EVE New Citizens Q&A

But I do understand some basic principles of space.

So here are my questions/complaints:


1. Things tend to stay in motion until acted on by an external force. If I'm not being webed, why can't I hit my AB, hit x velocity, and then turn off my AB and remain at x velocity, thus saving cap? What the hell is slowing me down? Is there friction in new eden space.....?

2. Same general idea of question 1. If I hit a wreck with a tractor beam and bring it towards me, shouldn't I be able to tractor it for just a sec, then turn it off, and have that object continue to fly towards my ship until it bounces off my hull? Assuming I don't move and it continues to fly towards my location. Is there friction in new eden space.....?

3. I could write 3 paragraphs about deceleration and how that works, but whatever.

As a hopeless sci fi nerd, these things bug me.

Why does "space" seem to have friction? What possible forces are acting on myself and these various objects?

I thought we were in space?

Why does EVE have "friction in space"?

Plausible reasons:
- it makes gameplay easier for your average layman
- it scales better with large groups of objects/players
- at the time EVE was created it was probably a very good idea (or even "state of the art")... now with so much coding on top of this legacy physics engine (a.k.a. "Destiny") it just isn't very feasible to alter it in such a fundamental way without breaking more stuff in the process and spending months cleaning it up (the DEVs have admitted to not enjoying tinkering with "Destiny").

lolRP reasons:
- New Eden is a relatively dense star cluster and might be full of gravity wells, radiation, or somesuch that adversely affects the natural laws of physics.
- The warp cores in all ships produces a "drag effect" on both the ships and all surrounding objects in space.

Lorewise, it's because ships featuring warp drives "drag" against spacetime... or something. This supposedly also explains why drones are stupid fast or something.

Mechanicwise, it's because that's the way they wrote it first, for whatever reason.

Try Jumpgate classic if it's still around. Just getting through a gate or docking without crashing is a challenge with those physics.

hows this for mind blown

nothing is in orbit, every orbital in each system room , is perfectly stationary

it isnt a space game other than the painting on the walls of the rooms.

its a game of inventory management / chess with space type weapons..

yeah and firing artillery in space produces no recoil, just ask the Winmatar

A quick not, if you want to see some actual real space physics in eve. Tractor a wreck toward your noctis while heading away from it at mwd speed. Once you are up to speed and the wreck has caught up and is bouncing around behind you, salvage it. Soon as your salvage is complete shut off the mwd and watch the empty wreck-shell overtake you and continue off into space with no drag at all.. untill it disapears a moment later. Bit slack i know but it's the closest thing to real space physics i'v seen so far :D

One can also further the mind boggling with sound. *If* Eve was a space simulator, you wouldn't hear the sound of explosions, of other ship's turrets, engines, missiles, etc. because sound doesn't travel in vacuum.
Thankfully it's just a game and we can tick the "quieter turrets sound" checkbox...

RL physics have nothing what so ever to do with most game physics.

Just get used to it or you will waste a lot of your time thinking about something that isn't going to change.


An example from another game - playing Planetside you've got these guys in powered armor called Maxes. Then you've got these guys that can turn invisible who have no armor at all. Now - say the Max is coming down the stairs and the Infiltrator is running up the stairs. They collide. The Max will bounce off the Infiltrator - because the Infiltrator is going Faster. In RL - F=MA. In PS F=V.

Even most of your flight simulators cheat - or have a cheat/easy mode.


Think about it. A trained pilot in RL has to have hundreds of hours of flight time to be qualified to fly a military aircraft - IF - they'll even be accepted for the training - which most human beings will not.

Even to get a Civilian Pilots License takes many hours of flight time with an instructor before they'll even let you solo.

You simply aren't going to get enough members of the general public to do touch and goes for hour after hour so they can pretend they are flying an aircraft, to make a profitable MMO if those were the requirements.

Now - as to EVE in particular - you will notice that there are no joy stick controls. I mean ... you kind of click in the general direction of the way you want to go to steer your space craft ... How lame is that? *shrug* But that is not an over sight by the developers - it was a conscious decision in their game design.

EVE is a good game - but that's all it is - a game - and - as games go - it is NOT even a simulator.



Did I mention about how you can shoot right through other ships and asteroids to hit your target?


*shrug*

.

One way to make this friction feel to go away is to stop the engine animation upon reaching the set speed. The engines would fire up again with every vector change.

To add even more realism maneuvering and reverse thrusters might be added to the ship models to fire up with slowing down or for vector change. This might ofcourse be quite hard on some ships, although doable I believe.

Some thinking about AB and MWD would be necessary as for if the cap is drained on the set speed or not and so on, but that isn't really the point here...

I'm not talking about change in the physics model. All we need is a small change in graphical representation for an workable compromise.