Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Different formations have different pros and cons. The formation type would effect how damage is dished out and taken by other types of formations. This provides new tactical game play. You can also add new weapons that fire in a straight line and have splash damage, etc. And different fleet formations will minimize damage taken by these kind of weapons. Just throwing this out there.

What ideas can you guys come up with that could make this awesome?

I need more info on, "Line of sight calculations requiring more server resources exponentially" on why this is? Because that just sounds like horrible programming. I'm a programmer and drawing a line in 3D space and checking if anything is colliding with the line is very low cost. For example when you play any first person shooter there are weapons that just shoot in a straight line through enemies.

I do agree drag bubbles would make it a lot more interesting.

Your FPS do it from a single point to all object. EVE have to do it from every single ship to every other ship in space.

If it's a wide formation that's good against bombers you'd actually have an advantage against bombers. Also if you're moving slow, i.e., not using MWD, you'd take less damage for that too as your signature radius is smaller.

Yeah, I agree.

You can change the fleet formation on the fly. It's all about tactical decisions. Yes, you could be out of rep range based on what formation your fleet is using because the fleet deemed that formation for that moment to be more beneficial than reps. Ships can move independently of formation if they want to too. Fast tackle can move separate and doesn't have to be in formation. For example in the movie 300, the scout moves ahead of the army to check out the enemy and they move independently. Different formations have different strengths and weaknesses. The type of formation the fleet uses would effect how they move, how damage is done, and how damage is taken by other different types of fleet formations. This provides new tactical game play and wider variety to combat. It provides more depth to gameplay as no single formation is the win all.

I've done game development, I've programmed for 15 years and 256 ships vs 256 is nothing. Think of how many polygons are on screen and being taken care of in real time. And any programmer worth their salt would calculate those ships as dots in space. So the only values you need are the xyz values.

It's not about half the fleet doing their own thing. It's about moving the whole fleet as a single unit. Sure, there can be poor fleets that have all sorts of different ships mixed together (which is always a bad idea anyway). Optimally a good fleet would have all the same ships with the same fittings. It's not about handing controls to the FC. It's about tactical options, you could easily move as a separate unit if you want.

The idea is about fleet formations and new weapons that fire in a straight line and have splash damage. The talk about line of sight was started by the Abrazzar toon at the beginning of the thread, so you can ask him about more details on that. Line of sight has little to do with my suggestion.

Oh god no, so you are gooder(er) than every single one else on earth.

Behold, our saviour hath arrived.


Now before you make any more announcements any time some, let me help you understand something. In order to do this I will use a learning method that got lost over the years.

First you take a pen and a piece of paper, then you write the following a hundret times until you can no longer forget it,

EVE is a database and not a 3D world simulator.

After doing that you may or not comprehend that our clients are just a visual approximation of millions of database polls per seconds.

Sigh... script kiddies..

for true los shooting in the game, your basically adding collision physics into the game
so your average anomaly will be pushing the same sort of cpu stress that most physics simulators presently pull, like a full match of 'next car game'
now multiply that into a fleet fight of 3 or 4 thousand, all with say average 10 drones each
you now have 44,000 objects all moving independently.
now add weapons onto each of these say an average of 4 guns each onto the ships
that's another 16,000 items

so now you have 56,000 weapons firing, every single one of them has to check the position of every other object on grid to make sure its LOS is clear for its shot to hit its intended target. That's 56,000 x 60,000 = 3,360,000,000 calculations per tick just to see if los is clear or not,
which gives 3 results with branches

Yes it can hit the target > does it hit
>yes - hit quality, tracking, speed of target, sig of guns, ect
>no -

No it cannot hit the target >
Does the shot hit a different target?
> Yes
>> hit quality, tracking, speed of target, sig of guns

Did the shot miss all targets?
yes
no

so that 3 billion calculations just got multiplied out by 3 simple yes no questions, which then lead to multiple questions them selfs.
this also does not include questions like, whats the ships resists, angular velocity, signature, and hundreds more


LOS physics in eve would require teraflop computation speeds to even remain playable with anything about 200 players.

Anyway, any of you here going to check out Star Citizen?