Thoughts about Quasar

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
1

so, i was just posting in the social hub thread below and it occurred to me that… if you were to have a lot of players in one location, be it on fleet in EVE, in vanguard on a battlefield or in a night club.

would it be possible to take Quasar one step further?

as I understand it Quasar loads fractions of a pixel instead of the whole pixel, allowing for faster data transfer to create the texture.
could this be a dynamic based off of a players latency relevant to each other?
allowing players close together to get some kind of better quality
while equally causing players further away having lower quality for the benefit of maintaining a better connection.

this would also mean in tidi fights, graphics are automatically adjusted to help with the server load (at least in theory)

i’m sure theres some kind of formula or calculation which can be done to determine the minimum viable pixel break down to achieve this.

sort of like
Distance
-------------- = Time
Speed

maybe there is something

Pixels
----------- = Graphical Load
Latency

with some kind of variable for number of players.

as a player who enjoys the the game especially its community aspect, I’d be willing to accept the most obscene & ludicrous level of potato mode if it meant i could be in a 10,000 player battle.

what would also be nice is if these battles were recorded and then rendered and released online for everyone to view, this would also meet the request of the community for some kind of dramatic camera footage.

2

If it was possible to actually get that many people engaged in a battle, CCP would find a way to do it. At the moment, however, you’re not getting that many people into a fight. You can bet they’ve got people figuring out what it will take to do it once it happens, however, but we’re nowhere close to needing it right now.

3

Aren’t the graphics all done client-side?

4

haven’t got a clue.

just thought if it could be done, how it could benefit the community, would be a neat thing.

5

I’m not sure what Quasar is but from what you are describing it sounds like distance based level of detail’s called LOD’s, but this is all client based for graphics and I think CCP already uses these which isn’t a big problem in huge tidi battle’s anyways I pretty much have my graphic’s set to medium np during big fight’s.

The bigger problem is all the server tick’s (network based) so that each player doesn’t desync with hundred’s of thousands of little tick’s of damage and module activations that everyone needs info on at the same time.

6

Dont mind drogon. About once a month they crawl out of the basement with some of the most outlandish ideas and makes about 10 posts. Then retreats back into the basement til the next month

7

Meh people should come up with crazy things every 100 posts or so 1 might be genius.

Like I heard a guy talk about having a 2nd server that predicts what is going to happen next does the calculations and if it happens the 1st server saves some processing time and if it doesn’t it gets chucked, to by-pass single node limitations, it sounds interesting but I’m not sure if it could be possible.

8

That sounds insane, even to this non-technical brain

9

well I assume server tick is sort of like latency, I’ll admit, understanding server ticks is new territory for me.

my understanding however, is that Quasar is some kind of graphical loading system which CCP uses. between client and the main servers (granted, i may have gotten this wrong)

it was talked about during fanfest,
so my thought process for this was to expand on the transmission of Quasar data into an individual amount of data based off of latency in the hopes of improving connectivity of players.

however if i’ve understood this wrong, then I hold my hands up.
i just recall watching about Quasar at fanfest, how each pixel is broken down into 4 sections or something and they send fragments of each section, allowing for faster data transfer for higher quality resolution (or something like that… its been a while since I’ve seen it)

working under the assumption that such a thing has an effect on the overall connectivity of the community, by adding a variable of latency (between players as well as the server) into the equation and having the process double, triple or quadruple down in the hopes for improved connection for everyone.

if it doesn’t work like this then fair enough but maybe someone high up will see what I’m trying to get at and connect the dots or fill in the blanks to see if it will benefit the community.

10

To be honest I’m way to lazy to go and search through fanfest data to find it lol… so I can’t really help you much.

But consider the logic of it if you heard it at fanfest then it was created by CCP which means they have min maxed the crap out of that tech already, so the only way to increase its efficiency is either through new tech or making the current tech more parallel.

Let me use my limited knowledge to try and dig deeper into your idea:

“as I understand it Quasar loads fractions of a pixel instead of the whole pixel, allowing for faster data transfer to create the texture.
could this be a dynamic based off of a players latency relevant to each other?
allowing players close together to get some kind of better quality
while equally causing players further away having lower quality for the benefit of maintaining a better connection.”

A texture is just the color of the object at that point on the object, its reflective details and its light emission details and all that would bowl down to would be the color of the pixel on your screen.
So this is all from your graphics card to your monitor and effects your fps but not your latency.

So your idea is to allow some type of texture desync to players that are too far to realize, but keep it synced to players close enough to see? The problem with this is that ship textures are loaded right at the start and the only thing’s that would influence them changing is things like explosions cuasing light to brighten up the texture on the ship’s and so on.

