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PvP Mechanics and wrong gameplay direction ?


Aesir

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Hi Everyone,

 

If you did gather all the info on this game you may have notice 3 things:

- JC said (approximately) : "would be cool to have a lua script which make your ship doing an automatic front to back (180° turn) with one button so you can face a foe behind you"

- The game will be first person view.

- As everyone know, pvp will be lock then fight depending of characteristic of your ship, I guess he has EvE gameplay in mind.

Problem:

This 3 "things" belong to very different game design choices, because the first one is "arcade" or "simulation" gameplay, where you need to react fast to face your taget (and aim?) in order to shoot at it correctly. The second, FPS mode, is also arcade gameplay where you have the limitation of the view angle and camera, increasing the difficulty of finding your target compared to a third person.

Last is tactical gameplay, where you certainly have to react fast as well, but more important, have to do choices giving a certain situation, you analyze and react, prepare the situation before it comes (design your fit). It is all but arcade mechanics, compare EvE online against Elite Dangerous and you'll get what I have in mind.

Well, it is emergent gameplay ! Why not mix ? Well ... because you are manoeuvring your ship in an arcade way, you expect to eventually dodge, do nice things moves and enjoy a dogfight ... while the damage you do and you suffer are actually not dependent of this here... In a more technical way, the game is using position prediction to simulate smooth movement while the position information of player are updated not frequently enough to simulate a dogfight. You may say, it is not the goal of the game, indeed, so why would we even need "arcade" mechanics ? Just put a ship list on the right of your cockpit UI and click on "target" then "orbit at 10km" if you know what I mean.

I could also add to this the concept of big ship with plenty of automatic weapons < big ship with plenty of manual weapons controlled by several players, (why would I ever want to sit on cockpit and click on "target" then "fire", then "target, then "fire", etc).

 

I am not shooting at the game right now, I just want to expose my concern about the risk of such a gameplay, it could be very frustrating to have smooth and cool control of your ship but with no relevant impact in a fight. Overall, the mix is dangerous and could lead to unhappy or unpleasant gameplay feeling. And yes I know that there is technical reason underneath, but here we may need an emergent technology to solve this... (Lock then P2P to avoid Server overload, would be like P2P on the fly with your target ? I'm not really a specialist in that specific domain you probably thought of this already)

 

That's an open topic, please throw your thoughts.

 

Aesir

 

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Hello there.

EVE's "lock and fire" doesn't mean DU has to do the "fire and forget".

The Elder Scrolls Online - a game I spent about, eh too much of my time to be honest - has a tab-targeting systme - meaning your attacks lock-on to the enemy. You can break a "lock-on" from an enemy's attack, by dodge rolling (100% to avoid an attack, both AOE and directed or conal). ESO's soft-lock system, or active lock-on, means that every single time you press left click and you aim at an enemy,. your attack homes in on them.

That's a VERY likely scenario of the game's combat being like. Why? Cause ESO bases its netcode to action prediciton (similar to diablo) and DU poretty much as adapted thayt model of programming for its netcoding called Actor Model.

That being said. how could the ESO system of soft-lock targeting meet EVE Online half way?

Let me explain.

Let's say you have a staffighet - starfighters have a nose gun, thus you need to strafe to attack your enemy, no really, that's the term when fighters zero in their noses guns, strafe. So, your shi phas a max ω (angular velocity) of 0.1 Radians (number is for the examplen not taken seriously) and your nose gun is a turbo-amzeballs pulse cannon (cause the Empress won't be pleased with anything less than a Pulser, amirite?), so your Pulser has about 5 Km Optimal range.

But oh noes, the enemy is Lil' Timmy, following the latest Zarvox PvP mayhem video, so Lil' Timmy flies his starfighter at 1500 m/s (cause scruibs do speed-tank). Your Pulser ,at 5000 meters Optimal, (sure hit within that range) can only track a max of 500 m/s with its 0.1 Radians rate of turn.

Now, this is the real simple crossroads of the two systems. In EVE, ifyour trackign is less than the enemy's anvular velocity at X range, then you have Tracking Speed/ Angular Velcity, and you get the "damage status".

