Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Acquisition and Targeting

The whole overview/scanner/targeting mechanic seems kind of nonsensical to me in that, if an object is in the overview, it is currently being tracked by your navigation system. In other words, it's already been locked, its coordinates and vector available instantly. Transferring those coordinates to a module should not take any time at all, yet locking a target in the overview does take time, even though it is already being tracked.

As I believe I understand the purpose of lock times, I think it makes more sense to have the overview detect targets both passively and actively. Passive acquisition is based on your scan resolution and takes much more time. So when you first enter a system or come out of a jammed or dampened state (I am not sure this should exist in its current form e.g. EWAR ideas post), your ship's navcom will automatically begin acquiring all targets on grid, the ease of this determined by the signature radius, distance(?), and velocity of the target. Actively scanning will drastically decrease the time required for acquisition, but will effectively make you easier to target by increasing your signature radius (making you look "brighter"). This of course cannot be done while cloaked as it would give your position away. Beacons, gates, stations (public), customs offices are acquired automatically as they transmit their coordinates. Celestials are not. If a system is Known, then there will be something in the system that transmits location data for common celestials like planets, moons, and belts.

Once a target is in the overview, ctrl-clicking on it will make it pop up in your target list, which will also be your watch list, sort of. While this might sound kind of nuts from a gameplay perspective, as one would imagine that simply being on grid long enough would allow a player to instantly bring weapons fire to any target within range, I think this increases the need for EWAR and good tactics. But I'll put that in another post.

Directional Scanning

Directional scanning should be a type of long-range passive scanning which focuses on a region of space. Think of it as pointing a telescope at something. This should, naturally, take more time, as more time is needed for exposure and comparison. Also, its effectiveness will vary with range, the speed of light affecting how long it takes for you to see what shows up (sensor ideas post). Ships will be very hard to see unless one is very very close and the data that you get will be delayed. You might have a ship show up on Dscan that left that area minutes ago.

There is no Range field or Angle slider for Dscan, only Aperture, which at maximum will not be very large. It will always return a range, however the accuracy of this might be poor depending on size, distance, velocity, scan resolution, etc. As a result, one cannot look at the whole sky. People might dislike not instantly knowing the presence of nearby off-grid ships, but this further emphasizes the need for strategy and tactics.

The interface for Dscan should be integrated into the overlay as much as possible. A toggle button would be on the overview window or the ship readout (there would also be a keyboard shortcut). Activating Dscan would bring up an aperture overlay that can be resized and moved similarly to the way one currently resizes and moves scan probes. It may also be set to lock to a particular object so that scan will automatically track regardless of ship movement. Scanning starts immediately, the results appearing in the overview and bracketed in space as they are pinpointed. The farther away one is from the region being scanned, the longer this takes.

Also, probes can Dscan. More below.

Probe Scanning

OK, let's see if we can totally mess this up. So one launches probes, they fly out, and either actively ping a distant area (making the probes and anything in its radius very visible) or passively look (Dscan), returning coordinates that display in the overview. Unless we want to use something like quantum entanglement as an explanation for instantaneous communication, then the signals from the probes must be delayed, as they will be communicating with photons which, again, only travel so fast (communication ideas post). Therefore it would actually be faster and safer to launch them, have them warp out, autonomously scan an area (probe scanning post), and return without communicating anything until they are retrieved by the ship. Also, the probes will return to the exact spot from which they were launched, as one is not broadcasting one's location to them. Well, one could, but players could see it and that would most likely be bad. And besides, that transmission would also be delayed so it could take a long time for the probes to get it, etc. Also, there are no combat probes or core probes, just space probes and survey probes. The results you see in your overview will depend on your filters. You can have one tab for anomalies and cosmic signatures and another for ships, etc.

Survey Scanning

The way I look at survey scanning (I have never used it so I could be way off) is that it is basically like cargo/asteroid scanning a moon. This doesn't need to be in the overview as the results cannot be directly interacted with. It can have its own pop-up window. Just target a moon, launch a probe, a window pops up, hit scan, it flies out, lands, surveys, transmits results. It might be better to just have a separate module for space probes and survey probes. Is there a situation where one would want to use both at the same time? Though that leads me to think that asteroids should need to be surveyed with probes to ascertain their composition, so there is another thing to go in a post for mining ideas.

Conclusion

I know a lot of this is very radical and probably not doable but I figured I'd put it out there anyway. Please be gentle with me.

Well, let's see. Depends on what you mean by "improve". I've heard some people complain that fighting in Eve is somewhat simplistic in that there is basically no fog of war. You know where everything is and even if you don't it isn't hard to find. Part of fighting, I think, is about figuring out where your opponent is and trying to keep your opponent from figuring out where you are. In the vastness of space that would create a lot of opportunities for intelligence gathering, subterfuge, and generally add a bit of complexity to warfare. On top of that, it would make space big in the game. Everything is so easy to get to and so easy to find. Maybe that's a good thing overall. I dunno.

I did mention some pretty radical stuff as part of the idea, but I guess mainly what I was looking at was combining the numerous windows we have for figuring out where things are into something more unified and consistent. At the core, the overview tells you where things are in space. So do probes, so does Dscan. Having separate systems for all this seems overly complicated to me.

As for massive changes to current mechanics, well, you got me there. I'm not exactly sure how much would have to be changed or if there really would be a "huge cost in development resources", as I'm not sure how CCP is set up.



The thing about the overview though, is that it doesn't just let you see things. It gives you the exact position and motion of an object. It tells you where something is, how fast it's moving and what direction it's moving in. That is tracking, by my definition anyway. The system has to scan for targets and compare that scan to the previous ones to try to identify that the blip at position Z it got on the latest scan is the same as the blips it got at position A-Y on previous ones. In other words, I think a tracking system has to calculate where it expects a target will go based on previous data and try to match that up with with the latest data it has. so it's already making the trajectory calculations. And I don't claim to possess a great deal of knowledge about military hardware, but I have seen documentaries on more-or-less current fighter planes which have systems that make targeting in Eve look rather primitive. They automatically identify and track hundreds of targets. The pilot only needs to select one as a weapon target, select a weapon system, and let fly. Of course there is gameplay balance to consider, which is why I figured making the overview take a while to sort everything out, which at the distances we're talking about seems understandable, would make it fairer.



Yeah, Dscan definitely wouldn't be as reliable as it is now. I use it all the time, probably for the same stuff you do, and when I think about trying to use it the way I envision it, I think it would make flying around much more dangerous, chaotic, exciting, and uncertain. Having to think about how far away I am from what I'm scanning, how long it would take for any signals from the target to reach my ship, how long it would take to jump to target, if it's clear on Dscan will it still be by the time I drop out of warp, etc, makes things interesting to me. As for better, well, depends on what you want from Dscan. Do you want instantaneous knowledge of where anything is around you, or at least the direction it's in? Is finding something/someone out in space rather quickly something you think is better than having to trust instruments that are only showing you where something was? Then I guess you wouldn't like it at all.

So in short, yeah it's some big changes. And as I stated in conclusion I didn't figure it'd be doable. Might as well make another space game. I think the pros of my idea is that it helps make space in Eve big and unknown and mysterious and worth exploring, make fighting require a lot more strategy and tactics, and to make the UI less of a hot mess. Thanks for replying.