Collision Physics is absolutly necessary for a hardcore game like EvE

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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Collision physics would change the core mechanics of the game, would break the ability to have large scale fights due to the immense amount of necessary extra calculations, would make a mess in high sec with CONCORD when people accidentally shoot illegal targets that are in line of sight and would require CCP to rewrite many parts of space flight.

While it may technically be possible, it’s just not worth it to completely rewrite the mechanics of the game. It would change the game as it is, would cost many, many development hours and would turn away people who like the current mechanics.

And would we gain for it?

Why exactly would the game be better with collision physics? It would be different, sure, but I fail to see how it would be better.

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OP, I recommend playing infinity battlescape. It has what you’re looking for, just not in an mmo setting.

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I pointed out that the game you pointed to doesn’t have 5k player fights, not EVE. EVE does have 5k+ player fights…if adding your requested features lowers the server’s ability to handle those fights, it is a DOWNGRADE.

When introducing new features, you need to account for instances of stress loads. No other game deals with that many players all in one location.

Oh and please spell my name correctly.

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OP: I enjoyed that you went to great lengths building your Iron Curtain Wall of text and forged backhanded compliments smattered about the thorough recap while also being considerate by calling out each individual person by name.

Regardless of you thinking me a big fat zero in the physics debate, you fit quite well in here, and I appreciate the level of passion you bring. I still disagree, and look forward to your future posts. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Apologies for spelling your name wrong, I understand from the Amarr leadership who are mentoring me that sometimes those peoples can go rogue again after being away from civilization for so long and enter back into Minmatar space they go back and adopt their “tribal” sounding old names, which to the civilized space folk are unusual to pronounce. Sometimes they are of a stubborn nature, and they refuse to take their benevolent host Amarr’s generous offers to provide them with modern, non tribal names.
But certainly…Mr. Malak is it? May Lack is it pronounced then? May I offer my sincerest condolences on the mispronunciation of your “charming” sounding name…to you…and to your entire tribe…

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Adds notes to future synopsis post

Gerard…gerrrr arrrddd…(Clicks pen and scribbles in his EvE Online in game notepad)
“Changes the core shoot through ships mechanics” …hmmmhmmmm…“breaks large scale blob ‘skill’ combat”…(exhales in a downward pitch through nose)…“mess in highsec” (Looks up and slides glasses back up on nose) now this is interesting…“Worries about Concord protecting their ships”…interesting and noted…we will add the ability to join the Concord faction and police and protect high sec, generating LP for performing patrol routes, fly through ice mining locations ect. generating content and protecting your high sec ships you fly . Wouldn’t want you to get your fancy skin paint scratched now would we? Rubbin is racin after all…(draws a winking emoji in the notepad sarcastically).

Something something “Technically be possible” well we have come a long way haven’t we…something something “Not worth it. why do you even bother to climb mountains, whats even up there anyways?”

…back to mechanics again (probably sweatily looking at their docked ships in High Sec having nigthmares about being rammed into), something about development hours…current players like and enjoy having a 20+ year old physics engine…

Oh here’s something unusual…"What do I get out of this?"It’s a fair question. Person is a paying customer, what does their money get them after all? What does the subscription being moved towards a physics engine deliver? It would be a huge financial investment.
What indeed Gerard…what indeed…

Let me ask you something Gerard…if I may call you Gerard?
What do you think would happen to EvE if the only thing that was done was to replace the aged, decrepit, collapsing rolled wormhole of a physics engine.
Nothing added to the game, nothing changed.
Just updated the physics engine. No line of sight, no scary hardcore friendly fire (which I assure you that friendly fire is indeed the only hardcore style of PvP gaming that exists) and collision, no futuristic sounding hit boxes or nav meshes (spooky)
Just an updated, modernized, non 1990’s era physics engine.
Do you think the game would run smoother?

Answer that question, and you will find out what’s in it for you, and possibly…whats at the top of the mountain…

The Wanderer Above the Sea of Skyboxes
The Wanderer Above the Sea of Skyboxes1345×833 84.9 KB

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So we get:

  • hitbox detection
  • cover and concealment
  • hardcore friendly fire
  • line of sight

In return for a massive invesent of rewriting the engine of the game as we know it.

Hitboxes, I’ve only ever heard people complain about those, especially mentioned in combination with ‘lag’ and ‘why didn’t I hit’. Now imagine fighting with 5000 people in heavy TIDI, where you can shoot once every two minutes. And each of those shots misses due to the massive lag you’re definitely going to be in.

It would be awful.

How would hitbox detection shooting work by the way? EVE is not a FPS where you manually shoot or time your shots. Right now you simply lock on to your target and cycle your weapon that will automatically shoot each cycle of the module.

