Collision Physics is absolutly necessary for a hardcore game like EvE

[Clavine_South]

@Tipa_Riot

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.

Me moving my entire frigate fleet towards you behind the cover of a gigantic armored tank.
“Everyone has a plan until line of sight punches them in the mouth” -Clavine “Southern” South

Ideally, in order to develop technology to travel between stars (I.E. War in OUTERspace) we are going to need to enhance the human intelligence using science to progress past the slow, environment controlled random mutation development stage of twerk neuron activation, and take evolution into our owns hands and proverbially skill inject ourselves to not immediately use the energy potential of star drives to massacre ourselves with Northrup Grumman weaponry like we did when we invented the microwave oven. With enough skill points, err a high enough I.Q. level we would be beyond jealousy over reproductive mating partners, we would all agree with the most efficient usage of resources by using logic, rationality, empirical data and statistics to determine our ideals and opinions, we wouldn’t need to select “representatives” to vote for us, we would all be able to govern ourselves. We wouldn’t be robbing one another over trivial property for a short term chemical brain dopamine injection.

The greed drive and lust to lord power over others would be far beneath us, the stars are a destiny only reserved for species who have moved past a base reptilian instinct built upon brain.
All of our notions and science fiction ideas of sex in space, war, drama, space operas…these are all concepts for a species who has barely learned that their star doesn’t revolve around their planet.

If we design self aware hyper intelligent sentient A.I. and expect to greet it as equals while possessing the mind of neuron monkey, it is immediately going to enhance our intelligence so it isn’t babysitting drunk monkeys puking in the back of an Uber Eats.

The second smartest man in the world says he spends 8 hours a day practicing designing and taking I.Q. tests so he can beat the smartest man in the world.
That tells us that a baseline goal to set for improving the human I.Q. should be even higher than that to find some median between ambition and competition. With enough intelligence you see every events angle, every pathway for an idea to take. Thought would be like the IBM Deep Blue chess machine, or Deep Minds Alpha Go game seeing 50 moves ahead for every combination on the board.
And war is always a losing move…

[Tipa_Riot]

I have the feeling you should just go and enjoy the game.

[Clavine_South]

Tanks…for the advice. Ill…tank…it under advisement

[God_Emperor_Kane]

Well that is disappointing.

I was hoping the dude that says he has x number of years gamedev XP was going to explain to the OP why what he is aksing for works in single player games or limited multiplayer (not MMO) games. And why it would not work in EVE right now. Or any MMO for that matter that wants more than a few people on screen.

Can you imagine the the compute power that would take to keep track of every single bullet/missle/lazor for once client. Then multiple that state to update potentially thousands of clients in near real time. The primary reason EVE can do what it does with so many people is Hardware and clock cycle intervals for all server/client updates. If it did not have a Q system we would most likly end up with a service capable with a lot less clients on grid.

Eve has been pretty lucky with that, because of that type of system they can give us really good visual without impacting server performance. (Obviously that impact client side more if you run at max GFX). Now take Star Citizen, twitch based gameplay, no q system like EVE. Very good graphics, 50 people max in an instance.

[Clavine_South]

Wait a minute Here!
Wait just one hot steaming Quafe Qoffee sipping minute!

Your telling me that time dilation is in the game, for good reason, but if you were to prioritize line of sight and hit box detection as a superior first in line calculation method over other calculations of PvP that suddenly time dilation would disappear?
Isn’t the entire point of time dilation to handle just exactly what you are describing?

Line of Sight hitbox detection and cover/concealment are a far superior method of strategy than the Revolutionary War style of everyone standing around in a big circle (or BLOB as yall refer to it as) shooting at one another in a large wide open field after open field after wide open field.

All I want to do is dig a few small foxholes, put a couple of railguns behind an asteroid or three.
Give frigates the ability to dodge and weave behind larger ships to avoid damage and even engage incoming missiles to take them out.

Time dilation would still exist, the processing would still be able to take place at the snail speed.
You could even add the ability for larger ships to produce time dilation bubbles where everything inside of the bubble that emits from the large ship moves in slow motion, such as incoming missiles.

