About flying upside down and other physics stuff

I know EVE isn’t a dog fighting game or anything like that but… I just want to fly upside down. (There’s no up and down in space I know I know but you know what I mean!) Anyone else in the same club?

I also know that EVE physics engine doesn’t allow this, but I’m curious as why? Has there been any technical post from devs that explain this? I couldn’t find anything myself. All I’ve heard is that EVE physics are more like “submarine physics” but yeah, would like to hear more indepth, official answer.

I do also wonder if the ships could fly upside down, would this affect aligning and that sort of thing? Maybe it could add some more depth in combat, like if you rotate around your horizontal axis, would it be faster than vertical axis sometimes?

Of course I would ideally like to see momentum too so that drifting would be possible, but I doubt it would work when it comes to the controls and gameplay EVE. I like to believe the ship thrusters are so well made that they can bring a ship in full stop in space.

I’ve also had this thought that EVE space is so dense and full of gases that the celestial objects have hard time going around their orbit, which could work as an explanation why planets don’t move etc. (The bigger the thing, the slower it aligns and moves.) Doubt that makes any sense when thinking about real world physics however. Sci-fi wise tho, what do you think?

Will go to bed now, gonna check your replies in the morning!

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Get a rotating monitor.

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Pretty sure by lore solar systems behave normally. Just there is an engine limitation on showing it.

When you’re in zero-gravity in space, there is no ‘upside-down’.

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Not that I know of.

I’m guessing it was decided to make it this way so to get as many players as possible into the game, because not everyone likes or enjoys a fully immersive 3D experience and control a spaceship along all axes.

The decision was then made more than 15 years ago and hasn’t been changed ever since.

The entire steering part is a bit … well. It doesn’t really take momentum into consideration, so you end up with being able to randomly steer however you want and suddenly accelerate extremely in the midst of space. All of that of course without using fuel. Sadly not every part of that society is so advanced, as the people still need to manually mine for ore.

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It’s not space. Its more like a fluid. Think of your ship more as a submarine and you will be fine

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Heres why from a programmers perspective:

Eve’s navigation is fairly easy to process, the only things that you care about is pitch, yaw (Limited to 0’-180’), and then linear motions. I can easily throw a game engine together that can process this. If you could go completely upside down then you would not only have to have an extra check calculation to see if you are beyond the 0’-180’ direction, but you would also now have roll in the equation. This now would be processed as a euclidean system where you could have gimbal lock. Then to get rid of the gimbal lock, you could use a quaternion system instead, but now you are just making a much more complicated system.

Other games like dreadnought follow the same navigation principles for the same reason of simplicity (And also that game is mostly capital ships, so you’re not gonna do a barrel roll anyways :stuck_out_tongue:).

As for planets, adding realistic motion would just add more unnecessary stress to the servers, and bookmarks would be messed up. This is probably a reason why Elite Dangerous doesn’t have bookmarks either.

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Actually EVE’s engine doesn’t track facing at all. It only tracks velocity.
As far as the server cares you are a sphere (or perhaps a few spheres put together).

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Some do fly upside down, the drunken eve pilots, actually it is possible to flip the ship over but it is difficult to achieve, I think I did it by a standing start, hit micro jump, upon landing about 5 KM from my target I selected approach and at that same time hit the afterburner and the Raven flipped over and rolled to the target.

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Pretty sure it tracks alignment. Leaving alignment to the client is just asking for trouble - as in, people hacking their clients to get insta-warping, etc. Having that stuff controlled by the host makes it “unhackable”. But you’re right in that the client side handles graphics, the host just deals with position, velocity and a few other variables.

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Facing isnt a thing as far as warping goes. The server treats you as a sphere with a velocity. And the velocity is all it cares about for warping.
“aligning” is actually getting your velocity on the correct vector at between 75%to 100% of maximum. Facing on your client doesn’t matter for it.

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Good post, I enjoyed reading that. I can see the rationale behind that, yeah.

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And a lot of times you can’t text or email your mission agent to get a mission or complete one. You have to go in person. Maybe the Jita isk-doublers scammed or hacked the agents too many time. So you have to show up in person every time.

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But velocity is a vector quantity and vectors do have a direction, aka a ‘facing’. How this translates into the game’s programming, though, is outside my knowledge base.

“The Expanse” TV series does a good job of representing how travel in space is 50/50 acceleration/deacceleration, along whichever vector.

Battlestar Galactica/Babylon 5 for space dogfights.

The ships turn and burn in the opposite direction to slow to a stop.

EVE physics are a joke, even within its own paradigm.

The expanse is pretty much what Elite Dangerous is. Lots of similarities, more than just physics.

EVE is based on a submarine game engine: it’s why your ship slows down without applying thrust, it’s why there really isn’t an up or down, it’s why you ship starts to list and hang a bit if you stop moving.

The velocity vector is interpreted by your client to simulate a ship facing. That’s how. But the server only cares about your velocity and treats you as a bubble.

Exactly. This is how you get the hilariously common sideways warping ragnaroks

yo, not all vectors have a direction. yer ship’s position is a point. yer ship’s model has a “forward”, which’s the ship’s directional vector. when yer ship’s aligning, the server’s rotating the ship’s directional vector towards it’s intended goal. hey, do you have any corpses i could lend?