System Scanning

Diary entry of the monstrously bad-looking developer pt. II

I read some rumors that system scanning might get an overhaul in the feedback on my blog on Exploration, so I took up this hammer that is sometimes laying around in our office and did some research on what the hull I’m doing. Now I feel like sharing this secret information with the rest of the world.

System Scanning is getting crazy improvements for Kali1, mainly because of its current crappy status, I mean ... it’s just not worth many fishes (or up on many fishes, like the Icelanders say it) and to support exploration and the hidden stuff we are about to find.

Probes
We will change probes so that they are capable of scanning as singletons and give results on found objects. This means you won’t need three probes to create a pizza-alike triangle to find objects within. They are getting scan strength which is used for finding objects. Inaccuracy and scan radius will also be getting some tuning to increase usability of all the probes.

Lost & Found
Just finding objects will be based on the probe type you are using. Its stats will 'battle' against the stats of the objects within its scan radius, if the probe wins it finds the object and gives you the estimated location of the findings.

The factors used on the objects for this mini-battle are signature radius (big is bad) and scan strength (high is good), where frigates are commonly harder to find than battleships/ capital ships, while recon based ships are in general the hardest ships to find.

Inaccuracy
Inaccuracy has been modified as well; the harder it was for the probe to find the object, the higher the probability of error. Still there is a little chance factored here, so you might get lucky/unlucky with a sloppy long range probe and land in the face of the thing you scanned.

Addons
New stuff will be added to make players that want to specialize init to become better, faster and more stylish atit:

• 1x new Launcher (Recon Probe Launcher; fast and deadly - made for ship scanning)
• ?x new Probes (special ones to find special things)
• 2-3x new Skills (increased efficiency, faster scanning (Astrometrics changed to give more groups to scan for) and perhaps faster deployment)

UI / Usability
We have improved the scanning window in many ways, making it easier to operate and changed all this no-good group selection thingy while still adding more stuff to scan for. But instead of selecting a single ship group as you do today, we have merged a lot of groups to keep it more simple, making it only five groups to scan for, and these five groups can also be scanned for at the same time if you have the skillz.

One of these groups is just “Ships” - selecting that group scans for all ship types in the game, this and the new recon scanning should make it a lot faster for scanner dudes to pin-point a ship in a system.

So there is that; a small portion of information on the new system scanning, hope it got you tickled.

Ave,
TomB

Ps: this is some image showing system view (with the true EVE star system in the background) with scan radius bubbles of operating scan probes (another Ps: this is just the start of the look):