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A Poor-Man's Line-of-Site Mechanism
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Doctor Invictus
Station Crew
#1 - 2012-08-20 16:24:42 UTC
A Poor Man’s Line-of-Site Mechanism

TL;DR: Use distance-from-target and distance-from-shooter in tandem as a poor man’s analogue for actual line-of-site targeting. A more advanced mechanism could make inanimate objects into cover for ships trying to avoid taking fire without needing to worry about calculating exact positions.

Long-Form: Line-of-site (LOS) for weapons fire is a semi-regular requested feature on the forums. While LoS would definitely increase EVE’s realism, it has been argued convincingly that true LOS is computationally impossible for the foreseeable future. In true LOS, the relative positions of every object in range of the firing ship must be accounted for, leading to impossibly high numbers of computations for every single weapon cycle – just to determine whether a hit has taken place.

Using this poor man’s version of LOS, two simple variables are used to calculate whether ships (or objects) in the vicinity of weapons fire are at risk of receiving secondary damage from missed shots/being in the way. distance-from-target is exactly what it sounds like. The closer a ship is to a ship that is targeted and receiving weapons fire, the greater the likelihood that it will receive secondary damage. distance-from-shooter is the same concept as applied to the shooter; the closer you are to an active shooter, the greater the chance that they will accidentally hit you. The overlapping effect of these two variables is that for two ships shooting at each other (or especially a large number of ships shooting at each other), two areas will be at high risk of receiving secondary fire; immediately next to the firing ships/ships receiving fire and in the space between them. This effect is accomplished using only distance data already present in the game, without necessarily calculating specific relative positions between ships. Different weapons could generate smaller or larger miss profiles, and ship size could be used as an additional variable in calculating chance of receiving/extent of secondary damage. Maybe someone more familiar with EVE’s operation can speak as to whether this is viable given the ability of the current game.

A more advanced version would involve blocking fire from inanimate objects in the environment. The most obvious example would be asteroids in belts. Asteroids (and other objects) could block weapons fire if the targeted ship is nearby. This would, as above, simply require the distance between the targeted ship and the blocking object (e.g., asteroid, station, whatever). The closer the object is to the ship, the greater the chance that it will block fire (arguably the size of the object should be factored in as well), with additive effects for having a large number of blocking objects nearby the targeted ship.

And there you have it; line-of-sight weapons targeting method for the computationally poor. Thoughts?

'Farms and Fields' Sovereignty Revamp: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=22452&find=unread

A Computationally Cheap Line-of-Sight Mechanism: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1822688#post1822688
Skippermonkey
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#2 - 2012-08-20 16:28:29 UTC
stealth anti blob thread

COME AT ME BRO

I'LL JUST BE DOCKED IN THIS STATION
Sigras
Conglomo
#3 - 2012-08-20 21:42:55 UTC
I have a few problems with this idea.

#1 High sec - this would make anything except missiles and drones completely useless in high sec as the chance to get concorded has just been increased exponentially even in missions, I could warp in as a griefer and just fly around near your target hoping to get hit

#2 While this solution is innovative, it doesnt really fix anything that LOS would do for the game:
It would break up blobs but not in any way that makes sense. The blob should be able to get in a formation and mitigate the LOS issue.
It would reduce the damage on primary but not in any predictable way, or any way that anyone could take advantage of IE you couldnt use a tankier ship to "get in the way" and take damage for the more vulnerable ships unless you made the chance to miss ridiculous

#3 Unnecessary Randomness in a Competitive Environment is bad - Im going to say that this is basically universal. Its why competitive servers in TF2 turn off random crits, and why units in StarCraft do static amounts of damage instead of a range of damage.
This is not to say that all randomness is bad because poker would be a really boring game if there was no random element to the cards, but adding additional randomness to the base mechanics necessary to make the game work is a bad thing.
Doctor Invictus
Station Crew
#4 - 2012-08-21 05:23:45 UTC
Sigras wrote:
I have a few problems with this idea.


Thanks for the feedback! I'll go over your points one at a time.

Sigras wrote:
#1 High sec - this would make anything except missiles and drones completely useless in high sec as the chance to get concorded has just been increased exponentially even in missions, I could warp in as a griefer and just fly around near your target hoping to get hit


I think this could be solved with pretty simple measures:

1) Put a 'safety' on weapons in hi-sec when there's a risk of causing secondary damage to bystanders (in such a way as to provoke CONCORD). Have a pop-up warning appear to alert the pilot to the risk they are about to take. If someone really wants to take the risk, they still can.

2) Have CONCORD responses to secondary fire be disabled in deadspace/mission space. Use whatever narrative technique you want ("for the greater good and success of the mission!"), but this preempts griefing using this tactic.

3) Have CONCORD responses to secondary fire have a greater threshold. Accidentally denting a nearby bystander's shield might not alert concord, but "accidentally" nailing them to structure certainly would.