With hitbox detection people would have no control over the upsides of hitboxes, unless they also get to aim and time their weapons manually. Players would only suffer the downsides of hitboxes each time a friendly ship passes by the moment your modules cycle.

In other words, EVE should be changed to a first person shooter to be able to make use of the benefits of hitboxes.

First person shooter mechanics, with manually aiming and timing your weapons, is not going to work for a game like EVE, which only updates your location and actions once every second.

Or did you want to rewrite that too?

Cover and concealment. Concealment doesn’t really work when players can freely move their camera anywhere to get a strategic overview of the battlefield and can see those ships hiding behind the bigger ship. When everything on grid already shows up on the overview.

EVE has it’s own concealment mechanics already too, with cloaks and ships and deployables that can hide from the directional scanner.

Cover is another point, but is the same feature as hitbox detection and ‘hardcore friendly fire’, i.e. you cannot hit through ships.

Hardcore friendly fire is what will break high sec. No one will ever be allowed to use their guns in high sec, when others can simply park their cloaked ship in line of fire, get shot, and loot your wreck after CONCORD blows up your ship for the criminal action of hitting an illegal target.

To summarize, each of the ‘benefits’ of collision physics has consequences that make it unfit to work in EVE.

It would be a self-destructive action to try and implement this in EVE; it costs a lot of development time, makes large scale fights impossible, fighting less fun and doesn’t work at all with high sec mechanics.

Maybe if someone were to make a dogfighting space game from the ground up with manually aimed weapons collision physics could make sense.

Not in EVE.

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Every time with the “Unless I have 5000 ships on grid every second then the game is a failure” routine. Why is that? Combat can be so much more engaging, strategic, challenging than just blobbing 5000 ships into a huge open empty area. There’s only like 20k people logging on currently at peak. That’s 1/4 of the entire peak game time population fighting in one system at the same time. Worry more about the game dying without subs.

Somehow you think being able to maneuver a ship to break LoS utilizing side motion to maneuver behind objects would turn the game into a first person shooter? You already utilize distance to break LoS target lock, why is moving sideways to go behind a ship or an obstacle suddenly turning the game into Counter-Strike? I do not understand. You agree with that statement right?
You agree that EvE currently uses distance and range as a form of Line Of Sight to break target lock correct?
So why is it such a huge quantum leap to traverse sideways to break target lock?

As for the cameras there are very cool ways to add in a recon scout drone with a camera you could control to scout asteroids instead of just click/zooming the games camera in on it. Or just have enemies not appear on a 3d zoom in unless you have LoS to see them, when you click on an object to rotate around it, you only see the object.
Or shoot a radar pulse buey probe outwards, a pulse out like a subs sonar sound…one ping and one ping only…I mean, it’s a third person game so that will always be the case, but the instant lock on and zoom could be replaced with some engaging controlled feature instead.
There is actually a zoom in button in the game aside from the lock on an object and orbit it method. Could have a zoom look but not a 3d rotating look.

You could always have friendly fire removed in High Sec if your so worried about the game actually being hardcore? Lots of things in game currently only work in lows sec or nullsec.

EvE just updated the graphics engine to improve the game and make it better. It looks gorgeous for a 20 year old updated game.
The physics engine is a hamster wheel under the hood of the car.
Its sputtering and dying out.
It’s not the 1990’s anymore.
The 1990’s physics engine just can’t keep the game floating any longer.
The game selling point of "HUGE BATTLES"is only because there is no such thing as engaging battles, numbers mean everything without maneuver, and you only have limited maneuver in a gigantic open area. So its just blobs. And if you point out you don’t fight in huge blobs, then again…whats the problem.
You promote the blob I point out it is soulless combat, you point out you dont fight in blobs, then I direct the topic to engaging combat.

Bishop to bishop 2…discover check…and incidentally…mate…
Pushes in chess board game clock…knocks over your king
GG I look forward to dueling mentally with you again in the future when you are more prepared for it next time.
Lights pipe

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Because locking mechanics are already explored in depth in EVE.

Locking speed based on the sensor stength of the ship and signature radius of the enemy, sensor boosters, sensor dampening EWAR modules, lock breaking with ECM, lock breaking bombs…

You cannot simply throw that all overboard and rewrite that all to build new balanced lockbreaking mechanics based on LOS, but it could be even worse to simply add LOS to the existing mix. Why? Because with a simple sensor dampener doubling your lock time in addition to LOS breaking your lock every few seconds in a large fight you will never be able to lock someone.