Since your tracking is terrible, that translates into the game ass "your shot is glancing". You still though, aim to shoot at a voxel aprt of Lil' Timmy's ship - exactly like how the ming system works in DU, they have spoken that's how they want to do things already, just clarifying. You aim your guns at a VOXEL volume on the attack's ship, not "homing in" on them - although, to be fair, MISSILES, could home in on the enemy's Core Unit, and just have the animation collide with the first voxel surface it finds. 

So, since your ship can't actually fight at that range  very well, your attacks come out as "grazing hits", whioch are more or less, if memeory servescorrectly, you dealign 30% of your damage (before resistances apply). 

 

As for your comparison between E:D and EVE, you compare two space games with totally differnet gameplay.


Now, your suggestion of EVE's cancer of a clusterfuck of an overview, does have a merit - for EVE Online, a 14 yeard old game with such a terrible legacy code, that you want to take it out the back and shoot it on the head to tkae it out of its misery. Remember, EVE's based on Magic the Gathering, that's why the game has remants of VERY BVERY OLD SCHOOL RPG MECHANICS - like the aformentioned Overview, which is mroe or less the "card mat" of Magic the Gatrhering. And yes, ships in EVE are just Decks you sort out ,your Capacitor is your mana pool and EVE is a high fantasy MMO with a sci-fi chip on its shoulder. Tell me all about how "EVE is cyberpunk", Blood Raiders are vampires, no matter how much they say in the lore they use slaves for transfusions of blood.

What I was saying?


Oh yeah. ESO's targeting system idea NQ may 9 or may not, hey, I am not a fortune teller ) have on soft-lock targeting, is a nice idea. You call it Arcadey, we call it 2017.

ESO's targeting scheme rewards positioning and situational awareness, while EVE's system of hit-chance calculations rewards you, the player, reacting to thigns happening to you.

Could you be blown to bits by a Rokh that's been stacked for maximum targeting range in EVE Online at 250Km before you could react? Absolutely, but only if you didn't react to it. Only difference in DU, is that you can HIDE behind objects or other ships to avoid being primaried. 

So, 3 years from now, when you take your starfighter on a dive in between enemy formations to avoid being peppered by the GSF - or, let's be honest Pandemic Legion -  be glad that NQ didn't go for the Overview from EVE Online :P

Cheerios, 

Cpt. Twerkmotor


P.S. : Also, there's a high chance they don't want an overview system cause you won't be flying an Erebus on your own. Heck I doubt you'll be flying ANY ship on your own, other than a starfighter.

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For newcomers to MMOs in general, Twerks informative message above requires a bit of context:

 

For those that want to learn more about what "angular velocity" means in Eve Online should give this a watch (and who doesn't like a good French accent) 

 

 

 

The ESO targeting system, and some MMO targeting systems in general, are nicely explained here (first 6 minutes):

 

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First thanks for the detailled answer, and please be carefull with your english, not saying it aint good, just that english isn't the mother tongue of most of us and some of your sentences are "wuuttt".


Yeah I do understand your point, you may be right, if NQ ever go in that way. I mean, my concern isn't about being technically possible or not. I played hours on ESO and to be honest, I quit a couple of times because of the gameplay (also because of the lie about "do the char you want" which is actually "please pickup one of the already formated class").
 

19 minutes ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

As for your comparison between E:D and EVE, you compare two space games with totally differnet gameplay.

Well from my understanding DU should be somewhere between, kinda like you said.

Point is, in ESO rather your face rather not, but there is not such angular calculation, there is in EvE, but because you're not gonna do awesome instant turn back to escape any missile going at you, it's kinda slow acceleration an a lot of inertia which both helps in the "action predicition" model. And you may notice that both EvE and ESO have a third peron view which is more related to "slower" let's say tactical gameplay, position/movement is not really a thing in those games.
But In DU that's another story, I mean, first person and fast movement with LUA scripting ? it looks like it should be like "dodgefight", now I'm not saying it's not possible to do a mix, it should exist something in the middle, but emergent gameplay is difficult and it is something to work on carefully. It could be total crap or a revolution, and that's my concern.

