EVE General Discussion

Omg, yes, this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=8Pg1dzAvL2M

Is not related to WiS but just to say how the options to extend EvE boundaries are abbandoned.

It was still 2006. And in respect of this someone keep saying that's more important to focus resources to balance the light blasters DPS? Give me that flight and **** off the blasters dps.

Would it be that bad to just implement just a meeting place for all the capsuleers? And build from there?

I mean just a place were we could meetup as a corp/alliance would be good enough for me anyway. Or would that still be too hard to accomplish? Just leave out all the gambling and other stuff and just create a big stationroom were the avatars could meet each other. Sorta have this foundation and build from there with every update.

Is it really that problematic to get this in the game?

It seems that it is because they do not even want to talk about it.

When team avatar still existed they said it was not that much less work to do a basic public area over their full wreck diving concept. So, yeah, it would be alot of work. But it would have several purposes.

It would allow testing code for multiple avatars interacting with each other before such code was used for gameplay that has real consequences. Id prefer to not lose my pilot to a bug if wreck diving was released before CCP figured out if multiple avatars would work on my particular computer.

CCP released FW improvements that were only of interest to those who enjoy FW. They released new mining content that is of interest only to those who mine. They released incursions that were only of interest to those who do incursions. CCP tends to make content that is only of interest to a small part of the player base. And every time they do people who are not part of the group that is interested in that new content complain that CCP's efforts were a waste of time. But CCP has little choice: we players are a diverse lot, with many different interests. The best we can hope for is, over time, CCP will make content for everyone.

So when was the last time they released content mainly of interest to role players? The character creator sort of falls in that category, but not by much. I think an expansion that included content for role players would be fine, and is perhaps overdue. Common areas for multiple avatars, store fronts, bars or other establishments, corp and alliance planning rooms, and so on.

The new crimewatch system opens the door to a concept CCP introduced a couple of years ago: Smuggling with player enforcement. The idea was you would go to a player run establishment and there buy something that is contraband. Something required to make new booster drugs. (CCP was going to release an entire new line of boosters, of which Quafe Zero was the first.) You had to do the transaction in person to avoid it being registered on the market. Then to combat this trade in contraband DED was going to authorize us pilots to scan other pilots, and if you found someone carrying contraband they could either pay a fine (bribe?) or have their "suspect" flag set. This concept is now possible as we now have a suspect flag in the game.

It's not free. And it IS a lot of code. But it is not something as overly complex as you make it sound. Just about every MMO had this kind of code since...I dunno...1997? That is multiple avatars in the same game space, interacting with each other and the world. Starting with UO, which admittedly was isometric 2D and thus a little bit easier to code, but not much. If all those other developers all those years back could do it, why can't CCP do it? It's not THAT complicated.

I'm not saying they can sit down and write this and have it done and running in a week. But in a month? With a half-decent team? Should be possible. Just to invite another avatar into your CQ? Should be very easy to do, actually. Next step, allowing up to X avatars into a larger room, just expanding on already existing code. And if that code was good and efficient to begin with (which it really should be), the work would be minimal, could be done within weeks.

Unless EVE's code is an absolute and total mess (possible, they did use Python after all), it's not that complicated. Unless they seriously messed up their structure. It all depends on how badly you want it done. Other developers made entire games with a staff of 20 people in the time it took CCP to release Incarna.

[EDIT: I need to work on wording and tone in this and my next post. It might be a while before I can get back to them. By "shortcuts" read "optimizations," or even "design decisions," or "shortcuts relative to full cinematic realism for various reasons."]



That's because every other MMO took shortcuts.

Let's start with WoW, because who doesn't like taking a few shots at WoW?

1) There's no physics. There are a handful of static animations that don't interact with the environment at all. You can "mine" a node from 5 feet away. You "climb" stairs by walking up an invisible ramp that looks like a staircase, but the walking animation doesn't even change;

2) There's no collision detection between avatars (nor in TSW, nor in GW2, nor in any other MMO that I can think of). Collision detection is one of the bugbears of 3D. Doing it right is hard. EVE uses boundary spheres now because they require one simple test: Is the center of X within Y distance of the center of Z? It's a trivial calculation that can be done millions of times by a server, but it looks really bad, and there are some comical edge cases;

3) Fairly primitive rendering is hidden under limited customization options, cartoony designs, or both. This is more true of some games than others, but notably WoW, Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World have vastly more primitive character customization than EVE does--it makes the animations easier. EVE models your toon's individual teeth;

4) As a consequence of all of the above, /emotes tend strongly toward caricature, or embrace caricature entirely (WoW);

CCP basically threw out all of those shortcuts and decided to tackle the hardest possible problem. They only made one concession--all avatars are approximately 5'8"--because otherwise collision detection becomes exponentially difficult. I'm not really surprised that they failed. Humans are unbelievably hard to model convincingly. If CCP is still interested in doing this right, and I think they are, then they have their work cut out for them and it will take them a very long time just to lay the groundwork necessary to pull it off.

EDIT: Also, confirming that CCP employed less-than-absolutely-rigorous coding practices for far too long, and is now paying for that in spades. Notably, their standards and practices sucked all the way through Incarna. That they required all-new rendered art assets for every build, instead of taking the time to develop a rapid prototyping tool like they have now? Wow. Just wow.

Well, to start, WoW was designed specifically to run on just about any computer, and this is largely why it was so successful. A buddy of mine was running WoW in '04 on a PC he used in '98, with quite decent performance to boot. Not a shortcut - design choice. By comparison, some PCs couldn't run Incarna/Trinity. Remember Trinity? CCP had to released 2 versions - Trinity and Original graphics.

