EVE General Discussion

Wow, a lot of flametards on this thread...

All the technical reasons people are posting about why it isn't possible are bs. Of course CCP could solve the problem if they wanted to go in that way. They use WASD in WiS for example. It might require changing or supplementing the architecture a bit or maybe not, but it's certainly not impossible.

But, yeah, it probably wouldn't be a great idea because:

No, that's not true. Most MMOs have lag of a second or more pretty regularly and use some form of WASD. They just have the local client adjust your apparent position smoothly and the server is up to a second behind. So, maybe the other ship will actually be calculating it's tracking based on your position and speed from 1 second ago and whatnot, but you wouldn't notice the difference. Like in WoW for example, sometimes if there is a race situation, like where you're running to cap a flag, it might look to you like you got there half a second before the other guy, but the other guy is the one who actually gets the flag. That's because your client is showing your position ahead of where the server thinks you are by whatever amount of lag you have, whereas you are seeing the other guy where the server thinks he is plus whatever amount of lag you have. Minor issues like that are unavoiadable, but that sort of thing is no big deal. This isn't a new problem. These issues have been solved many times in many different ways by hundreds of games.

How many other MMO's are single shard and have mechanics designed to support having over 1000 individual connections on one grid at a time?

…none of which have had to deal with the issue on the scale required in EVE. That makes it a new problem.

Also that damage is really a dice roll. Yeah there are controllable variables, but at the end of the day you click shoot game decides if you hit and how much. So it's not like you can really dodge fire in he greater sense of things. Until you can really "aim" your own fire not a whole lot of point.

I'm not advocating this. I like it how it is. But there are some kind of cool things you can do with space combat without aiming your weapons. Star Trek had kind of an interesting spin on it where you would fit different guns facing different directions. Some could fire over a very wide arc, some very narrow arcs, then you had different shields for each side of your ship. So you were constantly adjusting position to try to get your main front gun lined up with them or to expose your shield with the most strength left or whatever. I don't think EVE should go that way, but it was kind of cool.

Actually, with the current tech, it pretty much says that it's impossible.

The servers and the clients and the connection between them can't handle it. Making it “possible” technically would make it impossible economically due to how few people would be able to subscribe and how much the servers would cost to support them. Until ye olde Moore's Law has had another decade to work and even the US has jumped on the broadband band-wagon, then maybe the two will move towards some point of intersection, but right now, no.
And that's the problem: the source
The problem with that solution is that it can only go so far, and it comes at an unacceptable price: client data alteration. You cannot trust the client. Planetside already proved this (as well as why this kind of direct control is less than optimal for MMOs in general).

The other problem is: why add it? What does it actually add after all that fiddling? Joystick (and WASD) control makes sense when we're talking about one-man fighters and a Wing Commander scale on the ships… in EVE, we're talking about M1/M2/M7-class ships from the X-series (and as anyone who has played those with a joystick will tell you — a joystick makes fuckall difference in manoeuvring those ships, and you're really just more likely to snap the thing from constantly leaning on it for a minute to make a full turn).
They think that WiS won't be nearly as time-critical as FiS, I'd say, not to mention that the world interaction is far lighter and far less cruical…

That could certainly be true. No argument there. It could be too expensive a problem to solve given their current subscriber base.



You don't necessarily need to. For example, the client could be updating the position it displays to you to get around lag, but the server could calculate the true position, so the client isn't telling the server where you are, it is telling the server how you move.



Yeah, I agree. I have said a couple times I don't think they should do it. I'm just saying they could make EVE into that kind of a game if they wanted to.

Addressed above. Agree you wouldn't offload anything you didn't want hacked to the client, but that's only some stuff.



How do you mean? Economically? That may be true, I don't know. Technically, of course they can add more servers to a cluster.



No offense, but you're just talking out of your ass on this one. You have no idea how they track and store location data. Like, what type of variable is it stored in? Is part of a complicated object or an array or a native variable type? How do they search it? How are they updating it? Etc. None of that is stuff you would even notice if they decided to change to facilitate using it in a different way, so I don't see how you could possibly assume that they would need to re-write the whole game...



"Already being done" isn't really an answer that makes sense in this context. Optimizing a database isn't like just a knob you turn from "poorly optimized" to "well optimized". You tweak it to perform specific tasks better at the expense of the performance of other tasks or disk space or memory usage or whatever. As you add in new demands on the database new optimizations become relevant that wouldn't have been before, etc. What I am saying is that presently they don't do WASD, so the database wouldn't be optimized for that. To just hazard a guess as to whether it could be optimized in a way to make those transactions trivial is fruitless. You'd need to be intimately familiar with many thousands of lines of CCP's code and stored procedures and indexes and blah blah blah, none of which you or I are...



That's silly to think that just adding WASD would somehow increase the load on the servers or the database 100 times over... Your client is already talking to the server every second. Every second the server is already doing some kind of process for you. It's just adding on a little bit of data being sent each time that you move around and doing a little bit more calculation on their side. Neither of us could actually know with any degree of accuracy, but I would guess more like a 10% increase in load.

Maybe we're just talking about different things. If you're saying "given their current architecture and budget this isn't something they can do", that may well be true. That's what all the dev blogs are about- stuff like "hey we got a new proxy this weekend so blah blah blah". That isn't relevant to what it is possible for them to do, that's what they are doing.

Someone wrote an app that would let you pilot your internet spaceships with a joystick, it's up on the old forums somewhere...don't know what happened to the project though. It basically read the joystick movements and performed the clicks in space for you. Was very interesting to see it working.