Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Every server tick, the game draws an imaginary line between you and each of your locked (or locking) targets.

If that line passes sufficiently close to any other ship in the middle somewhere, you lose your lock, or if you are currently in the process of getting a lock, it cancels.



The proximity you can get within somebody's line of sight without breaking their lock would be inversely proportional to your signature radius. I.e., a frigate could be right next to the line but not interfere, whereas a battleship with istabs and target painting on it will disrupt lines of sight for a wide distance around it. Mathematically, the computers would only have to look up to some maximum distance from the line, to cut down on lag. Because after some certain point, nothing even CAN have a big enough radius to get in the way, so you can stop looking.

This is very simple, yet stops 100 people from targeting a single guy easily, because 90 of those people probably have friends of theirs or other non-desired enemies in between them and the target, so they can't get a lock.

This is also extremely realistic. If a big reflective shiny thing is smack dab in between you and your target, then things like RADAR will not work anymore, because it will block all the light from reaching your target, and thus also block any of that light from reflecting back to your sensors.


You could still have a bunch of people target one enemy, but to do so, you would need rigorous, organized formations to ensure that none of you got in the way of one another. So you have to choose: is it worth it to try and drill for and maintain appropriate lanes of fire with extreme discipline? Or will you give up on concentrated fire, and let people fly around messily, with the consequence that they can only engage in small gangs?

This also strongly encourages mixed fleets of different ship types. For example, your high damage dealers might be in smaller ships that don't get in the way of each other, while your tanks are in large ships that you might even intentionally paint yourself, or whatever, to make them act as targeting shields, blocking incoming fire and leaving only a hole open in the direction your damage dealers wish to fire at at the moment.

Also: since there is no direct way to know who your enemy is painting of their own ships, you can't just call out as primary whatever the ship with the biggest radius is. You actually have to use some strategic guessing to try and figure out what they're up to, if you want to break the shield. Making it that much more of a battle of minds, as it should be.

Do note that I am NOT suggesting the game takes into account the 3d models of ships for line of sight, if that's what you thought. No no no no. that would be exceedingly dumb.

The game would treat every ship as a single point, and it counts as being "in your line of sight" if the distance of its centerpoint from the line is less than or equal to that ship's signature radius. Thus, it is literally no more complicated than a linear regression each time, which should be orders of magnitude faster than even the calculaitons required for a single missile to be pathed out...

Also, it would only look outward some maximum distance from the line. Like, 5km or so, which covers everything except supercapitals (they dont shield as much as you would expect them too, too bad.). Thus, a battle with 200 ships on each side would only be marginally more than twice as many calculations as a battle with 100 on each side. NOT an exponential increase.


No, drones have quite small radii. Small ones are 25m - that means it would only get in the way if it were 25m or less away from the line between you two at the moment of a server tick. If it was orbiting you at 500m, that would be a rare event.

Now, you COULD send your drones directly in the direction of somebody, and thus cause them to reliably get in the way. But:

1) that only works for that one guy. Anybody else off at an angle also targeting you would be unaffected, making it not an effective defense against a gang. and

2) You would also disrupt your OWN targeting to that guy as well. Making it not so effective for dueling, either. and

3) None of the above would work in the first place, unless that guy were either standing still or really far away. Because if he is moving at all, the drones will not be directly between you: they will be moving in an arc, playing catch up to meet his trajectory. Making them no longer effective blockers.


In other words: drones are a ****** way to take advantage of this. An industrial ship with multiple warp stabilizers, tank, and friendly ships painting it, however, might be quite effective.

Did you read the thread? Nothing I wrote had anything to do with reducing the number of people on grid.

Not a bad idea but it would still be adding calculations to the server side of the game. Might be that 200vs200 doesn't generate much more calculations than 100vs100, well, it would but lets start small, 5vs5.