 

 

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Well, a thing I learned in EVE - which was a lie after a while - is that in combat you can't do much. In cobmat for examplke in EVE, you ican rapidly change directions to throw enemy attacks off ( as your angular velocity of your ship COUNTS towards the transversal speed). So, if I have Jackdaw in Propulsion Mode, I can constanl;y change direction and I can pretty much throww off MANY hits. It's a hard process, but it IS doable.


ESO is a mixed bag. I was on the same boat as you on the "start a class" and the departure from Skyrim's model (or Oblivion), howver, after the altest expansion, you CAN do the class you want.


I currently an a PvP Tank, with one Armor giving me a 1 minute cooldown on a powerful self-heal when I het to 30% of my health 9which is huge to begin with). Then I got a set of sword + Shield + 3 armor pieces that give me the abilit to spamm my Weapons' echantments cosntasntly, thus dealing tremendous amount of damge to people who expect me to be "build for meta".

What classI started as ? Nightblade, the Rogue / Warlock archetype. How many Nightblade skills I use o nmy bars? 2. The other 10 skills are all skils every class i nthe game has access to (PvP skilltree, Fighters Guild, Mages Guil, Undaunted and Heavy Armor skilltree).

So, yes, some classes can do some things better (i.e Dragon Knights can do better melee mage builds), but so does any class.

 

 

But that's also the case in EVE Online. Your ship is your "Class". Stratios for example is EVE Online's Nightblade. It can tank, drain energy and use "spells" to fight dirty - like a Warlock / Rogue hybrid ;) .

I get what you mean, but in DU's case of combat with ships, those maneuvers JC Baillie spoke off with Lua scripting, those maneuvers WILL cost you fuel. Those are VERY high-G maneuvers. 

 

Also, Ships (for now) have third person view. ESO has a third person view... cause sadly, the game was developed with a third person view in mimd. The First Person view in ESO was added later on  to make the fanbois of TES : Skyrim happy... :/


But I'd have to absolutely disagree on one thing. ESO does take positioning to begin with. I regularly play as archer sniper in ESO and one of the things I have to ALWAYS keep n mind in PVP, is my position, in other words, making it impossible for the eenmy to come towards me, while shooting at them from maximum range. Positioning also palys a BIG role in EVE Online ,especially when you play a Stealth Bomber or a Tengu Sniper. You want to warp in, align while shooting at the logistics ships and then warp off before they can hit you.

Sure, ESO has no "math" involved, but that's what EVE's combat brings into the mix. An enemy shoots at you? Move left and right or do barrel rolls (remember, you turning around your ship DOES increase your change to avoid hits or reduce their damage). Plus, if your enemy has to click every time they have to fire at you, you COULD make them waste shots in empty space by performing rapid maneuvers (like how in EVE you can do that by cahning directions all the time and then hitting the afterburner as you go directly to the enemy, thus escaping their warp disruptors and escaping ;) ).


Just don't be afraid of the targeting model. I have no doubt that when it coems to fleets fighting in DU, it will be like EVE Online, aka "primary on the dominix".

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Quote

Français :

Je vais rapidement répondre au premier point "automatic front to back (180° turn)".
Le LUA vas faire (grossièrement) cette enchainement d'action :
1- Coupé les moteurs de propulsions
2- Faire une rotation 180°
3- Activé la "Marche arrière"

 

Dans l'espace, quand on vas dans une diretction et que l'on a aucune poussé, on ira toujours dans cette direction, quelle que soit l'orientation du vaisseau.
Si on est dans l'atmosphére, on peut aussi faire un "front to back", mais il faudra pivoté trés vite.

Il n'y a rien d'Arcade dans une telle manoeuvre.

 

I will quickly answer the first point "automatic front to back (180 ° turn)".
The LUA will (grossly) make this chain of action:
1- Shut-down the propulsion motors
2- Rotate 180°
3- Enabled "Reverse"

 

In space, when you go into a direction and you have no thrust, you will always go in this direction, whatever the orientation of the ship.
If one is in the atmosphere, one can also make a "front to back", but it will have to be rotated very quickly.

There is nothing Arcade in such a maneuver.

