Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Thanks for clearing that up.
Yeah, I hope the Devs can indeed figure out how to use those resources. Though I fear the single threaded nature of the current EVE star system simulation still prevents this.


Nope, nope and nope. One word: Drake.

We already are having all these problems solved with missiles. They are actual simulated entities on the server that can be destroyed(disco ships) and thus the server always knows what´s going on around one.

Sorry, don´t see where that´s helping.
But that´s why I´m proposing the current missile calculation and simulation as the basis for LOS. Turn the gun "projectiles" into invisible missiles moving at max speed that the server can still process.

If something intercepts it on the way to the target, they basically do the standard gun damage as determined by the ship(mods, ammo type) and when they finally reach the target ship´s "simulation bubble" the usual damage calculation is applied.

N calculations for each ship that could be hit, times N ships that are shooting making the total calculations increases as N squared. Things that grow as N squared quickly bring the client to its knees. If smartbomb walls of fire were more popular vs missile blobs, we would have a big issue as that is an N squared case. (Every time a smart bomb goes off in a grid, its got to be tested against every ship and missile in flight.)

You cannot trust any calculation done by the client as people hack the client. The only way to use client calculations would be to have the server replicate a small sample to catch the cheaters.

Also CONCORD could just ignore accidental shooting of cloaked ships basically saying if you cloak, you are on your own. And as I said before, CCP could add a user controlled interlock that would make your gun skip a cycle if its shot would hit an unintended target.

I would have thought N ships each have at most a handful of ships targeted (what's the max, 6? 8?). Then from each ship, there are at most 8 paths to be calculated, i.e. 8N in worst case - and that is only if they were firing each launcher/turret at a different target, which is pretty unusual. The most common situation would be that each ship chooses a target and fires all of its weapons at it, and that calculation only has to be performed once every rate-of-fire (not very often on the timescale of a CPU clock).


Yeah, that's probably right. You could have each client do calculations for all the required paths and then do a quick sanity check at the server, which would then have to resolve any discrepancies itself. But it may be more trouble than it's worth.

But anyhow, I don't think the LOS calculations are terribly time-consuming. I don't know what the state of TQ is - hopefully better than the 3-year old description on Evelopedia - but maybe they could pony up for some GPUs to add to the nodes next time they are thinking about hardware.

A decent solution to the aggro mechanic issue would be capitalising on projectile weapons' instant-hit behaviour explanation (they utilise mini-warp tunnels) by saying that the ammunition relies on warp capability boosting equipment located in high and low security space, which is understandably absent from null and wormhole space. There the ammo's warp field will be feeble and unstable, causing the ammo to phase in and out of the real-space phsyical dimension (or whatever the explanation is for our ships being able to pass through planets). This explains it's ability to travel "instantaneously" while lacking the ability to pass through objects.

Or simply divide ammunition types into physically real-during-warp and "intangible"-during-warp types, with the former being instantly confiscated by concord in high security space (but what about lowsec?). In that case, why would you ever use the former in null/WH? Perhaps make it cost an absolute fraction of the price, or boost its stats a handful of times over to their "intangible" counterparts.

The problem is you arent just looking at the ships targeted by the ship with the weapons, you have to look at every object on grid because something you dont have targeted could still be in the way. so with grouped guns, since this is binary, you could get away with doing that calculation once, but if you really want to draw a ray between your ship and the other ship and then run the calculations to see if any of the ship models on grid intersect with that ray, that is thousands of calculations per attempt with a battle as small as 20v20

I think the easiest way to fix this issue is to just have your computer not fire the guns if you dont have LOS, guns hit instantly anyway so there is no difference.

One thing is that if this was added...

Formations would be beneficial without a silly arbitrary stat bonus.

Drake has exactly zero relevance here. Missiles too.

I don't think that accidentally shooting should be Concorded - its accident.
Or, make that shooting no targeted parties make 0 dmg.
It helps to break blobs and it make sense that you cant shoot someone through other things in the space.

If other games can have LOS calculations, I don't see why EVE could not.

And about "server stress".
You remember how everybody talked that there can not be missile launchers because "it would stress servers too much"???
There is solution for every problem.
And please don't pretend to know everything and say "it can't be done" on every suggestion.

Okay, I see that the calculations can scale at N^2 if they're brute forced.

I guess the main point is to compare N targeting vectors with M displacement vectors to determine whether they are approximately colinear and shorter distance. I just tried this out with a small program on my laptop, and for N=M=2000 random vectors (4M comparisons), the calculation took 0.1 seconds.

The loop is trivially parallelizable with a couple of openmp directives, so on the 4-core Sol blades of TQ, these computations would take a factor 4 less. And in practice, the number of targeting vectors to use in computations would actually be decreased by a factor of eve-clock-tick/average-rate-of-fire. So you can imagine this computation adding a fraction of a second per clock tick of an already time-dilated battle.

A more advanced calculation would project the signature radius of the potential occluder onto a plane transverse to its displacement vector. It's fairly simple linear algebra to map the targeting vector onto the plane and determine whether it falls into the sig radius, probably a few extra floating point operations over what I've done.

The Eve model for calculating hits - involving sig radius, transversal and turret speed - is already fairly sketchy as a model of real physical turrets. But this allows them to apply some quick-and-dirty approximations (e.g. using sig radius rather than a detailed model of the shape of the ship) which are still somewhat consistent within the "physics" of Eve.

For more simplifications, you could just exclude small objects from the computation - for instance, invent a rule that frigates and smaller (drones, missiles) never get involved in these type of occluding events.

A more advanced version of that would be to exclude ships beyond a certain distance, which might depend on their signature radius. For instance a battlecruiser at 50km subtends a very small solid angle and is highly unlikely to occlude a shot. So a good approximation would be to ignore it.

And for close range brawlers, there are very few additional occluders with a distance less than its target, so you automatically cut out the bulk of the calculations for those ships.

Missiles are more complicated, but some hacks might be sufficiently good for play. You could do the calculation once at launch - this would correspond to something like the missile locking on to the wrong target. Or just update the calculation 2 or 3 times along the flight of the missile. That's probably good enough for hollywood.

More radically, you could invent a lore explanation which removes missiles from this type of calculation. They are guided, so maybe their guidance systems are good enough to avoid intervening targets. This would correspond to a big buff for missiles over turrets, so would have to be balanced out in other ways. But it could be a neat way of adding further differentiation between the weapon systems.

Finally, I'd say that even if you exclude ships from occluding calculations and just consider large collidable objects, structures and asteriods, that would already be a huge improvement to the tactical game.