Player Features and Ideas Discussion

We now have new nebulae, the stars we travel to shown in the sky and stargates that point to them. Although this does nothing for game play, it adds to immersion and makes eve cooler. What else could be done in this same vein? Many times it has been suggested that planets, moons and stations should orbit just like real astronomical objects. Imagine sitting at your POS watching the moon slowly move and change phase as you orbit, and other moons transiting across the planet as they orbit, or Jita 4-4 going into and out of eclipse at it orbits.

But this introduces problems, for example with bookmarks, movement, setting warp bubble traps, and knowing where to scan for targets. Here are my ideas on how to have everything move and deal with these issues.

First, all planets, moons and stations have a “sphere of influence”, each with a local coordinate system. Bookmarks are fixed to the sphere of influence they are made in. If they are made at a location where they are in several spheres, a hierarchy is used: Stations take precedence over moons, which take precedence over planets. The sphere of influence of a planet is big enough to cover all its moons, and a moon’s is big enough to cover all its stations.

If as planets, moons and stations move a bookmark finds itself inside a new sphere, it keeps its coordinates with respect to whatever sphere it was created in. It does not get “swept up” in the new one.

The speed you see your ship move at is relative to the sphere you are in. Surrounding each sphere of influence is a buffer zone where the influence drops off. If you fly out of a sphere of influence into the buffer zone, the transition to the new coordinate system will be smooth with no sudden changes.

Stargates have large spheres, so bubbles placed near them will move with the gate, and stay in line to a destination for a reasonable time.

Some players will jump through a gate then quickly d-scan in the direction of nearby planets looking for targets at anomalies. This is somewhat harder if the planets keep changing position. Fortunately, two things make this not a big issue. First, planets do not move that fast. Earth moves only 1 AU every 2 months. Next, on average for every planet that moves out of range, some other will move into range. Finally, an upgrade to the d-scan is really needed. Maybe more range, maybe a setting that makes it scan in the direction of any object selected on the overview.

How speed works could use a better description. What the player would see on the speedo would be just what is seen now, same acceleration rate, same top speed, and so on. But the game needs to know where you really are, and your actual speed. A little math is needed.

Say you are near a station. Let

V be your velocity relative to the fixed stellar coordinate system.
Vp is the velocity of the planet relative to the fixed coordinate system.
Vm is the velocity of the moon relative to the planet it’s orbiting.
Vs is the velocity of the station relative to the moon it’s orbiting.
Vo is your ship’s velocity relative to the station you are near.

Then the velocity of your ship relative to the fixed coordinate system maintained by the game is:

V = CpVp + CmVm + CsVs + Vo

Where Cp, Cm, and Cs are influence coefficients. They are equal to 1.0 inside the sphere of influence, dropping to 0.0 as you move through the buffer zone. Once you know the velocity of all objects relative to the fixed coordinate system, velocities of any two objects relative to each other can be found and positions can be updated.

An issue is that no two stations should ever have their influence spheres or buffer zones intersect. Nor should two moons, or two planets. Also no sphere of influence should be so small as you fly out of it easily, like when you are trying to snipe, or sit in an observation spot. This issue may require moving some planets, moons, and stations.

Are there more issues? Sure there are. But they can be solved. Adding this change would most likely take less work that making all those nebulae, and I think just as cool.

Its the reason for the new nebulae (Well, CCP thought it would be cool, and the pre-showing at fanfest was well received). Makes Eve a more immerse game. Makes space more like real space.

I also wonder if we could ever move big battles off stargates and into space proper if an ever changing "landscape" of moving moons and stations could lead to interesting strategies.

Actually, my way asteroid fields would have a sphere of influence, and BMs made in there would move with the roid field.

The computations needed is large, but if done in C++ the actual cpu time needed is actually quite small. Current computers can number crunch quite fast using C++. Although computing the speed and position of an object in orbit requires the use of elliptic integrals. But there are good approximations for those.

Most people who actually do those things can do so in any system they land in. It's not intimate knowledge of a given system that allow them to quickly scan planets for targets or set up good drag bubbles, it's a general competency of how the game works. Your suggestion would simply increase server load with no discernible benefit.

okay I did just think of ONE thing it would do: those stations whose undock alignments give instawarps to some celestial or another would move. But that's trivial as anyone who picks a station for an insta to a celestial can just as easily create an instawarp bookmark and move from there.

Not only that but if you put your quick undock BM too far away it would be outside the station's sphere of influence and get "left behind" as the station moved.

My Jita one would become useless, its tens of thousands of km away. I think I would adapt.

The problem with having you always be in orbit is: Which direction? A good example is if you are sitting over the north pole of a planet. Which way would your orbit carry you? Once your orbit reached the equator and someone else is there, in orbit, what happens? Do you pass at a zillion km/sec?

From this it seems to me that the closest we can get to true Newtonian orbiting is to have orbital motion defined by celestial objects. You move along with whatever one you are close to. The rest we fix with hand waving lore.

Its already working into the lore that our ships are not rocket powered, but have some sort of gravity drive. The engine ports we see are just the exhaust from the power plant that powers the gravity drive. They no more push your ship along than the exhaust from your car engine does.

We just say the engines propel us by interacting with the local space-time metric, and that is linked to the closest or most dominant massive object. A "web" slows you relative to that object. "Anchoring" or just setting your speed to zero has the gravity drive fix you in place relative to that object.

In deep space the dominant object is the sun, so objects moving at zero speed are fixed relative to the sun.

Its not the best answer, but it gets us closer without a massive overhaul of every game mechanic.

The thing is, the Newtonian model was dismissed as impractical for what CCP was/is trying to achieve. Docking under 'pure' Newtonian physics would require a degree in orbital mechanics to dock at a station (because we'd have to match relative velocity, angle of approach, and manage our ships' inertia to avoid overshooting the station, among other things).

We'd basically have to spend ten minutes calculating before we could make even an approach to a station, which really cuts down on the 'fun factor' and slows any decent fight down to a crawl.