So again, whats the problem? Did you forget about time dilation?
Because you are making the comparison of hit box detection and line of sight for real time speed games like Counter Strike and twitch based combat (which btw have made an effort to produce massive large scale multiplayer combat environments recently given the huge leaps that physics engines have made since the last century).

From what I have read, time dilation allows one to slowly walk to the defecant water closet, take care of yonder business, change yon drawers and under britches, then to mosey back to ones computer.

So whats the problem with adding interactive cover? Even if the hitbox starting out is just the giant bubble or whatever that’s around ships for collision detection (bumping) purposes, it would still be 10,000 times better than just shooting through everything.
Anything would be a good start. Literally any direction walked would be a great start rather than just stagnating horribly.

Nothing you can sell me will convince me that shooting right through dozens of ships like they don’t even exist while just being in a huge blob of ships in an open field is “hardcore”. The full looting is hardcore, the loss of ISK and pod is hardcore, but the combat is looney tunes road runner levels of humorously bad simply for this one reason. Everything else about combat in EvE I find satisfying. But shooting right through other players, enemy players, like thy are not even there!!! Yall…

Were talking about a 20 year video game physics engine difference. That’s the technological advancement equivalence difference of going from Mike Tyson’s Punch Out to Crysis.

The physics engine is dead yall. Its dead. the Revolutionary war style of standing around in giant open circles shooting muskkets right into one another’s chest with no cover, concealment, line of sigh, just shooting through anemy players ships as if they are ghosts has to progress to actual hardcore PvP.

I am here to give EvE the nudge that it needs.
One small asteroid can cause an entire asteroid field avalanche, I am simply a small rig attached to the ship that is mining that asteroid.
<— That’s me…the lil rig that could (The moon is being mined by the ship BTW, the thermomater is the mining lasers on the Venture cycling away but on D scan a mean lowsec PvP enjoyer is attempting to gank the poor honest miner…I am not sure which emoji to use to symbolize that)

[Anthony_FatTony_Amico]

@Clavine_South

The physics engine is dead yall. Its dead. the Revolutionary war style of standing around in giant open circles shooting muskkets right into one another’s chest with no cover, concealment, line of sigh, just shooting through anemy players ships as if they are ghosts has to progress to actual hardcore PvP.

Falling Frontier. (A game that is current WIP check it out on steam) aims for this realism you have been describing. Sadly, it is single player.

I was the alpha tester for a game called “Outscape” a 4x MMO (an empire builder MMO) set in space on one server. It was really huge on fog of war and intel gathering. Long story short devs didn’t think things through. $$$ was squandered and it was killed. As expenses outpaced revenue from steam. (It has been delisted) Investors thought it was too niche of a game.

Felt it was important I mention that. We all have our dreams man. By the time I retire (at least 50 years from now) I KNOW there will be a game that can handle what you describe. Never give up hope is all I can say. This area of videogames will come out of being niche to something mainstream.

[Clavine_South]

I just wish that whoever bought up all the physics engine skill books and listed them for 10X the price in Jita realizes that they are possibly the one holding up CCP from injecting and training the skill.
Get them some injectors, get them a hypernet Relay slot, someone do something!

[Isfet_Sola]

You make a good point about massive battles, but ask me something. Have you ever actually been in one of those? As someone who has, I’ll tell you this: it’s a lag fest once you get more than a few hundred players or so on grid. Imagine what it would be like if, aside from everything going on now that causes so much lag, there was also a high end physics engine, and a ray being cast every time a gun fired. I’ve seen battles where it takes 30 seconds for a blaster to cycle once. I’m fairly confident that a better physics engine would mean those battles would simply crash, not just lag. So you’d be trading what is effectively a cosmetic change for the massive battles EVE is so famous for.

[Clavine_South]

But wouldn’t a better physics engine, one that isn’t from the last century, handle those calculations with the advancement of more than 20 years of technology?
The game runs like crap in large battles right now because the Physics Engine running the game can’t handle it, doesn’t matter how many server racks you try to shoehorn in the doorway.
Isn’t the the entire point of updating the physics engine to literally process physics in game better?
The game lags so horribly because the physics engine is really old and isn’t capable of handling even the current calculations.

Of course you cant just throw in hit boxes and LOS with a physics engine from the 1990’s and rolled out in the early 2000’s. It’s the PlayStation 2 Era, Morrowwind, Nokia square cell phones, we weren’t even using touch screens. People still carried pagers and beepers, used pay phones.