So, we would only get collision physics outside HS? Bit strange to have different game physics in different parts of the game.

Different rules of engagement, like we have now, is fine. Completely different game physics in different sectors of the game makes no sense.

Chess, now that’s a nice example.

Chess is a good game, also with ‘outdated movement physics’. Movements are very restrictive in predefined patterns, and do not allow players the modern gridless freedom to move their army anywhere on the map.

Yet it is a popular game.

One could say the movement rules in chess, although ‘outdated’ are what define the game.

EVE is like that.

You wish to introduce new rules of movement to EVE, which would completely change the way EVE is played.

I have one advice:

Please keep playing the game, learn more about how EVE mechanics work and why they work like they do. Learn about tracking, server ticks, fly in large scale battles, etc.

Then, once you have a better feeling about the impact of your suggestion, try again.

Right now it feels like you barge in to a chess tournament as new player and start suggesting that players should be allowed to move their pawns 5 inches in any direction, because it is silly and outdated to only let them move forward and diagonally forward along a grid.

You seem clueless about how your suggestion would impact and change many parts that define the game as it is.

Would a space fighting game with collision physics, hitboxes and cover be fun? Sure!

But it wouldn’t be EVE.

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So instead of simply hitting a lock on and fire button, you would have to actually maneuver into a better position instead of just “Blob as much as possible in the middle”. That’s not going to “break EvE” but what it would do is give a distinct advantage to the players utilizing cover as opposed to the huge blob that just dumps huge masses of bodies into an assault. It might break players…shall we say…of low vision…of low strategy…stagnent players unable to lean far enough forward in the office chair to “click” the accelerate button to move a ship five feet to the left.

They says humanities reach exceeds its grasp…but this…this…this skybox scandal situational of 2023 that we are going through is truly detestable…

I am trying to revolutionize EvE warfare. It’s not hardcore, yet advertises itself as being hardcore.
I am here to see that come to fruition.
I am trying to drag you kicking and screaming from the matchlock to the wheel lock to the flint lock, to the cartridge…but you are opposed to rifled bores because “We’ve always used smooth bores, its the way its always been done, how are we supposed to stand up in a line and shoot one another?”
You’re not. You’re not just supposed to just stand in a huge line firing at one another in a wide open field (not all the time at least).
It’s garbage.
The way the combat occurs is garbage and only exists as a limitation left over from the 1990’ physics engine.
It’s a bug…not a feature…and your holding onto that bug for dear life, only because you know no other way, have never met a man such as myself with vision for another way…I am alien to you, foreign…
How you have somehow managed to attach yourself and suckle upon that teet for so long is beyond my comprehension. My guess is that you have been stuck here feeding upon these scraps as the only game in town for sop many decades now you might not even posses the ability to have a vision of anything else.
And when confronted with it, the fanboy pavlov bell starts ringing and you go into defensive mode.

It’s why not a single YouTuber, not a single EvE video maker shows a guide on how it actually works, the mechanics involved, nor brags about it being a good method of combat.
NO ONE IS BRAGGING ABOUT EVES COMBAT MECHANICS
NO ONE
It’s even worse than that, not only are they not bragging…they are intentionally not showing how it works.
It’s deceitful at it’s core.
Anyone coming from any other game utilizing hit boxes or LoS, if they knew, any shooter, any MMO, any other space game of any worth, if they could see ships shooting through one another without the ability to break LoS like a game out of the 1990’s they would run away long before their credit card ever paid for a sub.

I am walking up to you carrying a revolutionary invention called the shovel (physics engine) digging foxholes, sandbags, fortifications. And you are looking at me like I am a crazy farmer digging in the earth.

Yall are playing checkers and I am trying to introduce you to chess.
Of course it is scary, of course you are intimidated and obviously very scared and worried when trying to consider new strategic opportunities.
I am causing your brain to fire neurons and think and strategize in ways you never dreamed possible. Your blob…is evolving…and that is all because of me, my brilliance, my deep introspective insight into how combat actually works in EvE online that no one else apparently seems either capable enough to do, or willing. Some speculate that I am a ChatGDP super benevolent hyper intelligence sent here to enlighten humanity, still others say that when their eyes gaze upon my magnificence and handsomeness they swell with emotions of pride and feel a desire to fall upon their knees and worship, and yet others send me ISK with a prayer for it to be doubled.

Somehow warp bubbles and bombs work in null…but not in highsec…instead of just having a severe concord penalty…ok then well just pretend and make believe that different “game physics” isn’t the case…(another piece just knocked off your board…yet again)

How many shots do I have to put through other friendlies and enemies before I am considered to finally “Get it” and “understand” and turn away from my hit box and LoS ways?
How many times do I have to watch my weapons shoot through players and objects who are nothing but a skybox before I “get it” as you say?