In a 5vs5 battle you probably would have all 10 targeting all 5 opponents, considering we can all have more than one locked target. So instead of it being one line from you to your target, and one line from your target to it's target, and so on, you would have 5 lines needed to be checked every tick, your fleet mates would also have 5 lines each to be checked, and the opposition would also have 5 lines each to be checked. That makes 50 lines checked for signature breaks every tick, in a 5vs5 battle. All those lines would probably have one to three ships within 5km of it, mixed of friendlies and foes, so generating 1 to 3 computations per line after the initial checking and drawing of it. That would make, in average, 3 (line +2ship) computations per line, or around 150 computations.
Even if most of those lines are duplicates it would basically have to check them all anyway as cross-referencing every line to look for duplicates would add even more computations. (basically a 50 line cross-reference where you can rule out 4 that originate from the same point for every line would be 45 * (45/2) - (45/2), or 990 checks to check every line against every other line)

10vs10, as compared to going from 100 to 200, or doubling the amount of participants, would also have the participants tracking and targeting multiple enemies. In all likely-hood it would at least double the amount of lines from 50 to 100, being 5 targets tracked by each ship, to be checked but the computations would be worse than doubling. With 5vs5 you could account for 1 to 3 ships in the vicinity of each line. With more people in the fray this would increase, making each line need to be checked for more ships. Let's just add one more ship per line and we'll still get 4 (line+3ships) calculations done per line, so more like 400 computations. So doubling participants there would make computations go from 150 to 400, or +166%, not 100%.

I seriously hope you can imagine the difference when going from 100vs100 to 200vs200, and that you can imagine the scale of the calculations needed for a 100vs100 battle in the first place as you have at least 1000 lines, and in all likely-hood each line has10-25 ships within 5 km of it.

Apart from that there's one problem I have with the set-up you described: It does not take into account the targets signature radius or your own electronic radius. You mention in response about a drone having to be within 25m of a line to "break" it. That would most likely not be true in any circumstance.

To target something you don't have to be able to see the centre point of your target from your centre point. That would completely destroy the effect of a signature radius in the first place as the size of your targets signature matters not if you still have to target the centre point.
Not only that but hopefully each ship has a targeting array that is spread throughout the ship and not centralized in the centre point of it.
So I'd consider a 500m wide ship to have at least a 400m wide targeting array, or on points along the circumference of those 400m, and a signature of more than 500m. Not sure about the exact numbers but for ease of calculating and not overdoing anything I'll say 600m wide signature.
That would mean that from any point of the 400m targeting array to any point of the targeted ships 600m signature would be admissible to make a lock on the target. The "line" would then have to be a cone instead and anything with a smaller signature than 400m would not be able to occlude the target from your targeting array at all. Meaning forget about drones being able to do it.
Each ship that is in the vicinity of the cone also needs to not only have a big enough signature to be able to block the cone completely but also be in a position to actually block the cone completely.
This also leads up to what to do with a 500m signature ship coming across the line. If it blocks the targeting arrays would depend on where along the cone it sits, at that exact moment the tick is active. If it is closer to you than to your target it may block the targeting arrays. If it is closer to your target than you it will not be able to block out the targeting cone completely at all. This then adds even more computing to the targeting system as not only does it need to check how close to any cone/line a ship is, it also needs to check where along the cone/line it is, and if it has a sufficient signature blob to block out the targeting window, and if it is situated in a spot where it's signature actually does block out the cone/line.

...tbc...

The Tesselation tech they are talking about can probably make LOS happen without any fancy tech or drawing of lines or anything like that.
At which point, Blue on Blue fire might be able to happen. Or your guns might just auto hold fire, and fire again when clear, checking once every second or something.

Hey, this would be a missile buff, since missiles could guide around ships in the way to their target...... Suddenly there is a good use for missiles in PvP, and Drones since they also go around things in the way.

And people would want to use slightly more formation... i.e. Wing 1 go high, wing 2 go low, wings 3 & 4 hold the middle. Wing 5, warp out and warp back in behind them.

Of course, without the Tesselation tech they want to use, probably not going to work at all.

double post

Calculations are NOT that intense, guys...

It's LESS intensive than a linear regression algorithm, which my 4 year old laptop can do thousands of per second...


Drones dont target 5 things at once, so you'd have about 500pilotLocks + 500pilotLocks + 500droneLocks + 500droneLocks = 2000 locks at worst.

Again, my 4 year old laptop could easily handle that with well written compiled code, no problem at all. It would have quite a lot of processing power to spare, actually. I routinely run simulations on it for work that calculate and integrate 30,000+ Gaussian CURVE distributions per second.

