Scanning & the HUD

A scan is your character taking a proper look at someone. It is the only way anybody ever gets into your character's memory.

#Starting one

1. Stand in front of the other person, within 5 metres, and face them (your body within 90° of them). Only you have to face them — they can look anywhere, but their face is only learned while they look at you (within 60°).
2. Press F3. A small menu opens on the left of the screen: Scan person to memory · Recognize · Camera recordings · Stop looking. Choose with UP / DOWN and press ENTER. BACKSPACE or F3 closes it.
3. A small orange arrow marks the person in front of you. Press ENTER. The HUD fades in at the top right. If this is somebody new, your character starts a thinking pose about two seconds later (memorizing). If it is somebody you already remember, you get the answer after 2–3 seconds instead, with no pose — see Recognizing & the Live Result.

If several people are in front of you, arrows appear over all of them (the selected one is orange, the others grey) and you move with ← and →. SPACE picks up to 3 of them (their arrows turn green), and ENTER starts all of them at once — with nobody picked, the orange one. BACKSPACE goes back, then closes the menu. You can keep walking while the menu is open. The counter ‹ 1/3 › in the HUD tells you where you are in the list.

The menu says "Nobody in front of you" when nobody is close enough, and "Nobody in clear view - step to where you can see them" when a wall is in the way.

Recognize is the 2–3 second look only: somebody you remember gets the answer, somebody you do not know gets "You don't know him" — nothing is saved, and you wait 5 seconds before you can try the same person again. It never turns into a full scan.

#The HUD

 ‹ 1/2 ›                          ● REC 25%
  (voice) (clothing) (face) (tattoo)  ╭──────╮
   ▬▬▬▬     ▬▬▬▬      ▬▬      ─      │ 68 % │
                                     ╰──────╯
  Met him on Grove St at night
  Introduced as "Mike"
  Recognized

The HUD is invisible until somebody is in front of you, a scan is running, or a live result is on screen. You can move it, resize it and choose round or square badges — see Commands for /recognition:hud.

#What the badge colours mean

#What fills each bar

Bars never go backwards during a scan, with two exceptions you can see happen: the voice bar drops to zero when the voice they speak with changes (a voice changer switched on or off, or its battery died), and the clothing bar shrinks if they change clothes in front of you.

#How long it takes

Base times for one bar to go from empty to full, with nothing helping or hindering:

Three things change that speed:

Some worked examples in daylight, with everything visible:

The ring reaches 80 % as soon as any two of voice, clothing and face are full — usually well before the whole scan finishes.

#While it runs

• While memorizing someone new, your character keeps the thinking pose. It is the only sign a scan is happening: the other person gets no notification, no sound and no interface. A quick recognition of somebody you remember never poses, and a scan made with an active hidden camera plays no pose at all.
• Looking away never stops a scan. The more you turn your body away, the slower you learn what you see (half from 25°, a quarter from 70°, nothing past 90°); their voice keeps counting at any angle.
• Between 5 and 7 m, turned away, or with a wall in the way, the scan does not pause — you just stop learning what you see, and their voice keeps counting.
• If they walk further than 7 m away, the scan pauses and shows Paused · 30 s. Come back inside that and it carries on; otherwise it ends and is saved if it reached 50 %. Other pauses (they sit in a car, they are down) wait 15 s.
• You can scan up to 3 people at once: open the menu (F3), pick them with SPACE and press ENTER (in prompt mode: pick Carl with the arrow keys and press E while Bob's scan runs). The top-right panel shows your newest scan, and a small ring with the % sits above each scanned person's head. A quick look that already answered makes room for a new scan; with 3 real scans running, a 4th is refused: "You cannot follow more than 3 at once."
• Press E on a person you are scanning to stop that scan early. Whatever you learned is kept, if it reached at least 50 %.
• F3 → Stop looking ends every scan and quiet look you have running at once. What you learned is saved as usual (50 % or more).
• /recognition:cancel throws your newest scan away entirely — nothing is saved.
• A line under the ring tells you why a scan is slow: "Slower: dark, turned away". Besides dark, rain, fog and too far, it can say turned away, no clear view or not on the same level.

#The limits

All of these are in Config.Scan — see Scanning & Scoring.

#The result

When the scan ends, the ring turns green or orange and one word appears:

Below 80 % you never get a memory line or a name, only the percentage and the badges. Read Recognizing & the Live Result for what happens to the memory afterwards.