EVE General Discussion

Can I just point out that there's a lore explanation for the pudding mechanics?

The edge of the depleted-vacumn warp bubble has a natural drag associated with it, which is why we don't go time-traveling whenever we warp FTL, and is the reason there's a max warp speed on ships. The warp core itself has a drag against spacetime even when not in warp (relative to the strongest gravitational field, typically the nearest celestial--anchoring mechanics use a modified warp core). Because of this, ships have a max speed. It's important to note that the thrusters on the back of our ships aren't even thrusters--CCP Falcon confirmed this on the tweetfleet slack. It's unclear for now what they are, but it's not rocket engines pushing us forward.

Honestly, the lore is pretty developed. The most inexplicable part of Eve's mechanics is bumping. That's honestly just a technical and gameplay limitation--I can think of so many situations where collision detection and damage would **** everything up royally, both with lag and with horrible friendly-friendly collision situations.

Ulimited range on blasters? Sure. Rooks And Kings even have a video talking about how broken and OP that was when it was thing.


Also making a game around physics and following laws normally leads to **** gameplay. Even games like Arma bend the rules a bit in order to make an entertaining game.


It's fine as it is.

Well... let's take a look. Blasters are a cloud of ionized material. Just because of the charge on it, that cloud disperses fairly rapidly. Rails still have the containing vessel, but without a sustained magnetic field to contain the reactive core, it will eventually eat away at the vessel and basically become a blaster cloud. So hybrid weapons have decay.

Missiles eventually run out of fuel. See the launcher rigs. So yeah, they should go on forever, however, it's easy to imagine that, because of regulation, the warhead is dearmed once the fuel cache empties. I think that's fairly accurate to what we see in game. Also, Fury warheads seem to indicate that there may be warhead containment problems on some of them.

Lasers are easy--they have to deal with the good old square-inverse law. Unless your laser chamber is infinitely long and thin, you're going to have to deal with the fact that your beam widens and your intensity drops.

Projectiles really should fly forever. However, 280s are rocket powered, and Barrage has onboard guidance (as do, presumably, all projectiles, hence the long falloff compared to unguided railgun projectiles), so they're not totally dumb--maybe they try to slow themselves down after missing their target? Again, regulation. I'm honestly not sure.

The biggest thing to realize is that the optimal/falloff ranges aren't actual ranges for anything except missiles and blasters. Really what that means is that the ship's tracking computers can't get the projectile/laser to reliably hit the target at that range. In harder scifi, that's because ships are drunkwalking, that is, dancing around randomly to try to dodge projectiles and throw their enemies' targeting computer off, and at ranges where the speed of light+projectiles becomes an issue, there's an information lag that protects the drunkwalking ship. It seems like Eve simulates this without the ranges or the actual motion making sense. If ships fought at lightsecond range and we did drunkwalk, it'd make sense. As is it, ships should be able to perfect track anything on grid. So idk.

Oh yeah I didn't even consider that.


The speed meta would be unreal.

Acceleration-based physics (where your engines provide acceleration, and turning off the engines means you coast) would be realistic but would cause gameplay issues:

1. Why decelerate? Best attack is a fly-by where you start far away, build up a lot of speed, and hit them with kinetic-amplified damage. You spend about 1 second being in range of any of their weapons, then your great speed simply carries you away. No way to stop you, no neutralizing, webifying not enough, etc.

2. He who accelerates first is uncatchable. Calculate the distance between two rockets that constantly accelerate, with one starting 1 second before the other, for every second that passes.

3. Fleet maneuvers would be impossible, with all the idiots in your own fleet not being synchronized with their engine activations.

The game isn't realistic because it's supposed to be a game.

- speeds are slow and weapons are short range so you can "maneuver" within sight of the other ship, so you can look at ships rather than radar dots

- drag in space means you can catch the other guy by disabling his engines (or neutralizing)

Everytime I see this topic I think the same thing. And that is "here is a poster that doesn't understand why things exist the way they do". And I think people like make the mistake of thinking that what does exist only exists because of developer preference. ie They think "who, the EVE devs must really like submarines, why won't they give me a space game!".

The reality is that things are the way they are because realistic anything would SUCK. Being in an interceptor, going in for a tackle, missiing and taking three days to flip around, decelerate and get back to the target would suck.. never being able to get within a million miles of a ship that is constantly accelerating and doesn't want to be caught would suck.

The cries for more realism aren't unique to EVE, back when I played the previous Mechwarrior games, people would say "it's not realistic for Flamers and machine guns to melt/pierce armor that can withstand PPC, Missile and Laser hits!!!!". It would never cross their minds that they were playing a game about 10-12 meter tall walking robotic tanks that wouldn't last more than 10 seconds on any battlefield with Directed Energy Weapons.

I also saw it during X-Wing vs Tie Fighter. There was actually a small vocal "Newtonian physics" fringe in that community that would not let go of the need for realisim...in a game about fighter craft from the STAR WARS universe, you know, that universe where magical bacteria can make you REALLY flippin good at using swords made out of nothing but light.

It's going to happen in newer games too, it always happens, the realism crowd is looking for something that they never seem to find. Personally,, when i want realism, I walk outside, when i play a game I leave realism at the door.

Some realistic physics around bumping would be nice :-)

Like when that small cruiser bumps into a carrier/freighter/dread/etc that cruiser should go splat like a bug on a windshield and be utterly destroyed, while the carrier/etc simply asks, "did you hear something? naw was nothing" and doesn't move at all. For that matter if missiles bounce off your shields so should a frigate!

What I think is that the above scenario would make one helluva crash.

I for one would love just a couple of (mostly cosmetic) changes, with one gameplay change:

• Effects similar to warping through a planet when warping through moons, stations, (much) bigger ships. At the moment they might as well be painted on for how insubstantial they are. Even getting out of the wat in some fashion would be nice and immersive.
• Shield effects when bumping.
• Bumping should reduce shields (they are in fact absorbing a collision) of both ships, proportional to their masses, and damage / severely damage both ships if both have no shields. The rationale is that if even one has shields, it is pushing the other ships away without touching it directly. If neither of them have shields, however, they are crashing into each other. Damage should be proportional to the respective masses.

I'm guessing low priority, low or undetermined impact on gameplay, too much effort for the rewards. As a programmer I cannot count the number of times a customer demanded a change which was "just this small thing, how long could it take?", except it wasn't small at all and side effects would last for weeks after the change was pushed into production. Any and all modifications to the game phisics' engine are sure to fall into this case.