Collision Physics is absolutly necessary for a hardcore game like EvE

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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New player here. I understand the game engine is older than some of the players in the game, that being said I really think finding a way to add in game physics should be a huge priority for a EvE 2 or an advanced update and here’s why, coming from a new player point of view.

Going into my second week and a recent Omega subscription enjoyer my new player view is that the in game physics engine does not fit with this game in any way whatsoever.
What I mean by that is that EvE can be most unforgiving, brutal, punishing for making seemingly small mistakes, coming in at the slightly wrong angle, orbiting at the wrong distance, wrong velocity, forgetting a module is running drains your cap, wrong fit, wrong defense, wrong offense, wrong gate jumped into, wrong amount of value hauled, wrong decimal place added, wrong contract scam read, wrong undock button press…except for the physics engine.

The game physics collision engine is like Disney levels. It makes no sense, I understand 20 years ago it was probably hard to code for the F R E S H game launch with little to no capitol going towards that level of coding, but now? It’s been 20 years, where did all the subscription money go towards?
It’s 2023, we have AI robots writing and coding for us, Amazon delivers my special adult lubricants to my front door less than an hour after I press “buy”. I mean…whats the problem here?
EvE has no competition so the innovation stagnates?
Why is the game physics engine so horrible and outdated? The subscription costs don’t reflect the 20 year old physics engine. It’s one of the highest subscription costs for any MMO.

Yet the “hardcore” game engine (where I repeatedly see the term HTFU used while searching online) weapons shoot right through objects including stations, other ships, space objects, asteroids, debris, there is no option to use strategy with cover/concealment and line of sight. You cant use other ships as cover/concealment, you cant use asteroids, stations, planets, moons, suns, you cant hide a fleet in an asteroid field, or behind the far side of a dark moon, you cant crash into objects no matter your speed to mass ratio, you just magically bounce right off everything lol.

There is literally no line of sight that you can break?!?!?

There’s nothing exciting or hardcore about space bumper cars and non existent collision physics. That’s like a bad Motorola cell phone game levels of psychics coding. Something I would expect from a third world knockoff called “Adam Online” Juto 5-5. I understand 20 years ago, but now? There should be no excuse for this aside from “Its hard and costly to do”.
It feels really really bad for a game that is so hardcore in nearly every other area. Its way too forgiving and offers very little punishment aside from getting hung up on an objects bounce range, and not the actual object itself and just weebling and wobbling back and forth.

Like I said I understand it would take a brand new game engine not just updating the old one, tons of coding, $$$ and might not even be possible given how complex the game already is, but it just feels 100% completely out of place in this type of game.
Feels bad man.

“Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?”

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

Come Home Physics Collision Man

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You really want collision in eve? Undocking from jita and ships taking damage?

Imagine eve is more like underwater than in space.

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The servers will melt, and this topic has been hashed out since way before my time here. That is the primary reason this is not a thing and many other reasons.

Onwards to specific points.

Yup completely valid POV I 100% agree. Kind of silly to see laser fire go right through ships XD

This is also true. One might argue that complacency has set in and innovation has slowed down in favor of short-term profits.

Legend has it that the reason why CCP games have not removed those POS (sticks that have like 10 MILLION EHP) is because due to very old code that if they did remove POS ALL ships would go invisible.

Point being that CCP games doesn’t know how their own game works coding wise. It’s not worth it for them to assign devs to figure it out as that might take a long time. So, they just build on top of it and fix the bugs.

Very fair points you raise. All of the things you have observed are due to lack of technology and the will do make it happen due to business reasons/development goals.

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There could be exceptions for highsec as there always seem to be in this game, but there always seems to be a loophole or workaround. Perhaps undocking in 0.5 and above grants a temporary gravitation bubble inside of the field of the station preventing speed above a certain amount…perhaps Concord could give tickets for speeding in highsec…the lower your clearance, the faster the speed limit. No microwarps, no afterburners around stations and gates in 1.0 ect. That seems fixable with some simple ideas, the collision is not fixable without a redo.

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Way too many exceptions and rules to make this workable. Not to mention that this would kill the server in other instances as well, like fleet battles. The amount of collision detection that needed to be calculated is way beyond any hardware capabilities, in particular because even what’s currently possible in game is already beyond hardware calculation capabilities.

Not to mention that this would also require a rework of how you fly ships. Currently, you just fly in a straight line from A to B and don’t care about what is in your way because you either just clip through or bump around it until you are clear again. With CD, you’d have to have ships actively avoid structures and collision boxes without the pilot having to do every single little adjustment to the flight path. You’d also have to have much more detailed collision boxes as it would not make any sense why you can fly through some parts of an object but a few meters away you’d get damaged due to collisions.

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Maybe don’t run servers and game physics from the last century? I mean, lets imagine a scenario here. I get ISK from people and they give it to me to upgrade their ships. I need to use that ISK to upgrade their ships otherwise their ships don’t work well if they are not upgraded. Instead, I take the ISK I get, and I spend it all on Quafe. Yet I still want people to keep giving me ISK, yet I build them no upgrades to their ships and instead I just spend all the ISK on Quafe. People say “We gave you a 20 ISK subscription a month to upgrade ships, where are the upgraded ships?” You just BURP and pop open another Ice Cold Quafe brand beverage.

