EVE General Discussion

EVE is about space, and space travel, but it really isn't realistic at all.

Injecting realism
#1 - Everything in space rotates. Moons revolve around planets and planets revolve around stars. How come the moons and planets and asteroid belts are not rotating in their own elliptical orbits? Today, when I fly from gate to station, I fly past the same moon/planet in the same boring position.

#2 - Bumping into things should cause damage. Let's have ships get damage from bumping. This includes warping to '0' and bumping into the gate. Adding the % probability of damage by warping to '0' will make it an interesting choice.
#2a) Bumping into asteroids should cause damage.

#3 - Warping through a planet/moon should cause damage. Combined with item #1, this could lead to some damage to ships during transit of a solar system, if a moon, or planet, happened to be in the path.
#3a) Enable a new class of navigation, by enabling intra solar system waypoints, to navigate through the solar system avoiding warp through planetary bodies.

Its a videogame.

I like the ideas, but there are many problems that would come with that.

1) That seems like it would greatly increase the amount of work the servers had to do therefore increasing lag.

2) If you notice, you never actually touch the other ship/station/rock/gate when you 'bump' off of it. When you get close, your ship just moves you away automatically.

3) That would just make going long distances take even longer than they already do.

All very excellent points.



Well put.

While we're at it, lets make it so that FTL travel is impossible and every player is forever stuck in the starting systems.

Cool Bananas.

There's always got to be compromise somewhere, and I think EVE's got a good compromise.

In the future, maybe, space games can have more "realistic" physics - but since it would all be handled by computer anyway, it wouldn't make much difference to gameplay (you'd just be interposing a notional "flight computer" between your control and the ship's movements).

What I mean is, if you fly from gate to station, the computer (notionally your on board flight computer, or your own remarkable pod pilot's brain) would be calculating the correct route taking into account all the movements of the sun, planets, and moons etc., so in effect all that would be different would be the view, at the cost of (irl) computing power that could otherwise be devoted to ensuring the combat gameplay is slick and feels right.

Similar points for the other things. Again, bumping damage would be great, but in view of how many accidents can happen because of lag, it would be more trouble than it's worth. It could be argued that the few games that have tried realistic physics up till now (there was one quite well known one but I forget its name) found it a double edged sword - good for immersion, not so good gameplay-wise, except for those who partcularly love that type of calculation.

So yeah, this sort of thing will no doubt come in the future, and would be a great immersion booster - but at the moment, its cost would be too high relative to the benefit. Till we all have mega bandwidth all over the world, and the super-dooper computers of the future, I'll just imagine that the planets orbit, etc., and think of the solar system map as an abstraction.

I'd be happy if we just didn't warp through things. That's always struck me as really unpolished.

Check out Terminus

A space-flight sim set in the Solar system, rather similar to Eve. You've got stations orbiting various planets and their moons, with long-distance connections made via Vortex Gates (which you must manually fly through and activate). Most of the gameplay centers around self-driven "missions" such as collecting bounties or couriering goods around the system.

One of the most interesting (and frustrating) aspects was the inclusion of Newtonian flight mechanics. You fire your engines/thrusters for 5 seconds, get up to whatever velocity, and cut them off - you continue coasting in that direction, and can even use directional thrusters to orient your point of view to look/shoot anywhere around you, all while still moving on that original vector. However, if you want to stop and/or turn around, you're going to have to fire your thrusters for just as long as it took you to get up to speed, and if you've got the advanced settings turned on, you have to fire them in the appropriate direction, basically doing vector calculations on the fly. Dogfights are interesting and protracted, to say the least.

Also, there's collision damage for *everything*, including asteroids, ships, stations, gates, and even floating cargo containers. Just try scooping that loot while moving at 7km/s - they'll be collecting what's left of your ship in a garbage bag.

Oh, did I also mention that your ship had a consumable fuel supply, and that you had to equip it with everything including a sensor suite, life support and radiation shielding? I actually ran out of fuel outside a station once, just outside of docking range, and had to fire projectiles away from the station to impart enough velocity to effectively back in toward the docking bay.

Suffice to say, while all these 'features' were interesting in principle, they made the game - by and large - a pain in the ass to actually play.

Oh, also - multiply all ranges in ship-scale (in other words, not with respect to the distances between stations, gates, planets, etc) by a factor of 1000, as well as multiplying ship speed (but not warp) by a similar factor. Then things will be realistic looking while still being playable.

In other words, a close/medium range cruiser fleet would be operating at 20000km as opposed to 20km. Now you're getting closer to "hard" science fiction, while maintaining the exact same time scale; it would still take exactly the same amount of time to travel to your target, for example.

what good would that do besides make EVE less visually appealing? this is a game. not a physics simulator. if it was, it would be an absurdly terrible one, especially considering space behaves like a fluid in EVE and every planet and star has nonsensical stats on its info page.

oh, and if EVE was designed with realism in mind, every single spaceship would be absurdly ugly. Think perfect sphere with small engines pointed in all directions from it. THAT is an optimized spaceship design, not the stuff you see in EVE today.