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Re: The sensor display and lack of history

#16
Welcome to the forums, Bladdock :wave:

I had some similar thoughts as you on the history of scanning results. I thought that old scanning results dont necessarily have to move backwards, but just become more transparent and change the color as you said. Newer results could then "overwrite" the old results, so that you would still see some old 0peaks, which are no longer recorded.

+1 from me :thumbup:
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Re: Scanner 2.0

#18
I thought Scanner 2.0 was a significant improvement over 1.0; though I suspect in the future something akin to Josh's first pass may have a use (I don't know what for; it just looked cool enough that it perhaps shouldn't be forgotten about).

The one thing that I keep thinking about, scanner-wise, is that the actual signal that we're viewing isn't identified. Given that there's little physical meaning in having these signals in the EM spectrum, I'm assuming it's a fictional spectrum. This surely means there's scope for scanners of different spectrums? Is there an argument for either the ability to switch between spectrums using the same scanner... or convert the scanner from a bar-chart type representation to a line chart. This would allow multiple spectrums to be plotted in the same scanner. I'm just thinking out loud here - I'm not married to these suggestions.

Thoughts?
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Re: The sensor display and lack of history

#19
ThymineC wrote: What would be the value of explicitly being shown the history if you're seeing a frequency-space representation of signals?
One use could be the easy comparison of two signals, if you don't have a full database of signals you can compare them to or don't want to. The latter would probably be good for quickly searching an asteroid field for great differences in ore distribution.
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Re: The sensor display and lack of history

#20
Bladdock wrote:The idea being that recent instances of the display would move backwards, gaining depth; change colour and become transparent.
That is likely to seriously impair the readability of the scanner. Anything that makes it harder to take an instant reading from the scanner is going to make the scanner less useful - this is why cockpit HUDs in real life are visually very simple.

What might work is for the scanner to display "peak hold" values in a similar way to an audio level meter.
Experiencing a significant gravitas shortfall
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Re: The sensor display and lack of history

#21
Zero Gravitas wrote: That is likely to seriously impair the readability of the scanner. Anything that makes it harder to take an instant reading from the scanner is going to make the scanner less useful - this is why cockpit HUDs in real life are visually very simple.

What might work is for the scanner to display "peak hold" values in a similar way to an audio level meter.
That's basically what I was going to suggest :D I just didn't know how to describe it in a proper way.
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Re: Scanner 2.0

#22
Moose wrote:I didn't know I had any problems with the first scanner until I saw the new one. It looks stellar!
I see what you did there. :)

Mods: It might be nice to move this thread over to the Suggestions folder. In the meantime, there are quite a few notes possible on the new scanner model.

1. Although it's now displaying signals for multiple frequency bands simultaneously, there's still a time component: for any individual frequency, you can see how it changes over time. There's no longer a "history" as you get when watching a single frequency band, but your mind can provide that.

As long as the rate at which the signal varies is sufficiently less than the rate at which the scanner samples the signals, you will be able to see distinctive patterns of change over time. (I'm assuming the scanner in LT will always have a high enough sample rate per the Nyquist limit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Sh ... ng_theorem) to eliminate artifacting -- I'm not sure if that form of uncertainty would be fun.)

2. How about briefly displaying "peak bars" in the way that graphic equalizers do? Any value in that?

3. The current scanner can be thought of as counting the number of "ticks" from an emission source or reflection over a defined period of time. That's why the height of each frequency bar can change visibly.

What about a mode in which each frequency band is a straight counter? Instead of clearing all bars for each band and replacing them each sweep, in "accumulator" mode all ticks would be summed into each band until you explicitly reset the scanner display. If there's a strong signal in one band, it would grow to the maximum display height, after which all other signals would appear to shrink.

Where this might be useful is for observing at a distance, where signals are very weak. If you watch for a while, eventually real signals would accumulate enough to rise through the noise.

4. Would it be helpful to change the color of frequency bars as they get taller? That might help them stand out more, or it might just make the display look cluttered.

Is there some other way that color could be applied to deliver useful information? What other information about a signal is there besides frequency and larger-scale variation rate?

5. An idea I've seen mentioned by several people is being able to zoom in on part of the scanner for increased resolution. You'd see the same total number of bands, but they'd cover only a subset of the total possible range.