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I guess that's why we'll have pre-alpha, followed by alpha-1 and then followed by alpha-2... and depending on how things go, maybe alpha-3 and then beta-1 and so on.

 

I broadly agree with the OP, it does sound like a bit of a fruit salad. We'll have to see how it plays.

 

The concept may not survive the implementation, but it will be interesting to see what can be done.

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43 minutes ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

But I'd have to absolutely disagree on one thing. ESO does take positioning to begin with. I regularly play as archer sniper in ESO and one of the things I have to ALWAYS keep n mind in PVP, is my position, in other words, making it impossible for the eenmy to come towards me, while shooting at them from maximum range. Positioning also palys a BIG role in EVE Online ,especially when you play a Stealth Bomber or a Tengu Sniper. You want to warp in, align while shooting at the logistics ships and then warp off before they can hit you.

That's not what i meant, I meant precise postion like a shooter, sure position is a key like any good pvp game, but its not <200ms and it is anyway predictable when you gonna be in range or not.

 

 

43 minutes ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

Sure, ESO has no "math" involved, but that's what EVE's combat brings into the mix. An enemy shoots at you? Move left and right or do barrel rolls (remember, you turning around your ship DOES increase your change to avoid hits or reduce their damage)

That's something, yet you actually need to be already in movement to see the math, because inertia and stuff its not gonna be instant.

 

Overall everything you said looks good, but don't tell me it is fast gameplay, there is a lot of action happening in EvE and in ESO thats, giving you the feeling that this is fast, in fact it's not that fast.
How many action are you gonna do in DU ? Especially if you pilot your starship (even small ?) with a crew, it may feel slow and quite boring with one or two weapon, of couple of LUA script that you gonna activate sometimes depending fo the situation, and then the control of your ship. In EvE/ESO you have multiple things to look at and care about, yet DU looks more simple and should be more simple even at the release, there is so much stuff to care about before implementing more weapon/defense system.

Now that i'm more thinking about Elite Dangerous, it does actually looks like what you describe, but the gameplay is a bit boring in fighting, it is all about "you track ?" no-> you lose, yes->does the ennemy shoot at you ? no -> you win, yes -> who got the better stats ? It's very simplified but it's more or less that. LUA moves could be a thing in that case, adding some special moves that may change the deal.

I hope DU aint gonna be a simple rock paper scissors, especially for beginners.

 

We are not that far from seing boring gameplay with "meta" ship like a gigantic box of vexel with big guns and a couple of thruster to turn your ship in order to track you target and simply press fire.

When players build their weapons, you can be sure that they will exploit any weak points in the gameplay. If you ever played Robocraft or Crossout, you should understand what I mean.


Well, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it gonna be bad, I'm not pescimist neither, I just want to share my previous experiences and point now what NQ should be carefull about before it's to late.

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1) DU is in Pre-Alpha, so calling its "PVP" simple is like me saying the "economy in the game is crap,, DACs ae so overpriced as of now, you can get 500000 shmeckles o none side of the system and 500 on the other". You can't claim something is "simple" when it's not even there yet.

2) I never said it's fast gameplay. I said it's INVOLVING. You have to think how and when to attack ,as well as how to move to avoid being exposed to the enemy's retaliation. In ESO, that means "keep at range" or "dodge roll when the enemy charges up a skill" or "block when the enemy uses a Heavy attack to stun them". In EVE, that is "align, oribt at and Overload (we all do that, do not lie here :P ). Knowing your limits applies both in ESO and in EVE. In ESO you got to know how much damage you can burst to break a person's DPS tank during a short window, how to counter their tricks and in EVE that's no different. Seeing a Slasher? Keep range, neut  them, lol at Local, gtfo :P.. Same shtick, different game.


3) ESO's mechanics of "dodge" asnd "block", can be used in DU. use "Block" to power your shields, burning your energy in Avatar Vs Avatar and Ship Vs SHIp, similar to Active Tanking in EVE Online. Dodge? A dash ability that makes you avoid damge, but at the cost of stamina / energy in AvA and the speed-tanking of EVE Online for ship combat.


4) The real problem with the EVE Online Overview targeting you suggested, is that it kinda pisses in the whole thing of the game.