1+2 are the main ones, although I think 3 might be helpful if implemented reasonably.

Sigras wrote:
#2 While this solution is innovative, it doesnt really fix anything that LOS would do for the game:
It would break up blobs but not in any way that makes sense. The blob should be able to get in a formation and mitigate the LOS issue.
It would reduce the damage on primary but not in any predictable way, or any way that anyone could take advantage of IE you couldnt use a tankier ship to "get in the way" and take damage for the more vulnerable ships unless you made the chance to miss ridiculous


On the offensive side, I think faux LOS maintains the benefits of true LOS in terms of blob-busting. Sitting right next to a ship firing it's weapons runs the risk of blocking shots/taking damage, and so blobs would have to coordinate to avoid this. The larger the sphere of risk damage, the more the blog has to space itself. Will this end blobs? Probably not. But then, I don't think true LOS would do so either, necessarily.

On the defensive side, the blocking mechanism I mentioned for inanimate objects could be pretty easily applied to ships as well. Ships within range of a targeted ship would have some probability of taking the hit for the ship. The larger the "blocker" and the closer it is to the targeted ship, the more likely it is to block the shot. An in-game example might be that destroying a frigate in close orbit around a Titan will lead one to shoot the Titan many, many times. The natural balance to this latter effect might be to have smaller ships and drones have extremely small miss risk distances (e.g., a frigate could swoop in a somewhat accurately target the orbiting frigate, whereas a battleship could not do so at range without hitting the Titan).

Sigras wrote:
#3 Unnecessary Randomness in a Competitive Environment is bad - Im going to say that this is basically universal. Its why competitive servers in TF2 turn off random crits, and why units in StarCraft do static amounts of damage instead of a range of damage.
This is not to say that all randomness is bad because poker would be a really boring game if there was no random element to the cards, but adding additional randomness to the base mechanics necessary to make the game work is a bad thing.


I agree that arbitrary randomness is unacceptable in a competitive game - no one wants to lose some major fleet battle by a roll of the dice. On the other hand, I don't think the probabilities involved in this mechanic qualify as arbitrary, or even necessarily random. The probabilities, while present, are dependent on player actions (e.g., hiding behind a 'blocker' ship makes you safer, hanging out between two battling fleets is suicidal even if they're not interested in you, etc, etc). Once the probabilities are known by players, the whole thing becomes a bit more like a game of Poker than a pure game of chance - the probabilities just become one more thing to factor into PvP strategies.

Thanks again for your feedback, Sigras!

'Farms and Fields' Sovereignty Revamp: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=22452&find=unread

A Computationally Cheap Line-of-Sight Mechanism: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1822688#post1822688
Doctor Invictus
Station Crew
#5 - 2012-08-23 19:31:51 UTC  |  Edited by: Doctor Invictus
I thought I might update with a list of LOS in-game features/abilities captured by this mechanism - so more casual readers can see where it matches and where it falls short. Below that are some additional notes and thoughts.


So the main distinction between the two mechanics is that t True LOS is "certain" about what will happen for a given instance of weapons fire, and Faux LOS uses weighted probabilities to closely (but not exactly) replicate that certainty, achieving similar results at (presumably) greatly reduced computational costs. In-game the dissimilarity between the two approaches would be most apparent for ships/objects blocking fire for a nearby targeted ships; with True LOS only knowledge of whether a ship/object is between the shooter and the target is necessary for determining whether a shot will be blocked, whereas with Faux LOS it's possible, though not nearly as likely, to block shots while behind a targeted ship (relative to the shooter).

I've plotted these differences below. The darker the red of the area, the greater the probability of blocking a shot (this probability being increased by the soze of the ship/object doing the blocking)...

Diagram


In addition to all that, I thought I would add on a bit about smaller ships and drones. Since the size and spacing of ships determines whether they will block incoming shots, smaller targets orbiting very large ships/objects may be especially difficult to hit. An easy fix for this is to have the falloff rates for the distance variables vary across different ship sizes (the larger the ship/weapon, the larger the error distance). So frigates at close range would be able to take out other small ships/drones without constantly hitting the larger ship/object instead.

Thanks for reading!

'Farms and Fields' Sovereignty Revamp: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=22452&find=unread

A Computationally Cheap Line-of-Sight Mechanism: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1822688#post1822688
Skippermonkey
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#6 - 2012-08-24 10:21:03 UTC
So what you are proposing is some sort of in built d-scan that fires off every second for every ship in space....

good luck with that

COME AT ME BRO

I'LL JUST BE DOCKED IN THIS STATION
Onslaughtor
Phoenix Naval Operations
Phoenix Naval Systems
#7 - 2012-08-24 10:51:16 UTC
It actually sound fairly reasonable. It would add a lot in terms of protection for smaller craft, and would force blobs to be more restricted in their formations and fleet composition. It would be a mess in high sec, and in low, but as a way to counter blobs it looks very nice. If anything CCP should take a deeper look at the idea.