But that requires knowing exactly when a missile or something is going to land which is determined by the latency anyways so it wouldn’t really have any effect imo.

11

agreed, suggestion on the forums is just a form of expression usually founded in passion for the subject/topic or in this case, game in question.

sometimes you’ve got to wade through the bog to reach the treasure, SOME of my ideas have good merit to the concept but the proposed execution is usually game breaking or unbalancing in one way or another, but i also know several of my ideas have ultimately made it into the game, so sometimes it takes a scrub like me to throw something out there and see what sticks to the wall, sometimes thats all we got. i don’t work with servers, i’m not qualified in game dev

“had a thought” is all it should take, but apparently (not you @Kenzore ) its all it takes to get attacked on the forums.

1 Like
12

that’s true, its possible its already min maxed, but i only know whats been shown and not the full range of possibility, so it MIGHT be possible to improve on it further, if graphical data was sent locally through the web between players & the server, you could have local players to each other see ships naturally in better quality and it also naturally helps people further away or with lower quality hardware keep up (i unknowingly for many years played EVE on potato mode using DDR2 RAM)

you can then if you have better hard ware simply have a better graphical option, at least thats how i understand it works, my understanding my be incorrect though.

the main eve server recieves and transmits basic data, but detail loading is done via proximity between users within the game.

3 pilots in say… Rens trade hub…
2 playing from japan
1 on the east coast
the players from japan can see their ships in better detail due to being more localised. they would see the ship from the American player in a lower quality (or at least both retrieve a stream or lower data similar to what quasar does already)

this would also be the same for the Easy Coast Player for the other players ships.

but again, not my area, was just a thought, if do-able, maybe something will come of it. its my hope that someone up there in the ranks of CCP will understand the concept and use their mightly space wizardry to maybe help make space ships work better for all space potatoes.

edit: responding to your edit from a few posts back.

like i said, i have no idea if this idea would even work, maybe it will, maybe it won’t, maybe they’re only using it for highly detailed graphical models i don’t accurately remember.

I just hope it helps the community, if not then hey, it was a solid attempt and only shows I care about the community as a whole, if it does, then cool, the rising tide raises all ships and just this once, everybody wins!

13

I can see you are just missing key info let me try fill the blanks then you can enhance your ideas.

A guy is busy belt ratting in a system I warp into system warp to him and shoot him.

From the perspective of the guy belt ratting:
He is busy shooting the npc, I warp into system (My pc sends the data to server Player #@$@# has used the stargate and from here) [server receives that data tells the pc that gate goes to this system sends that systems data to the pc and tells it that it is allowed to load grid 12kms from that gate at position X:@#$ ; Y:@#$ ; Z:234 ] Pc gets the signal from the server and spawns in that exact spot and loads all the system data.

I hit D-scan, pc sends the request for data to the server the server sends the data back to the pc and the pc loads the d-scan with that data.

I see there is a player ship with his name on it narrow the search and warp to his belt.

My pc sends data to the server saying that I have warped from such and such a location towards the belt at this range, the server sais you will land here: X:Y:Z at this time with this player already on grid shooting this npc.

My pc gets the data loads all the graphics looks for the player skin loads that then only sends that data to my graphics card to load it on my screen through all the pixels. I double click in space towards the other player lock him and activate my modules.

For every action I do it send’s that data to the server the server does calculations and send’s that data to the other player saying this ship is landing on grid with this skin at this location he moves towards you and locks you and activates these modules (1 action at a time obviously all bunched together in 1 second intervals called server ticks.)

My gun goes on it animates a projectile towards the other player, the other player already knows I activated my module becuase the server said so as I pushed it before it even shows on my screen so the other players pc knows it needs to animate the gun fire animation aswell which causes the texture on the ship to light up.

So from my weird explanation you can see that the texture changes come right at the end way after all the server data has been sent.

So it won’t effect the server lag only pc graphical lag.

14

wow, thank you for such a detailed response and helping me further my understanding of how it works.

its a shame that the graphical load comes at the end and that there isn’t a way to help the overall connectivity between players via graphical loading.

without next generation technology, servers or satellite connections, it really seems like there’s nothing that can be done about it then, oh well. was worth the attempt imho.

thank you again for explaining so well.

1 Like
15

I mean that kinda sounds more workable than whatever Drogon is doing. It’s basically branch prediction.

16

It’s almost as if the third in this post already told you that:

… but I’ll take it as feedback that I should stop using rhetorical questions in such a situation.

17

well, respectfully your original comment came across as asking a question.
to which i explained that i had no idea.

Kenzore took the time to explain the process to me to elevate my understanding

again, respectfully
if you had taken the time to politely explain instead of by your own admission asking rhetorical question, I could of given you the same response

1 Like
18

I realise that.

1 Like
19

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.