 

Nothing can stop YOU from targeting a ship WITHIN a space station. I hoped you would see the probem with that line of logic on your own. Literally, nothing prevents you from attacking a ship within a station, as it's not EVE Online. Ships are REAL things inside REAL stations. And no Ships don't; vanish into a magic portal when you log out.  

Fleet battles? Why use a Dreadnaught to act as a shield for the carriers - which is what a Dreadnaught is as a ship, a giant shield - when you can ... jsut  FIRE THROUGH the Dreadnaught? See the problem? This is why NQ wants their "mining bubbles" to be used for PvP. You have to go through voxels  manually.

 

 

EVE Online suffers from the same problem as WoW, their combat belongs back to 2003-2004. I hope NQ won't even add "hard lock" like it's in ESO, where you can isolate a target within a group of people to fire through other people to them for Avatar VS Avatar PVP (out of ships). Like people in Heavy Armors going on the front, so they can act as a wall for people without Heavy Armors. And I'd like that for space combat as well.


Will it be like EVE Online? Hope not, I don't want EVE 2.0 . EVE is many great thigns but those greats things have NOTHING to do with the game's cobmat mechanics. EVE is great for its trade, meta-game, job opportunities ( I stole ESS pots, and I am not ashamed of it), but one thing EVE Online is not GOOD on advertising, is it's intrigueing combat". Mathematics or not, EVE's targeting system with the Overview, is boring and can't translate into DU at all - not without breaking the game via exploits, i.e people firing at you through walls.


I see your point and reasoning for the Overview system, but you gotta embrace the fact DU is not EVE 2.0.

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39 minutes ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

1) DU is in Pre-Alpha, so calling its "PVP" simple is like me saying the "economy in the game is crap,, DACs ae so overpriced as of now, you can get 500000 shmeckles o none side of the system and 500 on the other". You can't claim something is "simple" when it's not even there yet.

No and I didn't, I said hopefully it won't.

 

1 hour ago, Aesir said:

I hope DU aint gonna be a simple rock paper scissors, especially for beginners.

 

 

40 minutes ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

4) The real problem with the EVE Online Overview targeting you suggested, is that it kinda pisses in the whole thing of the game.

 

Again I'm absolutly not suggesting it, I'm rather saying hopefully it won't be like that.

 

If i understand you well, you're suggesting that DU should use a "passive/automatic" targeting system which lock the first things in front of you or let you select somehow only the target with a clear view. Could be, but in no way you will be able to hide behind something after someone already shot at you. ie, if a missille is going for you, it will go through everything, unless it has its own "targeting" system which regullary check if the target is reachable or not, which is a very heavy implementation in DU case, because DU is not about "physical" fight.

 

54 minutes ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

but you gotta embrace the fact DU is not EVE 2.0

Ho that's fore sure it shouldn't be. But as you mentionned earlier, it's in Pre-Alpha and we don't know much yet.

 

I see you have strong expectation for the game, as I do. You have to admit that this is something.
A kinda ESO system may works (even if I always find it very frustrating to have your arrow not hitting because you are out of targeting range).

I mean a ESO 2.0 sounds certainly better than EVE 2.0.

 

But to be honest I would like something more advanced, probably it won't be, but an emulation of physical fight like maybe Elite Dangerous would be nice.
from this https://lavewiki.com/network

Quote

 

Elite Dangerous Networking & netcode
Elite Dangerous uses a “hybrid” server approach for handling the shared & persistent universe that all players play in.

Some core functionality - e.g. the market simulation - are handled by central servers
Player-to-player interactions are done on a peer-to-peer basis
The rationale is that this allows for lower latency when interacting with other players, while non-latency sensitive aspects like the market simulation can be done by backend servers.

You can view your current network bandwidth consumption by pressing Ctrl-b.

 

I'm wondering if it could be possible to open a P2P once you locked someone, I mean, DU is based on message programming model, and as the client does have a lot of code similar to the server, it should be possible to do so. Or with some kind of "most likely to be hit" open a P2P, simulate the physics on your side, listen to them telling you their position, evaluate who you shot if you did, send the answer to the poor guy and the server.
Net code is definitly not my speciallity so I may be totally wrong there.

