Upcoming Feature and Change Feedback Center

Now:

• Click orbit -> ship orbits in a certain inclination
• Changing your max. speed makes your ship change its orbit inclination and sometimes even the orbit direction (clockwise to counter clockwise or vice versa). Here's another image, just ignore the description and look at the different orbits.
• This leads to pretty irritating situations where you activate your AB or MWD while orbiting and your ships stops, makes a u-turn and then starst orbiting with a different inclination or even direction
• Same for webbing. It can make your ship do weird **** if you orbit and get webbed.

New:

• If your max. speed changes (AB/MWD/Web), your ship will just keep orbiting with the same inclination and direction as before.

As far as I understand it the initial orbit inclination will still be random or whatever the formula is and it will change if you hit orbit again after your max. speed has changed.


I think he confuses orbit direction with align direction and therefor align time.

This is a change I can whole heartedly get behind. I can't count the times I felt like I would have lived through a fight had my ship not stopped mid flight to change direction, sapping my velocity and transverse speed in the process. Some people may come to the conclusion that it will potentially make kiters a little harder to kill but I don't think it's in a manner that is unreasonable or beyond expectations of how ships should be behaving in the first place.

I think anyone click-orbiting at close range in an interceptor is taking valuable time away from doing other, more important--and more strategic--things. It seems more of a veteran move to multi-task your ship, and more of a rookie move to micro-manage your orbit while you ignore everything else. If we want to encourage skill, we should want a simple enough orbit command that it becomes possible to multitask into other processes while still managing the orbit.


Post #36

It calculates the target's position across a static background. When orbiting a target, you see it move across the static background. If your camera is positioned relatively close to your ship and you see a target seem to briefly stop moving across the static background, regardless of what causes it to seem to stop, you will have an easier time tracking it.

I successfully used this understanding of tracking on a MWD fit Maelstrom to hit NPC frigates with 1400mm artillery at about 10km without webbing or painting, by matching my velocity briefly with theirs.


Post #38

One thing comes to mind: the fact that range to target has no direct effect on tracking, which actually makes it easier to hit a moving target the farther they are from you due to the way angular velocity calculations work. By giving turrets a range-to-target accuracy effect, there will mostly no longer be a need to "get under the guns", as it will be safe to orbit at long range also, provided you simply have a high enough perpendicular (transversal) velocity and low enough signature radius.

I can see two ways to implement this feature:

Method 1
Change tracking to be based on transversal velocity instead of angular velocity. Seems most of the playerbase believes it is based on transversal anyway. I'll explain:
Consider a Wolf is orbiting you at 5km and a Jaguar is orbiting you at 20km. Both have the same sig radius and are moving at the same velocity.
Tracking is based on angular velocity, meaning that just as that Jaguar appears to be moving 1/4th as fast as the Wolf (when your camera is zoomed in on your ship), your turrets will in fact track that Jaguar 4x as well as they track the Wolf.

If tracking were based on transversal velocity, there would be no difference in your ability to track either target as they are both moving at the same intrinsic velocity.

Method 2
Keep tracking based on angular velocity but implement apparent signature radius into the calculation. This way the signature radius of target used in the calculation of tracking is determined by dividing the target's actual signature radius by a distance factor. I would use the base optimal+falloff of the turrets as 1, such that at a distance equal to the base optimal+falloff (before skills and effects), you track the target as if its signature radius were 100% of what it is. If the target is closer, its apparent signature radius is increased.

This alteration would make it far easier to hit webbed frigates at close range, but far more difficult to hit smaller ships towards the end of your range.

An adjustment to this idea could be to give each turret a fixed value range modifier (much like signature resolution) for their signature / range units = apparent signature. This way you avoid strange effects such as pulse laser Abaddons tracking frigates at 10km better than blaster Megathrons can.

There was actually a post a while back in a thread about this very topic, explaining in detail how exactly the turret mechanics in EVE at current actually are accurate with physics, and how they should not, in fact, rotate with the rotating ship. Put simply: a turret locked in place will follow the rotation of its ship, but a turret freed to turn easily and with extremely low fiction will tend to stay where it's facing rather than follow the turn of the ship.

This doesn't make sense, since a target farther away is actualy moving slower if we talk about tracking. Tracking beeing the degree that your guns have to turn to keep track of a target.


I think it's "b".

Changing the calculations to match real world physics like you describe it is a nice idea from the "this calculations are stupid" standpoint, but it would break the whole gameplay around tracking. You could just rotate your ship to match the angular velocity to the other ship.

Example: Set your speed to minimum speed and approach the other ship. Done. The speed of the other ship will almost not matter anymore since your ship will rotate faster than the other ship is able to orbit you, no matter if you are webbed or not. (To a certain degree of course. Like frig vs. Battleship) This way it would be possible to get near perfect tracking in almost every ship a few classes bigger than the opponent. It would be "align time" vs. "angular velocity"

Only angular velocity uses apparent/relative motion. Transversal velocity uses intrinsic motion and only functions in Euclidean physics which all games run on, but which real life does not. EVE simulates angular velocity tracking using extraneous calculations in a Euclidean engine, and switching to transversal tracking would inded have the effect I explained, as well as reducing server load as far as tracking calculations.

Reaver you're confused.

Transversal is a speed. It doesn't account for distance. But Angular V does, and it's Transversal divided by distance.

Angular V is in radians. So is turret tracking. They're both the transversal compared to distance.

Angular V is also the same for both bodies at the same time. You don't want to mess with that.

A good change to finally make EVE make more sense. You can still do it.

Well said

Now this would be a problem. Imagine server asking for relative positions of both ships between ticks (1 sec minimum + 2x ping time), and then calculating the damage and hit chance (second tick - we are over 2 sec now). Firing a gun would thus take several seconds to finish. Several seconds latency is not an enjoyable experience in a fight.

However I sure agree with you on the physics part, it would be great but I am afraid its not possible now. But I would like to hear an answer from dev on this too.