This would have value if multiple signals -- perhaps from similar but different kinds of emitters or reflections -- were very close but not quite the same frequency. A large spike in one band of the fully zoomed out scanner display might resolve to two or three frequency bands when zoomed in. That might tell you you're looking, for example, at ships with similar kinds of engines but with different power ratings.

Are there other reasons to want to be able to zoom in/out?

6. In what ways should research affect scanners?

7. Are scanners something that can be targeted and damaged/destroyed independently? What should be the gameplay effects if your scanner takes damage, or if it gets destroyed?

More questions to come, I'll bet. ;)
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Re: Scanner 2.0

#23
I agree that this topic is more suited for the suggestions forum.

While I do love the new scanner, I kind of miss the analysis of signals that you could do using the historical graph of the old implementation.

Of course, I'm sure that the "signals database" Josh mentioned in the update video will be just as useful, but I liked the idea of being able to clearly recognize signal patterns without computer aid.

Anyway, I'm sure Josh will continue to improve the scanner with his trademark alacrity. :thumbup:
- The Snark Knight

"Look upward, and share the wonders I've seen."
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Re: Scanner 2.0

#25
I got you all beat.

You can have historical AND current with what is there if you add a 3-d perspective shift to it.

The audio program I use for the podcast is called Goldwave and it has this feature. While I suck at making gifs or making recordings so I can't show you, but I can link to a video of it in motion here. The video starts at 1:46, and you can see what I'm talking about in the levels in the top-right.

It may be quite fast, but slowing it down to show some historical data might be useful.
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Early Spring - 1055: Well, I made it to Boatmurdered, and my initial impressions can be set forth in three words: What. The. F*ck.
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Re: Scanner 2.0

#27
People are still using goldwave? I ain't seen that in an age.

Slowed down you'd basically have a 3d waterfall plot. Those are cool but I'm still gonna sit stubbornly in the spectrogram camp.

I would like to see colour coding on the current RTA-style implementation so that we could see things like heat, magnetic flux, gravitational distortion (I.e. mass) on the same display.
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Re: Scanner 2.0

#28
DWMagus wrote:...you can see what I'm talking about in the levels in the top-right.
That was exactly the kind of thing I had in mind when I wrote that it could significantly impair readability. I mean, it's a dog's dinner, isn't it? And that's against a black background. Spectrogram is the way to do this properly.
Experiencing a significant gravitas shortfall
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Re: Scanner 2.0

#30
I really liked the new scanner, but there are one or two things kind of bugging me:

1. It seems the signals are single-mode? I think it'd be awesome if we could have a multi-frequency signature associated with the given entity - this way, if we're picking up many entities on the scanner, to the unfamiliar eye it would look very confusing, but with practice it would become a bit more obvious. But I'm not too fussed about it!

2. The signal saturation (hence the amplitude scale on graph) seems really arbitrary. I personally don't like those plateaus, but I can understand its use in masking secondary signals (like using the sun to block your own signal components in the same frequency bands). But I think it can be better:
Normalize the spectrum to the most intense frequency component, in real time. This mainly does two things:
a) Gets rid of arbitrary signal saturation (cosmetic issue);
b) By normalizing on a very intense signal, we dwarf the other frequency component amplitudes. So if you were say looking at the sun, it would "blind" your sensors so that it would be much harder to spot anything , let alone the frequency components in the sun's emission band. And then if you wanted to get past this you could buy a module that you could get to attenuate certain frequency bands.

I think b) makes for a very strong impact on gameplay. By being blinded on long-range scanners in the direction of the sun (or any other strong emitter), we have a natural 'jamming' mechanism (not in its strict sense), and it opens up a lot of possibilities for fleet engagements. Travelling "upwind", or perhaps more appropriately, uplight, would come with its own risks, and would require care to be taken. To make the "blindness" complete, I as the player might also adjust the sun's physical brightness to such an extent that I can barely see anything at all in that direction, but I think this is a little extreme.

The biggest reason I think this is a good idea is that it very naturally adds an anisotropy to our awareness of space, adding a sort of polarity to physical space. From a combat perspective this would be *fascinating*... imho

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