Grismar's EVE Wiki : ScanAid

ScanAid

I wrote ScanAid to help people use the scanner more accurately. It's easy to lose your bearing in open space, especially if there's not a lot around at the location from where you're scanning.

How does ScanAid help?

When you use the scanner in EVE, you can set 2 parameters: range and angle. Range determines how far the scan will reach, angle determines what part of the area all around you you will be scanning.

If you set angle to 360°, the scan range will include all of the space around you (up to range km away). This area is shaped like a sphere, with your ship in the center. Any value below 360° will scan the area the camera is pointing at, starting at your ship. This will be part of the same sphere. At a 180° angle, you will be scanning half of that sphere (i.e. the half the camera is "looking into").

At a 90° angle you're scanning everything that's in a cone-shaped¹ area and ScanAid shows you what part of the screen is included in that scan. Note that the scan still includes parts of space you cannot see (off the top and bottom of the screen). At a 60° angle, you can actually see all of the space you're scanning and the scanner allows you to narrow it down even further to 30°, 15° and 5°.

The 5° cone is so narrow that, unless you zoom out far enough, you'll scan only the area that's covered by your own ship. Note that focussing the camera on another object won't change what you're scanning. For results that will actually mean something to you, have the camera on your ship at the time of scanning.

¹ Note that it's not exactly a cone, that is: it is a cone with a bulging dome-shaped bottom.

Installing and Using ScanAid

You need to run EVE windowed if you want to use ScanAid. If you have trouble running EVE windowed, or like the looks of full screen play better, try EVE Launcher (http://eve.grismar.net/evelauncher), which can make your windowed EVE look just like the full screen EVE.

If you download and install ScanAid, it will show a tiny menu, that looks like this:

http://eve.grismar.net/scanaid/menu.gif

The left button will exit the program. The middle button turn the scanner overlay on and off. The right button will allow you to select the EVE window if the program doesn't find it by itself for some reason.

The easiest way to use ScanAid is by starting it when EVE is already running and you're logged in and in space. ScanAid will detect the EVE window, determine its size and overlay the scan areas, like in this screenshot. If you start ScanAid before EVE is loaded, you need to use the (right) select button to tell scanaid where the EVE window is. If you start ScanAid when you're not in space, it will still overlay the scan areas, which will be useless, so you can turn them off with the (middle) overlay button.

When you're done scanning, close ScanAid, since it may cost you considerable frames per second.

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CategoryThirdPartySoftware