Missions & Complexes

There's been a part the game that's always bugged me and only until recently I found out why.


I was running an L4 mission when I was taking a little too much damage so I warped out to refit fit, but instead of warping my ship decided to do an impression of a bucking bronco and flip around in every direction. I was rather confused as on my screen all there was, was space (stars), I had no Ewar on me, I zoomed out and I was near a ruined station. Visually no where near it.

Now I've lost many ships, many more expensive, but this one annoyed me as I fully expected to simply warp away and dock to refit. So I petitioned it, The GM told me I will have been stuck in the station as everything in eve is a sphere, now I was I meant to know this? Where is it told to you when you start the game? So i got a 'tough luck' reply from the GM as I should have known better.

Now in all other games a cube is a cube, but it eve it's a sphere, Even though visually it's a cube, it's a sphere. So when my ship was near the station the game decided I was inside an invisible sphere. In a game where you can freely fly about and also a game where when you die your ship is gone. This really should be documented. Why can't a cube be a cube? all other games manage to have the collision boundaries where the actual objects are.

I also now understand why often when I mission rats get stuck inside space objects. (which in the three years playing as always annoyed me), Even the rats assumed a cube was a cube and got stuck in invisible object boundaries.

Since this loss, even though I've lost way better ships and haven't cared it's really put me off the game and I haven't played since the loss over like 2-3 weeks ago, only logging on to queue a skill.

I just feel it wasn't fair in a game where you can lose ships that you can so easily get stuck in there graphics and no one told me this until a GM pointed out to me all objects in space are spheres.

Live and learn.

This is indeed annoying especially in AFs and short range T3s (Loki, Legion, Proteus).

What I usually do is zoom out and move camera so that structure/object is between my ship and camera. Then trying to move away by double clicking space behind that structure/object. It doesn't always work on first try. If it doesn't work you have to find correct angle. This can be tricky if there is other structures/objects nearby.

Maybe I can shed a little further light here:

The art models that go with a given item/object in space don't actually depict the areas where the ship will collide with that object. This is defined by an invisible sphere placed around the object - the collision sphere, we call it. My thinking was always that a sphere is used because it creates less client-server calls (relative to a box?) but you'd want someone with technical knowledge to confirm.

One thing I do know, is that the more collision spheres you add to an object, the greater the technical cost in terms of server load, and client-server calls. For this reason the "fidelity" (or accuracy) of the spheres is sometimes quite a ways off and quite simple. These actually used to be more accurate, but then we ran some numbers, reduced the fidelity, and noticed a significant performance improvement (a.k.a. part of the "Need for Speed" initiative, of some years ago). When you think about how many sites are active at a given time, how many objects are in them, and how many interactions there are between those collision spheres and players, this makes some sense - it would add up over thousands of sites.

So, yup, that's why there are invisible walls in odd places sometimes. It's not so much a bug as it is an unfortunate byproduct of technical limitations.

It makes perfect sense for EVE to measure collisions in spheres. The only factors are the sphere's size and relative distance. If you did it with a cube for example you would have to calculate that against the whole area of it since a corner could be closer to you rather than a side is long. A sphere always have the same absolute distance to another sphere, no matter how they are relatively placed to each other.

I guess the real issue is fidelity though, but the tech behind this is still interesting :-)

The worst is when you're technically in warp, because then there's nothing you can do but watch your ship caterpillar along an invisible wall. I've lost a ship or two that way myself.

Live and learn.

Zhilia is correct there. There *is* something you can do! It’s ctrl-space, to stop your ship from blindly trying for the near impossible warp, and then manually fly your ship away from the obstructing objects.

As someone who has just done their first missions for a couple years, and who is using an undertanked blappy machariel, I have been several times caught by obstructing objects stopping me from last-second escapes … usually when I have allowed my ship to get into mid-armor and I am starting to fear actually losing it to NPCs (Oh, the humiliation!).

My advice, having just been refamiliarised with this issue, is:
- Small combat drones … always, always, always. When you messup and your shields are melting is usually the (Murphy’s Law) time that you discover there is one more frig on the field, and it’s a point/scram frig to boot, and it is now too close or too small for your main weapons to do significant damage to. Most any drone will kill them, warriors just get there faster and start applying damage faster, and do not take up much drone bay space.
- When your ship is amongst other objects zoom in close to see what is where, and fly manually to avoid potentially troubling objects. It is usually not too hard to point yourself directly up or down and hit your AB / MWD, if only you were watching close enough to realise you were near objects that may obstruct. The ‘natural’ approach for mission running is usually big-picture, so it is usually a deliberate conscious decision to zoom in and take an up-close look at things.
- Know the mission. I used to know their foibles back to front but my being caught out recently has largely been due to my not giving much thought to the specifics of the mission. Yes, I *knew* there were four scramming frigs in that wave … why TF didn’t I blap them while they were still 50+km away and move myself away from the beacon?
- Overtank. My mission running tengu was pretty bomb-proof in that it never needed to warp-out to save itself. It just pottered around laughing at the incoming DPS. All the same it is much more fun, and makes for faster mission completion, to fly a blap-beast like a machariel … and occasionally see your dial trying hard to enter structure.
- Avoid the clutter. Sure, many missions require you to go up-close to a certain object but in many cases you are not obliged to take the shortest, most cluttered route to get there. I often burn up or down 10 – 20 km then start the traverse to wherever I need to get (usually a can of some sort). This takes a few seconds more but helps keep me away from debris, and usually doesn’t drag me right through the NPC ships all sitting at or working towards their optimals.

Bottom line? Be prepared, be watchful, and learn how to manually fly your ship.

Good luck coping with this little game dynamic in the future.

Collision spheres are far far easier to compute.

Serpentis/Guristas L4 worlds collide however had (may still have, I dunno) a random collision at/near the beacon for the guristas pocket. (along with its random fullstage aggro whether you do or don't do anything in particular).

I even have a denied petition for a fairly expensive loss for tangling with that one. I simply don't bother going in there anymore.

All this.

Also, nice to see you back in this forum. Pretty sure I hadn't mentioned that yet.

I remember commenting on the exact same topic recently.

A SIMPLE and VERY HELPFUL way to alleviate this issue would be to have a way to display the invisible wall on the screen. It's fine that there are technical limitations to change the system but at least, please let us see the invisible walls (add a navigation toggle) so that we don't get stuck in the middle of no where without clear understand in which direction we should go.