Hopefully, CCP's server node mainframes are just a tad stronger than my crappy old laptop...

Seriously, guys, computers are fast. And if they aren't fast enough, the people at CCP have plenty of professional coders who can do a better job at making a more efficient algorithm than the one I came up with. Let's not get bogged down in worrying about server resources. leave that to the professionals.

Can we discuss more about actual gameplay implications, please?


Well that's all nice to hear about, but considering that CCP almost certainly ALREADY use the centerpoint of a ship for targeting purposes, this is all kinda a moot point.

And even if they don't, getting rid of blob tactics is so much more important to the game than it is to take into consideration sensors on the front and back of a ship, that it would be ridiculous to scrap an otherwise good idea for something as trivial as that.

For example, you know how when we turn our engines off, our ships come to a stop (violates Newton's second law of motion)? Or how we bounce off of things that we are 5 km away from because their hitboxes are bigger than they are? Or how we bounce off of things in the first place? These are all sacrifices of trivial realism details, in exchange for significant gameplay improvements or server resource savings. Same thing here.


They lose the lock. Again, don't fly in a huge disorganized blob, and such things will not happen very often. That's the whole point of the thread. Successful logistics, just like successful offense, will require effective organization OR breaking up the blob and switching to squad tactics so that there isn't stuff flying randomly near you in the first place.


Not so much. This will be almost completely irrelevant in small ship gang combat. A basic frigate has about a 30-50m signature radius. If you imagine that a typical frigate orbits its target at roughly 5km on average, then that means its orbit is 15,700m in circumference. Which means that in order to break a lock between that ship and another one, its orbit would have to get within ONE degree of the LOS. And most orbits wouldn't even be lined up in the right direction at all.

AND it only counts if the ship is within that distance AT the server tick. if youre traveling 500m/s that means that you only have a 1 in 10 chance of breaking the lock, even if your trajectory line goes right on top of the LOS. because 9 out of 10 times, your ship will pass by that point in between server ticks.

So for a 5 minute long skirmish, completing one orbit every 30 seconds and having a 1 in 3600 chance each time of breaking the lock accidentally... This MIGHT happen by accident about once every 1000+ 3 frigate pvp skirmishes, at best, unless people are trying to do it on purpose (which would be awesome!)

False.

1) Remember, this is always a 2 edged sword. A gang of AHACs will be much better able than, say, battleships, to focus fire on a single target together. BUT they will also be susceptible to other people focusing fire on any one of them.

2) Also, you have to take into account both sides of the fight. Even if you have a bunch of small ships, if your enemy fleet has a big group of battleships, this mechanism will still hamper blob tactics on both sides.

Why? because if you guys try to call out a primary, your own friendly ships might not get in the way as easily, but enemy ships (non-primaries) would.




So as long as there are large ships on either side of the battle (OR intentionally deployed targeting shields brought along as signature radius producers OR if they bring a few target painters to dynamically break up targeting), the mechanism will inhibit the effectiveness of blob tactics on BOTH sides, thus allowing either side to benefit significantly from disciplined formations or small squad tactics instead.

Either side can dictate whether this becomes important or not, allowing anybody who is organized to have the ability to give themselves an advantage over anybody who is not organized. Which is exactly the intended outcome.

If neither side wants to organize, then they can all use AHACs on both sides and go back to the way things are now, more or less. But that would be their choice. the blob tactics could not be forced upon them.

Simply make an exception for structures.

Structures have absolutely nothing to do with the motivation behind the idea, and structures are obviously not what anybody would call a "blob" with a straight face. So there's no reason to include them.

I think you should be able to block somebody's targeting of a structure with a ship or vice versa (Ship A gets in between Structure and Ship B). But no structure would be taken into consideration as a viable object for blocking other things (structures in between any two things targeting each other would not matter)

Either that, or an entire complex of associated structures or ones within some radius of each other would be given a cumulative signature for purposes of this idea, and would act as one single object for target breaking. That would probably be slightly better, since it allows ships to still hide behind structures as a tactic, but would not make fighting with a structure any more annoying.

Getting people to bring in a wider variety of ships and using them more creatively is an intended side effect. Including indy ships. Lead sheets in this case being warp stabilizers, with their signature radius penalty, for example...