Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Quite a simple idea this one. How would you like it that if you have a ship that has seen many many battles and survived, that visually the ship looks beat up, bruised with various other visual effects on the hull.

By giving all ships a second HP which can be anything up to or more than x1000000 times the base hp that the ship, as the ship recieves more and more damage over time, the texture of the ship would get changed to show more battle scaring and when the amount of damage received goes past the new HP value, the ship would look completely knackered with not much of the original hull texture showing and various dents and holes in the actual ships model, even missing the top wingy bit

This would help make EVE look great and varied and while it doesn't offer any kind of gameplay improvement, it would make players get attached to their favourite ships

This idea could also be extended to Outposts, POS's and other structures that players like to beat the crap out off

Obvious Q&A

• Players could just shoot there ships with their alts - Yeah but it would take a while and it doesn't change the game anyway
• What about repackaging the ship - Simpie it repairs the damage so you don't want to repackage that ship folks!
• Wouldn't fleet fights get laggy with all those textures changing - Ahhh good one, the texture ONLY gets updated when docked
• What about repairing the ship - I works the same way but doesnt affect this secondary hp, maybe repairing the ship could swap bullet holes for plates covering the holes

Discuss

If it's textures only, the visual difference would be minimal. If it included altering models, the load increase would be considerable. Server load may also be negatively effected relaying all that data, although to what extent is anyone's guess.

Anyway, in reality most combat in Eve is a battle of the red and purple squares.

Also, some people might not like all their nice shiny PvE ships looking like heaps of battle worn crap lol.

I would love to see these kind of things put in the game, the changes would be very minimal as Simi said because it would only be textures, the same goes for if you put any kind of paint tool in the game that allows you to change colours.

For people who are unaware of how FPS drops cause lag like effects the polygon count in games are what cause the main problems when it comes to optomisation which is why when you switch to different qualities your game will become blocky and more simplified and why games that were much older than now looked like that as well. It is actually particle effects, lighting and shadows that force graphics cards to work the hardest which is why you can have games like minecraft having tons of stuff in them but if they don't have any silly bloom effects or lots of detailed shadow to render then they work just fine.

I'd thought I'd put this here because I'm tired of seeing people ignorantly stepping on every good idea out there because they don't know how games are made.

p.s. The number of players, their connections and their distance between each other are what cause lag which is why you only get problems when huge blob fleets get together in EVE

While I can almost feel the art team smacking their heads on their desks from where I am, I do like this idea.

I can't see it making its way into the game anytime soon, but would deffinatly add some visual effects to Eve.

noob train hull and armor reps....

Data packets can be stored on server for fittings and any and all relevant textures and queries once a player enter local system for his ship type. If he is present, but docked, client-side can still ask the server once he undocked for information on current fit.

Like you know, it does with the ships and turrets and whatever else needs to be loaded when players are on grid.

So no, its a matter of updating a list of about 10/20 items to perhaps 30/40. I can understand it being laggy if your on phone internet...but thats your problem!

The main issue with Eve graphically is that they are still using DX9. New cards are optimized for DX10 and 11 which incorporates much better use of the hardware. Have a look at any of the new card reviews and you will see that the older games don't perform that well.

Well you could store how "damaged" a ship is to appear by assigning it an integer value between 1-5. Each number corresponding to a different texture pack. But if data concerning how much damage that ship has taken is to be used to assign that value, you'd now need to also store that damage in a running tally. For every single ship in eve.

But, again, transmitting that data plus overhead to the 1-200 ships constantly jumping in, undocking and warping out of the jita undock grid probably isn't going to help reduce load. Not to mention that for the (what, 20 or more?) ship types undocking and on grid at any one time you will now have to load 20x5=100 different ship textures.

You might say "LOL MY MIGHTY GPU LAUGHS AT YOUR TEXTURES", but personally I don't want to see the Eve client installer explode to 20GB+ download size. Not to mention load times when undocking, whilst you're waiting for that giant sea of textures to get pushed into video memory.

On top of that, you have to have the art department design all these textures. And, let's be honest, who notices textures? Other than when I'm ship spinning, mostly in eve I just see purple dots and red dots. If you want effects, which might be more noticeable (e.g. smoke) that's going to increase gpu load client side even more.

It's a nice idea, don't get me wrong. But it's messy, causes some problems and possibly performance issues, is a lot of work for the art department and all for what is, honestly, a minimal gain.