 

PS:

1 hour ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

This is why NQ wants their "mining bubbles" to be used for PvP.

Any Link ? I didn't recall this.

 

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First off, I will mention that this topic has been discussed before. 

Alternative link: https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/1593-actual-physical-targeting-instead-of-locking/ 

Now then, I'm going to get into some reasons why I think that your article does not touch on points correctly.

 

So the first post where Twerk goes into things is the generally agreed consensus on how things are going to work by the community. Listen to what he says, because while he doesn't say it with your feeling in mind, he says it how it is.

 

With that in mind, I'm going to give you the technical limitations of why there can not be free flowing movement in targeting and why there will not be precision shooting. The first problem is technical limitations of the actual single shard cluster. As Novaquark has described it as follows. Since you are in a single shard cluster, it is not technically hosted on a single server. Along with the regions being divided up into sections that are prioritized via player density and are granted processing power on the basis of that, there is also the communication between regions and entire portions of the cluster. This implies that to shoot with a sniper for example, you would have to calculate the bullet passing through all of those regions, and possibly through portions of the cluster itself.

 

Now if you understand that, you might ask why we can't still have some basic form of free flowing combat. The answer is this.

 

Battles

 

When battles happen, there is a whole bunch of stuff going on. The server is working hard dividing regions up by player density and processing power required and it is doing that all in real time. However, add bullets, and you mess the whole thing up with the calculations of the projectiles, moving a high speed projectile data across the cluster, and adding elements of randomness, when that projectile hits something along with the calculations resulting from that. If that itself is not a nightmare, than I don't know what is.

 

So in short, you haven't looked up how the single shard cluster functions and taken into account how the game is affected by that. I would recommend doing so.

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First of all thank you for the other link I'll read it carefully. I did a search but didn't find this article.

 

Now, I am listening to Twerk and thanks to his answer I do have a better idea of what the community agreed about, as you mentionned. But I also feel like it's a forum and I can discuss those ideas :)

 

The limitations you mentionned above are indeed the reason why you can't simply add bullet physics, I'm not questioning this. Yet i'm just expressing a wish, like I guess a lot of players, to see physics based combat, regardless of the technical issues.

And as I dont like to add a concern without proposing a solution, I imagined a P2P physics emulation, which would need to be in plus of the current system. I'm not saying it must be, but "could it be". As I said, only the client shooting would be calculating the bullet's movement and as well as retrieving in P2P targets location, those targets being pre selected again by the client depending on who you are aiming at when you press the fire button. And I'm not saying it's possible to implement this, I have no clue, but I imagine this as a server free implementation, almost.

 

Edit: but the real topic was more about, can it be fun combat to have a lock system in a this game ? Twerk convince me half a way I would say, I'm still not sure about the overall feeling/gameplay limitation due to certain combinaison like fps, dice, build your ship (very hard to balance right ?), etc.

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@Aesir no problems, I guess I misunderstood what you meant then. 

The P2P idea is... not quite true. The idea you suggested is more or less sort of like lag-switch (controlling what messages you send the servers, i.e. "I got not hit on that last shot, you  Mr Server are wrong about it). Thing is, that would require the game to do client-side calculatuions for that to happen. That's not applicable in Action Prediction (or actor model) programming - at least not as easily replicatable if at all possible for someone to achieve.

 

 

Also, see, ESO has "arrows vanishing"... cause that's how the game is balanced. In fact, there are some archer builds that can extend your shots up to 60 meters (from the 28 meters you start with. However, in DU (since they go for EVE's model of hit-chance, it's safe to assum,e we'll get the  equivalnet of blasters / railguns pairs of weapons ). So, you may have only a "targeting range" limit (like in EVE). In EVE, it's possible for you to hit someone past your Falloff range of your shots (up to 150% of your falloff to be in fact). Same could work in DU, only catch is, the enemy has to be standing motionless of the shot to hit. At 250 Kilometers, even if the enemy farts they can dodge your shot by 2 kilometers :P 

 

 

So yeah, the Soft-Lock targeting model can work for the game really well, since Action Prediction is also very good for "high latency" games - even EVE utilises it, and EVE has a server clock of 1.2 seconds ping for anything.