As such, this point is totally moot.



Actually GW2 does have collision between avatars, but only in combat and when you activate it as an option (game stops you from going "through" another player when attacking). Also a number of other MMOs had collision detection between avatars - Darkfall, Mortal, etc., to name a few. You need to play more. Some games just chose not to do them to prevent the obvious "door blocking" exploits.

The calculation you mentioned wouldn't be done millions of times, that would be absurd. First, you would only ever check for collision based on player position. If player A is not in the same room as player B, why would you bother checking for collision? It's as simple as comparing a flag, corresponding to a room. Different flags? No point in checking collision.

Secondly, rough collision detection is very light and quick. Consider FPS games, where you have up to 200 players shooting each other with weapons with high cyclic rates of fire and advanced projectile dynamics (windage, projectile drop, etc.), like ArmA series, for example. If it was such a heavy server load, it would not be possible, when someone fires 30 bullets in under 2.25 seconds (MP5, maximum rate of fire 800 rounds per minute as an example) when a few hundred people do it. Plus calculating how wind and range affect those projectiles. Plus determining precisely which box (or polygon, depending on how accurate your collision detection is) got hit, as there's a difference between a hand-shot and a head-shot, damage-wise.

Bottom line, again, it's not as hard as you make it sound. It is entirely manageable. Most of it would be done client-side anyway, without additional server load.



Once again, completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Complexity of the character model (which, once set is set in stone and does not change (your teeth do not morph as you walk around)) is completely irrelevant for the complexity of putting more avatars into the same room.

The only limiting factor is local hardware - can your PC load and manipulate textures needed, and render all those polygons and texture and light them in real time. But that is something they presumably thought of before they even started working on Carbon. So it shouldn't be an issue. Besides, level of detail (LoD) can always be introduced, to scale down the details of characters to keep the game playable.

Good example of LoD usage was Aion. You had hundreds of people on your screen at times, and characters were fairly detailed. If your PC couldn't cope, the polygons and textures were reduced, even when upclose. This is a mechanic normally used to draw a character that is far from you - it's pointless for example to render the character's retina or teeth when he is 500m away and you cannot possibly see those. And if your PC struggled very badly, the game would stop drawing avatars altogether, you would only get nameplates floating and moving around. That way, the game remained 100% playable, even if the number of characters on screen was unsupported by your PC.



That's an artistic direction of the game. And has precious little/nothing to do with anything. It's like saying Team Fortress 2 has an over-the-top cartoony cel-shaded look because of hardware limitations. It was an artistic choice.



There's absolutely NOTHING "exponentially difficult" about collision detection at 0.4 feet or 40 feet. They would merely need to set up the game's environments to allow a 40-foot character to pass freely. Something incidentally ANet screwed up with in GW2 - Nord males were too tall for some jumping puzzles. But from the programming standpoint, there's no difference. Art, yes. But I see no reason why EVE's Brutors couldn't be 6'8" and tower over other races. They could make a neat special case, making a Brutor slouch when passing through doors! :P Slightly more difficult? Yes. Exponentially more difficult? No.

[EDIT: I apologize to Jame for the tone of this post. I'll come back and edit it to be less exasperated in tone. I'm just getting this out there now.]



If you want to call them optimizations, fine. Semantics, as far as I'm concerned. The point is that there are decisions that a lot of games have made, for whatever reason, to make their lives easier, and CCP eschewed nearly all of them.



I said could be, as in "this is an implementation that does not appreciably tax the server." CCP made a lot of implementation decisions along those lines, early on. It's what allowed them to bootstrap the game with such a small staff and so few resources.

It's true that most MMOs hold no interest for me, and I don't care what they do. GW2 may have very limited collision detection under very particular circumstances, but my point stands. Certainly, there is no PC/NPC collision detection.

The "exponential problem" language comes directly from CCP devs. They aren't going for "rough." The literal example was characters with noses at different heights. They want to do realistic physics, and texture-level collision detection. They are not messing around.



It is relevant to the discussion because the actual point is relevant both to animations, which ignore physics, and to the decision to make /emotes into caricatures, which take us back to square one as far as what CCP intends.

You keep bringing up this game and that game, but the whole point is that CCP doesn't want to do what other games are doing. They are going for something as close to cinematic rendering as is possible, and damn the torpedoes. They don't want to make the compromises that other games make.



An artistic choice encouraged by technical limitations, which is smart (and was when WoW did it, too). And my whole point is that CCP is setting an artistic direction that is hellbent on overcoming as many technical limitations as possible.



Take it up with CCP. They've actually done the modeling and made the attempt, and they say it's an exponential problem. Maybe, instead of pooh-poohing the claim because some shooter from ten years ago had a "rough" solution to the problem, you could consider that it reflects the complexity of the problem they're trying to solve. They want realism, and they're willing to pay for it.

OK, OK, so "shortcuts" was obviously a poor choice of words, as it's clearly derailed my whole point. I concede.



That's a fair cop, although there is wisdom in their trying to solve the harder problem first.

My objection to the Amarr/Minmatar thing is that if you hardcode that kind of thing then you are force-posing for the character, and that's its own kind of shortcut.

I admire the fact that they're shooting for the moon, though. It's that mad gleam in their eyes that makes EVE so unique, and I hope they never lose it.

I agree. When I read the article about it years ago I expected it would end up being something that would happen based on your standing as compared to the other guy, or your faction standing.

They used the same basic example I gave as a means of saying, "this is what we'd like to see possible".
I never really expected it to happen though. Maybe 10 years from now, but at the time I was reading about it it was something I'd never even seen in a single player game outside of a CGI cutscene.