Black Dranzer
Caldari
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Posted - 2011.08.19 23:42:00 -
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Edited by: Black Dranzer on 19/08/2011 23:41:59
I'd like to take an alternative to this.
Two types of scans. System scan and focus scan.
The system scan is what you see above. It's basically a sort of mini-view of the entire system. It reveals "blobs" of ship activity which are basically grids. For example, if you have 50 ships on a gate, it's going to show up as one big red dot on scan. Or maybe a blue dot, depending on hostility or general ship size or whatever. The details are less important than the general feel. You could adjust range and resolution; Range does what it says, resolution influences how much data those blobs actually give you initially. The amount of time it takes to scan is a product of the two. The lines are warp signatures; They're what you get if your scan finds a ship mid-warp.
Now, if you click on one of those balls, you can perform a focused scan, which gives you detailed information like you'd usually get from a d-scan. Perhaps it takes more time, perhaps it's not as accurate. Maybe it gives you pilot names, though. Again, I'm being purposely vague here. Essentially it tells you what ships are on that grid.
Now there are three things I'd want to note here:
Firstly, you can't actually WARP to these grids. Oh, you can get a good idea of the location, but without probes, you ain't landing on them.
Secondly, cloaked ships would show up on scan. This would actually solve the AFK cloaker dilemah rather neatly, I think; Because you see, you'd be able to tell where a cloaked ship is, but only their general area, and secondly, you could tell when they were warping. At the same time, you wouldn't be able to scan them out or reveal them. You'd just be able to tell what grid they're on. The average cloaker wouldn't actually lose any real stealth advantage.
Thirdly, If you did this, I'd probably remove local. I'm not sure what you'd do to Wormhole space to make up for this. Maybe scans are fuzzier in wormholes or something?
You could do other things with this. You could make scan resolution affected by what kind of ship you're in, so that certain ships have more accurate scanners than others. It also wouldn't really require much additional content development; It'd mainly be recycling readily existing graphics.
So yeah, my take on the OP's idea. It's technically a d-scan replacement rather than improvement, because, well.. there's no direction anymore.
So, yeah. Thoughts?
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