@MasteredRed are you a hawk? >.> 

Didn't even remember that thread. Good read for people to understnad why "Free Aim" combat is impossible on games like DU. Sofft Lock + Action Prediction (or as the peasants call it in consoles "target assist" ) is the best of both Tab Targeting and pseudo-FPS controls.

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55 minutes ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

@MasteredRed are you a hawk? >.> 

Didn't even remember that thread. Good read for people to understnad why "Free Aim" combat is impossible on games like DU. Sofft Lock + Action Prediction (or as the peasants call it in consoles "target assist" ) is the best of both Tab Targeting and pseudo-FPS controls.

I guess in the over 3000 posts you've made, which is approaching 4000, you might have forgotten some things.

So yes. I am a hawk.

image.png

 

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I don't fully get the discussion. When I read the OP, I thought something like "point your main gun and armored prow at your enemy, don't let enemy ship get your 6 o'clock". If DU would somehow simulate weapon damage and armor resistance like Space Engineer, I would expect that.

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6 hours ago, JOKER_CN said:

"point your main gun and armored prow at your enemy, don't let enemy ship get your 6 o'clock"

From my understanding it cannot be like this as your orientation will probably not matter for damage calculation you receive. Yet it does matter for the damage that YOU deal if your target is in front of you or not.

 

9 hours ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

That's not applicable in Action Prediction (or actor model) programming - at least not as easily replicatable if at all possible for someone to achieve.

I mean, it's beside the Action Prediction model, it should not impact it, just do the physics on the client, the server doesn't have to care about it, it just want the result. Actually, In a blockchain concept, I wonder ... you see ? Like a bunch of guys arround compute your physics and the majorties win the decision, would probably be hack free. But I see a delay issue here, hard to estimate how much and if it is doable. Anyway, certainly not soon, but would be nice if the Devs could do some POCs arround this, or totally anhilate the idea because of some programming design reasons.

 

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3 hours ago, Aesir said:

I mean, it's beside the Action Prediction model, it should not impact it, just do the physics on the client, the server doesn't have to care about it, it just want the result. Actually, In a blockchain concept, I wonder ... you see ? Like a bunch of guys arround compute your physics and the majorties win the decision, would probably be hack free. But I see a delay issue here, hard to estimate how much and if it is doable. Anyway, certainly not soon, but would be nice if the Devs could do some POCs arround this, or totally anhilate the idea because of some programming design reasons.

 


But, that's the point of the whole thing... the actor model is there for many a reason (mainly for the way they partition the server to server clsuters to maintain a playercount er voluime of space, so we don't have lag spikes or the game having to reside to EVE's Time Dilation).

ESO has action prediction, and members of the Band of Outlaws play on the EU server without even registering latency. That's due to the model itself. You don't need to lcaculate physics, your ship has defined physics due to how you build it.

If your ship weighs 1000 Tons, has maximum accleration at 300 m/s2 and a rate of turn at 0.5 Radians, that means tyhe server KNOWS how you sohuld behve in flight.

The server knows that "this ship Aesir flies can go in X-a, Y-b and Z-c, with a rate of turn no more than 0.5 Radians" where XYZ are coordinates in a 3D envirometns, and A-B-C are the maximum your ship can push out in all those directions - remember, vertical thrusters and meneuvering thrusters exist.

Leaving physics calculations on the client's side is how games that can be easily hacked do things. Look at Star Citizen. It's riddled with Lag-Switches lft right and center. Would you want that in DU? Would you want an unskilled scrub to come in and say "oh hey, I suck at this game, but I can tel lthe server I was never hit, so I can win eany fight" ?