All I see from you is words like “Not workable” “Kill old last century servers” “Hardware capabilities” what i am not reading is “This is possible if we focus and work hard to attain this space game dream” and “I believe in CCP games, I believe they can do this” and “yes I agree with you physics would be amazing to have, I will not cry about impossibilities and limits”. Good thing the Wright Brothers didn’t have that attitude.

Is that a Quafe stain on your shirt?

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I wont worry too much about, Chat GPT Open AI is going to code it for us soon enough.

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If I read what you’re suggesting correctly, you’re requesting something like supreme commander where every projectile is accounted for and ramming into objects will damage all objects involved.

That would be great, but also not very realistic. While games like Sanctuary are finally being developed to make use of multithreading and many other cool technologies in the full sim rts genre, it will take a while before they come to market. And much further still before anything like that will come to an mmo environment.

Iirc, CCP is working peripherally on some ways to cheat. I’m not exactly sure how it’ll all work out, but I would guess it has something to do with hitscan tech that will allow asteroids (and other high mass objects) to block weapons.

I would expect bumping will always be in game though. Not only due to the undock issue in trade hubs, but there’s also some lore stuff to already support the game mechanic.

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Yeah I would think some small force field would exist for ships up to a certain mass/speed ratio, but going full speed into an immovable object just bounces you like a Disneyland cartoon. It’s honestly kind of embarrassing and unexpected from a full loot hardcore sandbox. Even World Of Warcraft had line of sight/environmental physics in their 20 year old game engine. I mean…that’s embarrassing to see their PvP have a high personal ability skill requirement to think and strategize rather than just pretending that objects don’t exist because you shoot through them, see through them, target through them, scan through them. They even managed to make AOE calculations regarding environmental physics. not amazingly well, but for a 20 year old game it was good.

It makes the game world feel just painted in, like the environment itself is but another skybox you barely interact with and don’t utilize very much. Its a shame because the in game models are beautiful for some of the structures and environment.

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CCP already runs the top notch hardware one can (reasonable) buy for money. More detailed simulation is not possible, not because they don’t try hard enough, but because of real world constraints on solutions for exponential effort problems. As said here before, what is currently simulated already exceeds what it physically possible, so it only works for an always limited number of players.

Maybe quantum computers, if they ever work, will help with it. But is it worth bothering? Eve online is not a simulation but mainly a strategy game.

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Maybe a DEV can correct me if I’m wrong here.
My understanding is that Eve has no physics engine. Everything is run from a database.
All objects have their locations updated in data fields. Their sizes and shapes are simple numbers that don’t really describe what they look like.
There are no edges or clipping like you would have even in old first person games like Doom.
Combat/damage is not determined by collision detection, but by complex math functions.
The graphics are painted in, doing an incredible job of immersing you in an environment that doesn’t really exist, is not a simulation, and you interact with solely through function calls.
It isn’t a matter of updating the physics engine or collision detection because they don’t really exist.
Its all location, distance, size, speed, and rudimentary shapes used in geometry and calculus equations.
To do what you describe, would require Eve to be re-written largely from scratch, with a completely new ‘engine’.
The result would be a very different game.

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Ok, then do a quick calculation
Is player behind Line Of Sight? If Yes then target loses lock, tracking projectile detonates at collided object, D scan does not ping them, not visible to “look at” options, no update on target distance in the overview, just last known distance.

Some of the core gameplay mechanics for EvE might have been really cool in 2003, but have aged like fine milk. One example is the incredibly heavy dependence and reliance upon local chat just simply telling you for free who enters and leaves a system. This has to be one of the laziest and unrewarding game play mechanics I have ever experienced in a game. No space below 0.5 should tell you for free, automatically, instantly, through zero effort whenever someone enters and leaves a system. ITS LAWLESS SPACE! Who is sending you intel update reports instantly in the cold black of space? The chat window fairy? Its a bad mechanic, just like shooting through objects is a bad mechanic.

And after reading about this, there is a massive resistance to change that in any way.
First you have to convince people there is a better more engaging way to handle knowledge of ships location, then you can work on enacting that system into play because that’s really what it would be, collision and LOS, position and movement having a huge game play part, instead of just instant free intel popping up in your chat window like a Hypernet Relay neuron activation.

I want you to position your ships inside of a giant asteroid, I want you to position them on the darkside of the moon, I want you to use your large ship as a shield and give cover as it advances to the squadron of fighters behind, I want you to dodge between two enemy ships as they open fire on you and instead blast into one another. I want you to dare to dream as you once did, about what is possible, instead of what is too hard to try because it is too much work.

I am told this game used to have literally hundreds of thousands of active players, with huge numbers all logging in at the same time?
Now its like 20,000?
So your telling me 20 years ago the game could handle hundreds massively higher numbers of players but now, with the best updated tech, it can barely handle 20,000 and physics collision and LOS calculations are just simple impossible to even imagine in any way.