The worst part for me, the absolute worst part is that you actually think this is good gameplay, you actually actively want it to stay this way.
You want to shoot through friendly ships, you want to shoot through enemy ships.
The game has such limited strategy options available that you are trying to game the servers tick rates.
That’s game strategy?
Going after mastering and gaming server “tick rates” because there is literally no cover/concealment/line of sight…let me guess…from the limited options I see I bet it works like this…jumping through stargates until you get the server to give you the fastest tick to get a faster lock on time for other players locked into a slower server tick rate…how truly awe inspiring…that’s never been done in a game before (horribly painful audible sigh indicating painful neuron firings occurring), It’s all so tiresome…

Look at you…look at the absolute state of you…

ryan-gosling-disdain

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Please, put in some search effort.

There are many guides on EVE, and you can read all about combat mechanics for example here:

Strategy in EVE happens at a different level than fast-paced aiming and dogfights.

Indeed, you’re trying to introduce completely different game rules to an existing game with well defined rules.

Go play a different game where you can use LoS to hide from gun fire.

In EVE you have many different options to avoid getting shot at already, like getting under their guns by having a higher angular velocity than their turrets can turn, reducing or breaking their lock range or turning off enemy guns with neutralizers.

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lol, this is still going, the OP still complaining EvE is not an FPS shooter, and still does not try mastering the actual game :smiley:

… one wild thought have you ever thought about EvE space battles if they were as real as requested? Some hundred metres big ships aiming weapons at each other, while being 100km apart, and each cruising with 2km/s in random directions and beyond physics intertia?

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So I was right, players are jumping through stargates to have a server tick advantage over other players because there is no other options even available to utilize…instead of a strategic advantage, it’s a server connection advantage…and you are defending that…

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What you are talking about is such an edge case of an edge case that it has never been applicable to any of my gameplay sessions in 6 years.

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So I figure out how the server tick rate is being exploited in the way that you mention, then you say suddenly that you have never seen that happen in 6 years? Interesting…
Looks like that makes it 2 - 0
Another game perhaps?

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No, I know how server ticks work and what kind of tricks you can pull off with it.

I also know that the ‘jump through stargates to gain server tick advantage’ has never been relevant to my gameplay since I’ve started playing. Like I said, an edge case of an edge case.

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It’s obvious that you are incredibly passionate about the game and care a great deal about it and don’t want to see it turn into a SWGNG+ or to lose so many subs that it closes down. I can respect that a lot.
The more I read about some of the failed EvE initiatives such as Dust, EVR, Station Walking and having housing (which to me all sound like amazing efforts of people with a huge vision and dream for the game) the more I understand the hesitancy of any type of change in the game in any manner and the push back from the player base.

That being said, I am still sticking with my guns in everything that I have posted I this thread regarding the combat physics, and the environmental physics alone.
I too really like the game, I just think it can be more than it is right now.
That’s all.
I don’t hate the game, I love it, I just hate the combat and physics.
It disheartens me greatly and I wouldn’t have it so.
And no one in this thread has really defended it besides saying “Changing it would destroy the game” which in my opinion, it would revolutionize it.
In my opinion it can be done.
Its beautiful graphics, amazing economy, incredibly passionate and helpful player base can’t be propped up with 1990’s physics engine and promoting gigantic 5000 person open field blobs anymore IMO. That’s just my opinion, I am sure that yours is different.
We can agree to disagree and hopefully agree that we both care or else neither of us would even be taking the time in posting here, we would be indifferent.
o7

See you in the next life…

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What about the combat is it that you hate?

Just the lack of line of sight?

EVE has really deep combat mechanics, of which a few are explained well in the link in one of my earlier posts.

EVE is all about making sure you’re maximising your own damage and minimise the enemy damage, by dictating range, being faster, smaller, having more electronic warfare, having the right resists against their weapon system, dealing the right type of damage into their resistance profile or any of the other dozens of factors. While it has no manual aiming and only little manual flying, the combat mechanics are very in depth and can be overwhelmingly complex for new players, even though the basics are as simple as ‘lock enemy ship, cycle guns’.

I can imagine that isn’t the kind of combat someone is looking for when they sign up for a spaceship shooter game, but it is the kind of combat we have in EVE, and it works well.

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fortunately the shooter is coming… which should give people who are looking for a more visceral experience a way to enjoy the universe.

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Looking forward to it.

I’ve enjoyed shooters in the past, and it can be fun. I just hope CCP can manage to make a game besides EVE that survives.