Are Asteroid Collision Boxes Still Over-Sized?

[Io_Koval]

@Horace_Whimp

here I am again

I had to check and yep you’re right:

Mining Became A Frustration Nightmare

Have you tried this? Go try it and we’ll talk. I don’t mean go fly straight up to a roid and drill it. I mean, get aligned and get a reasonable speed going. Then let’s see you fill your hold. Unlike you, I’ve actually tried this, many times, and it sucks. Sucks a huge intergalactic one. By the way, anybody who “sits” in an asteroid field is asking for it. Let me say again that speed is the answer to everybody’s ganking problems. You can’t get up to speed when you’re grinding down the…

You somehow have a mistaken impression that this feature is some simple “cpu computation on my local computer”. What you’re asking is actually extremely expensive on CCP’s servers and network bandwidth.

For the asteroid to have an accurate collision box, what you see has to be what everyone else sees. Seems like a “no duh” statement until you realize what this implies. Today, you looking an asteroid and I looking at an asteroid, will see the same rock but in 2 different orientations. CCP Games’ servers isn’t coordinating your rendering of the asteroid, with my rendering of the asteroid.

You might have seen your ship rubber-band due to a network hiccup. The server is trying to make sure all clients have spaceships in the right place. You’ve never seen an asteroid rotation rubber-band backwards in its rotation. That’s because the server doesn’t care how your client and my client see the same rock. They both have a static collision box. So no computations for that either.

What you’re asking for, is for every asteroid in every system, CCP Games’ servers compute one single visual orientation of the rock, and then transfer that information over the network to every client in system. And update that in real time.

Those new computations are:

1. Increased computations within the core of system server code
2. Increased bandwidth to send those asteroid rotations to each client
3. Increased local computation on each person’s client, as they have to process more data each second
4. All the engineering hours to make that work.

Now, you might look at this and think “you’re hyping this up to be a lot but I believe it still isn’t”. Well, we still haven’t yet begun to discuss the implications of dynamic collision boxes.

What is supposed to happen in Eve when two unmovable objects collide?

For example, park an Orca next to a dynamically-collidable asteroid. Turn on its industrial core. It is supposed to never move, speed of zero, while this module is active. But wait, now the asteroid is rotating into the Orca. With a static collision box, the Orca couldn’t get to this location in the first place, so this question was neatly solved: can’t happen, Orca won’t get there. So what about this new future? Should the Orca move? We already established, “no”. So the asteroid should move? But asteroids can’t move either, they sit still while rotating. What’s supposed to happen? Glue this code to the POS Forcefield code that booshes people away when it comes up? LOL!

This is just one single contrived case, but I am sure there are more.

And look man, we’re trying to get you to play. But let’s be honest. The attitude you’re exuding is showing this: even if CCP Games went through all this trouble to please you, answered all these edge cases and put in the engineering hours to make it happen, there is no guarantee that upon very next death you have to gankers, you’re not going to quit over something else that bothers you. Whatever next on the list it may be.