh i'm jared that's sean that's mark we'll see you later everybody take care see you later bye bye you

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