Like these ideas.. although im not sure about the 'safe' from interception bit.... maybe i can shoot someone in highsec if i feel like and get myself OB'd by concord (the people in eve who dish out CCP 'justice' )

Impressive stuff

I'm a little depressed that I can't find any Kombucha to drink here in China, so I'll get my detox in by posting another daily Starmap update:

Today I hooked up the scanning effect using an event that CCP BaoZi has setup to fire in kismet. It was super quick to get working and very easy to make adjustments on. The event fires about every frame (not sure exactly, but it is pretty frequent) and outputs 2 values: a vector and an integer. The vector is the location the scan is happening at. The integer (0-1) is how close it is to being done (then it will switch to another random point and so on until scanning completes). I adjusted the material to radiate a wave of distortion and color out from the scan point. The way it works is that the material pays attention to the 3D point--if the distance between the pixel and the point falls within a tolerance it will blend in a different color and blend in a displacement to the vertex. The cool thing is that in the Starmap, almost everything inherits from one base material, so I only need to update one material with kismet, but I can override certain parameters on the child materials so the effect can differ slightly when it runs over a star versus a planet (and so on).

Also I tuned some of the material settings at different view levels to help with readability. Depending on the angle you view the Starmap, the background can be quite busy, so we are playing with adjusting translucency, scale, and brightness based on distance.