Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I was fighting when my ennemy disapeared. Then he came back again. I was just at 5km of the end of the grid.
I don't know why the grid work like that but it is really awful. Isn't it possible to change that now?

The grid couldn't simply be 500km around each ship?

His point is still extremely valid you troll

Time to remove the "grid" from EVE.

As a software developer, if I was asked to remove the localisation of object management in a massively multiplayer distributed system (a.k.a. the grid) I would struggle to imagine how I was going to track the millions of individual objects in eve space in anything like real time.

If I were asked to improve the grid proximity and merging code... that would be simple.

Remove all grids, walk in stations forever!

Wait, why won't this door open...?

You lack understanding of bandwidth and processing power. Not to mention legacy code.

I have to admit that in my 30-year career as a software developer you are the first person to accuse me of "lacking imagination". I'm usually accused of "trying to push the boundaries of computing too far", and the high points of that career have been proving these naysayers wrong.

However, to answer the specific question.

Every single object you see (and don't see) in space in an eve system has to be tracked. Every asteroid, jet can, wreck, drone, missile group, smart bomb... you get the picture. If it has the remotest chance of interacting with another object then this relationship must be tested for.

In order to reduce the number of interactions checked (e.g. collisions) the logical thing to do is to reduce the number of tests that must be performed. By logically placing each object in its own little sphere of influence (grid) it means that the server code is freed from the burden of dynamically determining which interactions have occurred, which ones may occur and which ones never will.

If all objects were on one mega-grid then (for example) every ship would need to be tested for collision against every other, every frame. The vast majority of these collision checks would be redundant.

In addition, the position, orientation, velocity etc of every single ship would need to be communicated to your client, every tick. And then your client would need to figure out which ships to show you. It could discount (say) every ship that was beyond the horizon of your vision, but it would have to perform a calculation (involving taking the square root of squares) every frame refresh.

All of this unnecessary work can be completely eliminated by splitting up the system into 'volumes of interaction' (grids) and each grid can then be computed separately (and in parallel!). Only information about items in your grid need be communicated to your client - saving bandwidth and preventing lag, whinging and crying players.

The only complication with this system is when two adjacent grids grow to the point where events in one could influence events in another (smart bombs, ships moving from one to the other, etc). Relative positions of grids is simply a matter of computing the intersection of bounding spheres (simple maths). When two grids collide the contents of both could be dumped into a new bigger grid. There would be a moment of lag while it all figured itself out, but not too big a deal - it only happens rarely.

So rarely in fact that I suspect the dev team figure that it's a problem that does not need a solution.

Imagine, if you will, any large scale battle in sov nullsec where the grid slows to a grinding halt under heavy TiDi.

Now, imagine that the grid was the entire system and the server had to deal with every ship, collider, missile, NPC, POS shield, smartbomb, stealth bomber bomb in that system at the same time. If the existing hardware and network bandwidth can't handle packed grids, how precisely do you propose that they handle entire systems without subdividing them into unique grids?


I will concede that "grid-fu" is a thing, and that it could likely be reduced by using more creative grid boundary definitions, but doing away with grids entirely is simply not realistic given current hardware and bandwidth limitations.

This.

i feel the current grid system is fine(not perfict but about as good as they can get with current tech) however i would like the max targeting range to lose its hard cap so i can lock past 250km

I think they limited it partly due to the what the server can handle, but there is the balance issue too. there is what people say above me saying "i want to snipe from 250km+" which is scary enough as is.