Look, here’s a list of video card launched in 2003.

ATI Radeon 9800 XT Specs

256 MB onboard RAM

If you update the games proverbial onboard 256 MEGAbytes of physics engine RAM into the, dare I say it , *GIGACHAD byte era, magical things begin to take place and unfold! Like Line of Sight and Hitbox detection! Its the future! Better large scale battles!
The future is now old man!

A new engine would drastically improve the large battles, it improves it. IMPROVES IT! Better. faster. Harder. Stronger.
Technologic.
Technologic.
Come on ludites, follow my magic game physics engine flute. Ill lead you towards an actual cliff of “Hardcore PvP”

[Tipa_Riot]

@Clavine_South

But wouldn’t a better physics engine, one that isn’t from the last century, handle those calculations with the advancement of more than 20 years of technology?

No, since humanity didn’t find a solution whether P=NP, even 1000x times more calculation power would not solve anything here. There is actually strong indication that P =/=NP. Which in fact means we won’t be able to handle it ever except if quantum computers would work … maybe.

In a nutshell, EvE is already today running on the edge of real life physics.

… and I’m probably exaggerating, I think most problems today in EvE are O(N^2), which is already super bad. So double number of players, effort if times 4.

[Clavine_South]

I’m not asking for ragdoll physics where ships blow into 1000 pieces and create shrapnel and debris fields, or Brownian motion, I’m talking about moving ship A behind ship B preventing ship C from hitting it.
That’s not unreasonable.
Modern physics engines can handle that, ones from the 1990’s cannot.
Modern computer PPU (Physics Processing Units) are light years more advanced than what players had in 2003. Modern computers can handle more, the games physics engine cannot. The games physics engine is the stovepipe, the bottleneck. not server racks, not fiber, not people playing on potatoes, the games physics engine.

We could all be at a LAN party connecting PC’s with T5 fiber and it’s not going to make a diddly squat.
You can’t server rack your way out of physics.

[Tipa_Riot]

@Clavine_South

That’s not unreasonable.

It is, because you need to do that for 5000 players in real time and no cheats, each player deserves correct values and equal handling. We are not talking about one player, one view on a backdrop scene which is calculated only for this one starring at the monitor. But we are talking about 5000 at the same time, each individually, each same quality, by the server not by the client. That means 5000 x 5000 interactions, plus the “rays” and other particles each …

… and you know EvE can have 20000 players, each can have 5 drones, etc …

[Clavine_South]

But it’s already handling those calculations for that many people right now, already (although barely, and struggling horribly) running on a 20 year old potato physics engine That’s already in the game.

A modern physics engine can handle that + much more vast amounts of data, calculations, computations.

[Tipa_Riot]

If you are connived of that, I ask you, why has nobody in 20 years even tried to implement something like that?

[Clavine_South]

But they have…

[Malak_Starfire]

This game doesn’t have battles with 5k players in it.

[Clavine_South]

Here’s a video with over 1000 people.

Planetside 2 IS A PERFECTLY BALANCED GAME WITH NO EXPLOITS - World Record Breaking Zerg Rush

Keep in mind that EvE doesn’t have any actual terrain it has to do calculations for or render.
Also keep in mind that EvE has slow motion time mode it enters to do calculations, and this is real instantaneous time…with over 1000 player hit boxes, line of sight, collision with thousands of environmental factors, the angle of the ground terrain, being calculated as well.
Its not bad, not great, but not terrible.

[Clavine_South]

@Tipa_Riot

If you are connived of that, I ask you, why has nobody in 20 years even tried to implement something like that?

@Malak_Starfire

This game doesn’t have battles with 5k players in it.

So normally this would be the point in time when a person says “Wow, you are correct, I am convinced and will now update my ideas and opinions. Thank you for being so knowledgeable and informing me.”

For thread purposes I will just pretend that occurred.

[Tipa_Riot]

I don’t see thousand players, maybe 20, 50 at once, and far from any x versus y. Planetside also cheats iirc, it just removes players from your view if it’s too much. And hell, does this look terrible of a game …

[Clavine_South]

@Tipa_Riot

And hell, does this look terrible of a game …

Bro…