So…what happened?

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Pretty sure GPUs do a significant number of trigonometric calculations constantly. Y’know, polygons.

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Been in game design for 30 years, been playing EVE for 19, and here’s my insight on the matter.

I doubt at this point that it’s an issue of do they want to add collision, but they may simply not have the ability to. The game has been around for 20 years. The vast majority of the developers have switched out. 20-25 years ago when this game was being developed, we didn’t have the standardized naming conventions we have today. If you’ve ever tried to read a script from any game older than, say, 15-20 years old, you’ll know that it’s often gibberish. I would be willing to bet that there is nobody left at CCP who has enough of an in depth understanding of their physics engine to rework it.

So even besides the gameplay issues, I doubt they’re even capable. Also, the models are complex enough that you could experience locking issues (where 2 meshes get stuck against one another and can’t get free) between ships, and it would be a nightmare for performance.

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The graphics have been updated to look amazing, a LONGGG way from 2003. They even have Depth of Field inside stations, and maybe soon outside of them. Zooming in very closely on some of the clothing models show a very high level of intricate detail, and 99.9% of the time you never even see that stuff. Its a shame because the clothing model graphics look really detailed.

If they didn’t update the graphics the game would look incredibly dated, and there would be tons of people coming into the thread of the person asking why the game has such crap graphics defending it saying "It cant handle newer graphics, it cant do it, it wasn’t deigned that way, the coders all died, my Dad works for Nintendo, we cant figure out the code to do it, the technology doesn’t exist, it cant, no impossible, in fact stop asking, never, NYET.

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@Brisc_Rubal

What’s your take on this thread and what OP has to say?

This is pretty much the basis of this thread. Seeing projectiles, lasers, and missiles go through rocks or even structures to a target is pretty sad. But is it something we should accept as a community then?

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This is just how the game is - sure, it would be great to have line of sight and the like, but there’s zero chance it will ever end up in this game. It would up be changing the fundamentals of how the game works and that’s the quickest way to lose the existing player base.

But I do think it’s a good idea and would be fun in another game.

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I think the worst thing for me to see so far in regards to the shooting through objects physics is with hardcore full loot PvP and the incredibly huge battle videos on YouTube that I started to watch recently. It doesn’t matter how big a ship is, small ships behind it can be locked onto, and then you just magically fire your weapons right through other peoples ships like they arent even there. You not only fire through teammates ships, but also enemy ships, and you can shoot through dozens of other players ships.
To the point that even other players in the game are almost simply sky boxes painted in the background unless you lock onto them. There is literally ZERO Line of Sight calculations being performed, shouldn’t that be the top calculation occurring in a hardcore full loot PvP game of this magnitude?

We know that locking onto a ship when you fire at it and hit it prevents weapons from passing through that ship and stops penetrating to stop the weapon from hitting other ships behind it, so we know that level of physics, rudimentary hit box detection, line of sight calculations are already in the game.
We know there is some form of hit box and line of sight that suddenly comes to life and begins to exist when a locked onto ship is fired upon and connected with preventing further penetration to ships behind it. Even scrapped hull wrecks can be locked onto and then suddenly come alive with hit boxes and weapons collision.

Smartbombs seem to come kind of close if my understanding of the weapon is correct. They do treat other ships as “shoot through” with no weapons collision and Line of Sight, but they also don’t have to engage with the games lock on mechanic, and treat all ships on grid within range of their AOE as if they are locked onto at the same time no matter how many ships you are engaging.

Whats preventing the lock on ship physics penetration weapons block mechanic from occurring with all ships on grid without a lock on? Can there be a soft lock on feature that is lighter with less physics load that just determines line of sight, hit boxes and weapons path collisions?

It seems to me that line of sight and hit box detection would be the absolute priority on a PvP combat list first and foremost, then the other calculations being added, but the primary thing to calculate is did this weapon impact any players hit boxes in this flight path? Were talking about our ships, which are us, and we don’t actually exist. its like were ghosts.
Bumper cars and dust…

The level of calculations? Doesn’t that level of calculations already exist on grid for all ships being locked onto? Why not just go one step further, remove the necessity for the lock on mechanic to be the factor that magically determines if a players ship stops becoming without hit box fire through weapons detection turning the game from care bears into death cliff?

Start with ship to ship hit box impact collision, then work on ship to object, then ship to ship with objects.

By Grabthar’s Hammerits it’s like trying to explain what line of sight and hit box detection is to the Thermians. I have left the Berenstein Bears timeline, and I am now in the hit box free bad timeline.

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Nope, there isn‘t. What you see is a clever rendered illusion of the client. In fact only points (actually spheres) in space with some parameters are interacting.

BTW, space is big, in a real space battle the likelihood that line of sight would matter can practically be ignored, except for cases involving celestials.

I‘m wondering why you didn‘t complain more about the static celestials which spin but don‘t move. :wink:

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