EVE General Discussion

Every thing in Eve is a sphere and all calculations done off such sphere and each items sphere is different sized. Never will match the geometry of the ship... Technically your ship doesn't even have a front or back, that's why aligning then coming to stop has same warp time as never aligning in first place.

While I agree that it works like this for ships, and likely asteroids, how about stations? or other Large Collectable objects? I'm pretty sure that at least for stations there is more to it than just making a giant circle barrier.

They're seen as spheres still, maybe off sided to more oval, but still spherical. It's why you can fly into the station models in some side areas but get blocked on others when the model is longer on one side than the sphere covers. Like the poster after me said, the pretty is just the client giving you something to look at, all calculations are done off of the sphere and it's traits.

Think of docking ranges, the docking range of 0km may vary per station, but it's a sphere based on the station intersection sphere. That's why some approaches will see you at the exact side to dock but you could be 10km off on the other side of the same station when viewing via tactical overlay.

I have a suspicion the rotating radar dishes in some DED sites may have different collision.

I seem to remember that I can fly across the dish on its concave side, but collide with the convex side, suggesting the model and how it is calculated for collision comprises a hemisphere rather than a sphere.

Ill test it if i remember when I encounter them next.

Yes, I think it's easy to show that collision detection is not as simple as ships and structures being single spheres.

For combat calculations, alignment, etc. they are treated as spheres as far as I'm aware, but I think CCP moved on a long time ago from basing collision detection of the textures on simple spheres.

I don't have any real evidence of what the surface is based on now, but it seems trivial to show it's not a sphere.

Ships are pretty much spheres because they don't have a facing.
Terrain objects imagine them as a group of spheres put together and you will probably be right, it makes for simple modelling since you only have to check for where you are in relation to a handful of points to decide if you are bumping into it or not.

Obviously I don't have EVE's code base to confirm this, but it matches with in game behaviour.

To give a little information here, not every object or ship has only a single sphere.

For example the Rokh seems to be two-three spheres glued together because it's a fairly long ship. Larger things with complex geometry are represented by clusters of spheres. For example if you could look at the collision map of an Astrahus it would look like a weird Citadel shaped mass of gumballs or soap bubbles.

@Shahfluffers, there is no relation between Signature Radius and the size of a ship's collision mesh. Otherwise Target Painters would be the most hilarious module in the game

All of Eve is a series of spheres - or it was.

"Grids" were spheres and some interesting stuff could be done at the edges of those spheres (not just grid-fu either) assuming you were willing to put in hours of effort to use the "gaps". Bigger "grids" mean less "gaps" so I suspect it all works the same but requires a LOT more effort to achieve the same thing.

/me hasn't tried pinning/playing with grids since 2012 so I may be talking bollox now :)

So really EVE is a load of balls.

Sorry, could not resist.

Imagine if you couldn't actually shoot guns through objects and missile range was reduced because they have to fly around objects. Can you imagine how different this game would be all of a sudden?

You could use large ships to tank! :D