Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Most of this stuff can be explained away with some creative technobullshite. Let's blame everything on the warp propulsion physics.

Suppose the the normal subluminal movement of your ship involves your warp drive modifying its effective mass. If you are moving at speed X due to having Y amount of kinetic energy and you turn on a device that discombobulates the Higgs field in such a way as to make you mass "seem" less, then you will be moving through space at a higher speed without having gained any real kinetic energy. This may be how such tiny ion thrusters are able to make your huge heavy ship accelerate at such fantastic rates. It also explains how ships are able to smash into each other at several kilometers per second without breaking anything: the real KE is negligible.

But apparently this technology has it limits. The faster you move relative to large nearby masses (planets, moons, asteroid fields, even the stellar nursery we seem to inhabit) the more difficult it becomes for your ship to decouple its mass from its momentum. As a result you are stuck in their reference frame. [*shrug* Sounds good enough]

And the max-speed of your ship is the speed at which the tiny push from you ion thrusters is balance out by drag. This drag may come from the ultra-ratified gases, dust, and plasmas in space. No space is truly empty. Or a better explanation is that there is an "etheric drag" from your ship's warp drive that exists whenever it's spooled up (even if not at full power). This happens due to gravitational interactions with the nearby celestial objects and a coupling of KE to and from them.

Combine this slow bleed of KE with the difficulty or breaking out of the stationary reference frame (increased difficulty cheating at higher relative speeds) and you have a situation that requires continuous thrust and has speed limit that you reach fairly quickly.

Anchoring can be the same technology, but in reverse. The effective mass is made so great that significant amounts of KE imparted to an object result in motion too small to be perceived. And any such KE is rapidly (and intentionally) coupled to the surrounding celestial bodies.

The airplane-like turning is a bit trickier to explain. Let's imagine that these effects are produced by coils within the ship (with a specific orientation to the hull and presumed direction of motion) that create a toroidal vortex (think smoke ring) of gravimetric energy around the ship. This swirling energy can be perturbed by asymmetric pulses from the drive coils to make it gradually shift its orientation, and with it the ship's orientation. And lets suppose that such movements slightly unbalance the gavimetric vortex, cause field-lines to breakout, and these reach out to push/pull on the surroundings in such a way that your ship's KE is redirected in a new direction (thus maintaining conservation of momentum). I'm sure the artsy people could produce some fantastic imagery of this.

The only thing that would need to be changed is to call MWDs "Microwarp Enhancers" since the micro-warp effect is always in use whenever you're flying any ship. And from here it's fairly straight forward to rewrite the ship movement code with modified Newtonian equations describing force, mass, acceleration, "mass modification coefficients", and "grav-interaction drag coefficients". Ta-da! Basically the same game-play (I foresee subtle differences) accomplished using quasi-realistic physics.

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Wow, When such techno BS flows this easily it's a sign you've watch waaayyyy too much Star Trek. Maybe CCP's lore folk could whack their seal of approval on this, or use some of these ideas when writing the official cannon.

Guys, you're all missing the point of this post. They are just ideas. We can all speculate if it is possible/better, whatever. The idea was to post my concerns in a way that they could maybe be visible to developers. If they like it, they'll implement the ideas, if they don't like them, then they wont.

And for the ones that reject all an every idea that doesn't conform with you views of the game: Who hurt you? Are you ok? Do you need a hug? I like eve because its a really immersive sandbox, so immersive in fact, that some people really take it too serious. Guys, chill. It's just a game and I'm just giving my opinion. Don't be dismissive. Just dream of the possibilities :)

Finally, I don't know if you're up to date with eve development, but they have quite a large amount of resources invested in physical based rendering, new ship models, new structures, and basically a lot of eye candy. So I can see them investing resources in more realistic flight animations and movement. (The tecnomumble was all and good 10 years ago. Now, not so much. I think they can implement some of these changes if they want :D )

I share that sentiment. Too much eye candy, not enough mechanic. But I'm realistic about how much can be changed without it breaking EVERYTHING else. You can't just add hybrid turrets and stasis webbers to KSP and expect to get a playable game. Every single aspect of EVE's combat system is based in limited velocities and acceleration. Space needs to remain gooey. The point of my techno-BS post was to find a middle ground where everything "works" and in a way that's somehow rationalizable. Indeed, there are aspects of the physics could be upgraded without it wrecking the gameplay. Station sizes, tighter collision meshes, ship orientation and rotational inertia, F=ma, the inelastic collision math, etc.

EDIT: And cargo mass affecting acceleration. It has always bothered me that empty freighters cannot accelerate to warp faster than fully loaded ones.

LoL I tear apart everything you say with logic and facts...

so you duck out with the excuse that I "can't be reasoned with" Okay?

What reason are you trying to enlighten me with? I'm not denying the things you're saying... yes building a new game from scratch would be difficult and expensive and time consuming...

And I point out all the brand-new, from scratch games that CCP is trying to build over the years, instead of updating their space-ship engine... and you, what? Have nothing to say to that because it's true.

I give you reasons why I wish EVE would be updated, and you just cry "NO!" "Impossible!" "WHY would you even want it???" "Nobody else wants it!"

Yea well... Star Citizen's hundred million dollars in crowd funding stands to disagree with you.

I have a feeling that the changes to deployment method and gradual changes in game mechanics are a means to pull out chunks of functionality and improve them. Once the remaining core code gets small enough they can replace it entirely.

I deal with legacy coding regularly, and it is a PITA.
Newer coding is often modular parts working together, and is much easier to patch and modify the bits you need to change.

I hope this is the way CCP is going. Change is good.

My dream update would be real orbits and rotations in solar systems. Every day that planet, moon and station would have moved slightly (in their orbits/periods), Asteroid belts would physically be in motion all the time (you would have to track them like a ship to mine them). That 'old' suggestion of adding comets would be a nice perk too.

All I want is for jita 4-4 to take up the entire moon.

1AU/s=500c, rounded. It takes sunlight about 8m 19s to reach earth.

This has been asked for, repeatedly, for the past decade or more. CCP isn't interested. They LIKE IT that small ships can intentionally bounce big ones in complete defiance of all known laws of physics without taking any damage or even raising a criminal behavior flag. They LIKE IT that npc corp characters can use this mechanism to aid ganking in high sec by preventing that valuable target from warping.

It would be fairly easy, imho, to create a lockout zone within 5km of stations and gates in which the docking/undocking mechanism takes over and exempts collisions between ships under its control but leaves alone collisions between a ship not under its control and all others. [same applies to other objects at which a ship can be docked or undocked, perhaps with lesser radius of action]

obviously, the proper physics is: [imho]

a. collisions create damage proportional to the relative momentum of the ships involved [mass times (1 * velocity/c)]

b. a collision that does NOT go beyond shield damage to a ship does NOT change its course

c. a collision that does go beyond shield damage results in criminal flag and CONCORD intervention if in high sec

d. if a collision results in sufficient damage to alpha the ship, it is instantly destroyed and killmail results as usual


This wouldn't change null sec much at all except that your Daredevil couldn't successfully bump a carrier -- it would self-destruct.


BUT -- CCP continues to listen to the ganker community and support this bogus physics. We have to assume that, in CCP's opinion, gankers pay in enough real life cash each month that they NEED this revenue (or they buy PLEX from others who do pay in RL cash).


Just because I think that's complete BS doesn't mean that Iceland is going to change anything.


--older than dirt. older than EVE, too.

I can understand why they haven't done this until now. But now we can rebuild EVE. We have the technology. We can make EVE better than it was. Better, stronger, faster.