EVE Information Portal

ITT: Amateur computer scientists. BTW, this isn't how network data works at all. You can't just 'add a bit', you need to add context and other things.

Could this be expanded to ships I have on my watch list, and/or ships I got targeted? The client does get information about those ships being hit, taking damage. Is it sufficient to allow miss animations?

Edit: read up and see this was already covered. So Ill add a new comment.

If you did send hit miss info to the 100 people in your above example, you would not send 100 packets to 100 people, you would send one packet with 100 hit-miss bits to 100 people. The trick to doing this is to keep the bandwidth down by clever encoding. The client would have to have some sort of ordering of ships it keeps internally, so it can associate each bit with each ship. Also, a bit would be set to "miss" if in that tick the weapon was not firing at all.

Also, showing all hits-misses could be a feature that is normally on, but gets turned off as soon as TiDi cuts in, or gets close to cutting in.

I've seen this on SiSi and it really adds a fantastic depth to combat. You can actually see the difference traversal makes!

Bravo!

@CCP
You should not need to send information on every shot fired only the ones that miss. This should be much easier to implement.

yeah. what he said. Maybe the problem even doesn't exist since its unlikely anyway that all ships alpha strike at exactly the same game tick. Its rather a constant very low data rate stream to the client than a big packet - totally neglectable compared to things like voicechat.

Great stuff guys, really enjoyable to see it on Sisi.

Couple suggestions:
1. "Shots which miss are picking a point to aim at based on the bounding sphere of the target which means misses might look a little too regular and vary quite a lot". To enhance the visual effects of this, you can still use the sphere radius but add a little random fluctuation in range of -10% to +10% each time. It doesn't require anything big in math, and in this way misses won't look that regular even when calculated close by.
2. +1 for the misses for a ship you're looking at. Might be really great :) It doesn't add much lag and definitely adds immersion effect.
3. Don't think that adding miss calculation to a small fights (<10) is a good idea because small fights can easily become big ones, and then it might be an additional level of problems when moving from "all-calculated" to "only for you".
4. Having miss effects for watchlist and your target list is nice, but it will definitely add network load and maybe some server load (guess it depends on how propagation of hits for watchlist and targets works).

And one last note - don't you think that missiles become more and more of a "dead child" in sence of UI representation? They don't have turrets visible, they don't have miss calculation. I really think that they need a close look!


But anyway, thanks a lot for the feature again.

North

This is going to be quite helpful for turret users and ships that rely on not being hit to survive. Thank you CCP.

On a side note, I don't think you should simulate hits and misses for the rest of the fleet unless you can simulate it close to 100% on the client side.

You will get petitions like this and you will have to explain the whole bloody thing every time:
I was not paying attention, but my buddy clearly saw the Tempest's arty volley miss me, yet I still exploded. I want my ISKs back NOW!

That's one nice feature. Looking forward to see it extended for everybody in a fleet flight, it will look epic.

Now, CCP Choloepus, about missiles:

Given missiles never miss, but you have the explosion velocity stuff, it would be cool if the missile exploded a little "earlier", how far behind depending on explosion velocity and current target velocity. This would give the impression the target was able to outrun the explosion.

Yes, that's the situation right now on TQ afaik.

So the solution for artillery would be to have the shot-animation not "anchored" between the shooter and the target (and moving with them) but between a fixed position in space where the gun was when it fired and a fixed position in space where the target will be 0.3sec later when the shot hits (or misses).

For lasers, nothing changes, since light hits the target within the same millisecond anyways.

For hybrids, I'm not entirely sure:
I guess blasters would work like projectiles. Railguns however send out a short stream of plasma afaik, so that while the stream is leaving the gun, there would have to be a number of animations for each "particle" in the stream, starting from where the gun was when it fired that part of the stream and hitting where the target will be when that particle hits the target.
Same with the auto cannons, as mentioned by Nova Fox:

(now I got what you meant, Nova Fox. I was thinking of artillery shots and completely forgot that autocannons shoot a burst of projectiles, not just one)

I really could live with random hit/miss display on other ships. When you KNOW that the visuals on other ships provide no information the only difference between no hit/miss and random hit/miss is that the random thing looks better.
False information equals no information when you know that it is false. How about trying to get real information for the hit/miss animation for ships in your watchlist/fleet and random for all the rest? Would even that cause too much traffic?