EVE Information Portal

My mummy says not to talk to strangers but i sure do like your lollypop

I would REALLY REALLY want to see Line of sight weapons!!!
I think that's the only solution for blobs.

Oooooh, so lovely.

plz give us tessalation and dx11


got an Nvidia card because they sponsor Fanfest,

so make it work for its money with tessallation

I think CCP only need to boost its stats a little bit.

This ^


You can drag the slider to 0 on the tesselation option and get almost to performance issue at all.

so HELL YEAH it's so awsome !

Alright, lets add a bit of tech truth into the mix here so we can hopefully clear up some of the hopes and dreams of you, the player.

First off, tessellation and the the accompanied physics demo are NOT CONNECTED DIRECTLY. Tessellation alone can only complicate already existing geometry and shadow maps/such . What you saw with advanced physics (asteroids breaking apart once hitting the ship) was actually a part of the physx engine. Physx is a proprietary physics engine that can be used to do the things that you saw, and do them quite well with any modern graphics card! Most modern FPS use physx, and physx optimization is built into all new nvidia GPUs (I don't know about AMD, they are not worth mentioning to begin with anyway).

Now then, on to the dreamsmashing. PhysX is a CLIENT SIDE ENGINE. The kinds of breakage of asteroids and advanced physics effects you saw are locally calculated and rendered. What this means is that you will not see exactly the same thing that everyone else sees in the same area. Lets take for example what it would be like otherwise. If the EVE servers were to do all the physics calculations, the servers would have to take into account each collision from every ship with every physics enabled object. At that point, it would have to calculate how the object would break, the velocity and trajectory of every piece, and NOT ONLY THAT but it would also need to send this information to every single person on grid (or more). You may think "ohh, that's not too bad!" But if you remember that EVERY collision would be done this way, you start to get the picture of how many calculations would need to be done.

Now then. Calculations of the physics is only a small part. Theoretically if CCP had beefy enough servers, they could do it, but that is never, and can not happen for years to come. The REAL issue is that sending the data for all of these calculations would send the bandwidth requirements through the roof, and not to mention things would STILL NOT BE SYNCHRONIZED between players due to latency variations.

Basically what you guys have been assuming is that the EVE server would be doing the physics calculations for small objects and explosions, this is wrong. Server side physics is kept to the minimal needed like ship movement, and all of the other critical things that actually effect game play.

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If PhysX capabilities were ever included into EVE, all of those little asteroids you see banging around and breaking up would look quite beautiful. And all of those detailed explosions of titans and battleships would also be beautiful. However, all of this would be calculated on the CLIENT SIDE (meaning on your computer) and rendered locally also. So even when everyone warps into a asteroid field, the server sends them the SAME asteroid locations, after a while, everyone will end up with a significantly different looking asteroid field due to the random nature of the physics environment.
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Now on to tessellation. Tessellation is a glorious idea, and if CCP was twice it's size and sustainable in funding it's teams (not having to fire half the company due to lacking of funds :P) then I would say YES! Make tessellation possible. However, CCP has limited resources and they have to efficiently use those resources (teams) more efficiently than most companies. Because of this, Tessellation WOULD cut into other graphics related fixes such as updating the rest of the ships to V3 (this is just an example. They would probably have to be upgraded to V3 to even work with tess).

On top of that, Tessellation would make things look better, but it would also be unrealistic for large scale combat. The amount of processing power required would be like going from the old shader engine to the new, on top of adding a bit more complex geometry. This feature WOULD NOT need to be turned on, and you COULD run in the older (current) V3 system. This means that the only downfall to tess, would be the time spent building it instead of building something else


TL;DR

Physics shown in the video is actually a physics engine called PhysX (PhysX wiki link). Anything you would see like a field of colliding asteroids would look different for each person after a few seconds.

Tessellation is a great technology. It could make everything look better, and would not FORCE everyone to upgrade because it could be left off if needed. DOWN SIDE: Tessellation would detract CCP's already valuable graphical team resources from other things they could be improving, like adding new incursion content, adding new ships, adding new stations/props for missions, changing the POS system to look more modern.

No idea whether this would at all be technically possible, but introducing line-of-sight would be the single best thing that could happen to this game, period. And it would of course totally change how space battles are fought; frankly speaking, I cannot think of a downside - the opportunities for new excitement in space seems almost endless. Please dear devs, just tell us if this could theoretically be introduced? Just in theory, no promises asked for? Pleaaaase?

I saw in the video that the nVidia 560 was stated as the most common card used in Eve at the moment. I'd like to see a breakdown of that information because as far as I can see, laptops seem pretty common amongst those I chat to and they certainly can't field that kind of hardware.

I say do it. shouldn't have to wait months/ years just to see one ship overhauled.