Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Currently the way ships move about in space is a joke. They will dumbly fly directly into an object, bounce off, and fly right into it AGAIN.

I am sure many of you have died because you were attempting to warp and started bouncing.

Here is what happens in the current system:


Stuck on a gate.

Click to move.

Can't do that.

Cancel warp to move.

Click to move.

Wait as your ship untangles its self.

Fly away from the object for a while.

Re-try the warp.


I am sure some of you will raise the point and say "well you are just a bad pilot".

While I agree that pilot skill in maneuver a ship is important, it is not the solution to a broken game mechanic. This is especially true when I can down right fly right THROUGH in game objects such as stations yet bounce off of invisible walls somewhat near some objects in space. There is no way to see where the boundaries are and the best way to avoid them is essentially to just steer clear of anything in space.

I have a vision of frigates chasing each other through asteroids, weaving between them.

I came up with a concept illustration to show what I am talking about.

This picture is also a TLDR;
Example Picture

Please tell me what you think.


I have also added this idea too:

Custom Ship Flight Path

Path Click Moving

In my experience they work just about the same as he said it does. If it's a whole lot more complicated and a whole lot less of an issue then please explain how. I've almost lost ships before in missions because my ship was bumping into an object that was visually a lot further away.

This can also be particularly frustrating during missions and anoms where NPCs that you have to kill get stuck on a structure far outside your range. They're stupid and don't fly around stuff, pretty much only capable of orbiting. That's fine except in cases like this.

It has to do with how many collision bubbles an object has. The more accurate they make the collision models, the more calculations the server has to do. Imagine if every asteroid had 3 collision spheres instead of the one they currently had. It would increase the number of collision models in a system by hundreds, thousands in some. Moreover, for the ships, there can only be one, and it has to be centered on the ships position, because of the complexity of tracking a collision sphere that is offset from the object that is moving it.

I agree, its broken. You happy now? =)

To that I would say you do not have the bumps of a ship be affected as much when a larger ship lands. Right now the game wants objects to get away from a ship's area as quickly as possible. For that situation I do not feel it is the right approach. A simple fix would be to have the 'bouncing' be less severe upon landing. That way ships would lazily ease away from what is near them.

Another slightly more complicated fix would be to have a hologram of an expected (fleet/ corp) capital ship landing. When the hologram is generated indicating a ship landing, the ships in the 'landing zone' will start to move away as not to get bumped.


Hologram example (something subtle)

That is a tricky problem though, because the ship is very large.


As for properly warping. Here is yet again another example of a situation that will be fixed.

"Don't stop me now..."

Must say I love your TL:DR diagram.

I'm just annoyed when I fly in space and get stuck on an object that is several BS lengths away.

AI pathfinding is the bane of many games...

But many times I've been unable to warp because I'm hitting some invisible object.

One solution would be to make an objects visual representation a better representation of its collision sphere.

RTS games often struggle with pathfinding when many units have to navigate complex terrain (I can think of one game in particular - Warzone 2100 - where traffic jams would often result, but that game is from 1999, and I think its units avoid collisions better than ships in EVE do).

Each ships pathfinding calculations should be client side - so each computer would only handle the pathfinding for one ship.

Furthermore (like RL where self flying drones are much farther along than self driving drones), flying through 3d space with only occasional obstacles is easier than navigating mazelike terrain.
Just plotting a path around one object would be pretty easy to do.
Calculating if a ship hits an object isn't much easier than calculating if a ship is going to hit a stationary object.

If a ships vector intersects a collision sphere, then the client computer does the calculations for that *one* ship to avoid that *one* obstacle.

This should not be that hard, and there's no reason it cant be client side (no extra load on the server).

It is not an unreasonable request, judging by the AI present in other games.
EVE has the worst I've seen.

Bah. I propose a multi-quote option in forums because I have a little to say to a lot of different posts. I'll just focus on all.

RTS path finding is different because the game world the units exist in is rather rigid. Don't get me wrong, AI path finding is a problem... but at most you are dealing with 1K-2K units on a map in a world that is fairly predictable because they only have so many paths to follow. In Eve Online, those paths can be changed by simply cutting off a tractor beam to save cap while you suddenly place a wreck in an NPCs path. It's unlikely, but this is an example of what must be taken into account. See this player made video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDR5TaP_VqY

You'll notice that the number of NPC's being killed is in the hundreds of thousands and this is on an hourly basis, not a daily one. The Eve cluster would have to have upgraded AI pathfinding for every NPC spawn. If, let's say, NPC AI mechanics involve five calculations and we have 100,000 NPC spawns per hour, so we have 500K calculations per hour. Let's say your suggestion would result in adding two more calculations per spawn per hour. Now we have 700K per hour. This seems reasonable... but then you notice how much the numbers dramatically fluctuate.

My point is, with the numbers fluctuating this dramatically, even the increase of one extra calculation might result in the need for a serious and drastic upgrade to a system that is already state of the art. The investment is not only in code, it's whether the damned servers can keep up.

Now an NPC path can be predictable. A players path? Not so much... now if you increase the pathfinding for player ship AI so you automatically avoid colliding with objects (I mean on warp in or warp out), you'll add even more calculations necessary.

tl;dr : Every advancement in AI seems miniscule because we are rarely aware of the incredible number of NPC objects being destroyed in space at any given moment. This doesn't include the NPC's that were left alone during a blitz, either.

PS - @OP: Without asteroids intercepting weapon fire, what's the point of weaving in and out of asteroids?

I don't see how this is a server issue. Pathfinding for players can be done client side, there's no reason for the server to be involved at all.

Client pulls object position from the server (which it already does)
Client calculates collision bubbles from object orientation
Client reroutes ship around collision bubble
Client sends ship position and velocity to server (which it already does)

comparing this to an RTS is completely beside the point. A unit in an RTS is finding it's way through a 2d map in most cases, and at time when it doesn't (Homeworld series), the ships bounce even further from the actual model. Also, the devs and community have both said, and I agree, that there should never be client side calculations that will then affect other players. I believe the things that are done client side are missiles, but the server tracks those on its own, and graphics. Your client doesn't even say whether or not your guns are on, what mods you have fitted, or where you are. When calculations are done client side, apart from the obvious hacking possibilities (which are their own problem), people on slow machines are going to path more poorly than someone whose computer can keep up.

At the end of the day, the server tells your computer where your ships is, where it's going, how fast, and whether it is still alive. Nothing is done on the client. Your client doesn't tell the server where you are, it doesn't tell it what direction you are going. If you try to implement this, I can guarantee you are going to overload the servers with calculations if you want it to predict if something is in your path, and try to move smoothly around it.