I know it sounds like "oh man, the latency wil lbe high", but the smae latency exists in EVE Online. How do they solve this? Actio nPRediction., your ship s have VERY defined parameters on how they behave. Your client predicts actions, and then after a certai namount on the clock (1.2 seconds) it checks with the server for updates. However, EVE does the 1.2 seconds clock cause of how their old-school servers are set up. DU uses Cloud-Servers. In EVE, CCP puts 22000 people in one server blade, slows down the blade's system calls to 1/10th of the normal speed and says "okay, now the server has time to serve all the reuests it gets during the fight ". The only place in EVE Online that the Ti-Di doesn't (normally) apply, is Jita 4-4 , but that system has NO NPCs to farm, no Asteroids to mine, no nothing, so the node associated with Jita is fully built to accomodate people.

DU though does this. One server can hold up to X amount of people. If the amount doubles, the game braks down the same area to two instances, so each isntance can maintain X amount of people. But the action prediction model allows you to get updats on the "server" near you where the other peoplea re, and the server you are parrt of communicates with THAT second server near you to get confirmation on where people are.

This however, has a very small trick associated with it. They slow down updates coming in from farther servers. So, a serfver 1000 meters away? You server wil lget updates on the placing of people there every 10 seconds, while the serger next to you updates every 1 second on locations of people. If you were to clacuilate phyics on YOUR side during the process, that would negate the point of the server and the Actor Model NQ worked for building the server tech and netcoding for. :P

 

And no, we don';t know how "space servers" work. Remembe, video games are about smoke and mirrors. DU has instances, don't be confused about it, tey only manage to hide the loading screens by icnrementally loading a planet / voxel entity depeing on distance. One solar system is an isnance, and your planet you are on is an istnace, your arewa around you, is an inntance, your very own character updates on the server, the server you are on udpates on te server clsuter around it and that server clsuter updates on the server clusters around it.

Yes, that means that if an enemy ship is 10 AUs away from you, it may not be even there when you get to it, since the update your server got is 10 minutes (or more) old.

I call it "the best implementation of lightspeed delay put into a video game). I mean, the sun in the real world is 8 minutes old update, as its light takes 8 minutes to get to us. ;)

he delay you speak of has been thought out by the devs already. They built their server tech to accomodatte for it. Will it be  50 ms? Not reallly, but it will not be felt THAT bad.

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On 09/09/2017 at 2:07 AM, Partum said:

So if bullets arent going to be able to exist. How would combat take place? What would be the replacement of the bullets? I guess I just dont understand how this would all work.

If you read everything that Twerk said here, and you didn't get it, then try to have a look at The Elder Scrol Online gameplay and imagine the same with starship. Won't be the same, but it is an entry point.

 

21 hours ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

But, that's the point of the whole thing... the actor model is there for many a reason (mainly for the way they partition the server to server clsuters to maintain a playercount er voluime of space, so we don't have lag spikes or the game having to reside to EVE's Time Dilation).

I am sorry I probably didn't explain it correctly.

My concept is not to replace the existing server implementation and design, but use it, see it as a plus on TOP of the existing.

I do not have all the answer of course, I don't have enough knowledge and I don't even know how really the server is implemented (and I'll nerver know unless I join NQ).
 

But I had a talk with few friends who actually personnaly know the guy who implemented a part of the server we are all from the same school but my friends (as the said guy from NQ) did network and security specialization.
They told me that my idea could work, maybe, somehow :P

 

ALERT: this is not what NQ MUST DO, this is an idea, I'm not saying it has to be like this in anyway, it is more an idea from a brainstorming and certainly not a prove concept.

So I try to explain it better:

 

You have your normal DU implementation with the combat system that Twerk described earlier.
If I do a short recap of the system it could be something like this :
I'm sitting in my spacecrat and I see a foe, I want to agress him.
I lock my target (rather soft lock) by aiming at it, I do see on my UI that i'm locking him.

Depending of my weapons stats, speed, direction and resistances of my target, I will do a certain amount of damage when firing (they will be probably much more parameters)

 

In my scenario it would be:

I'm sitting in my spacecrat and I see a foe, I want to agress him.
I aim at it, using a crosshair. There is no lock.

If after firing, a bullet hit then, depending of my weapons stats, speed, direction and resistances of my target, I will do a certain amount of damage when firing (they will be probably much more parameters, we could also thing about where did the bullets hits the target)

 

As explained by Twerk, my scenario is for now impossible with the current implementation of the game because of techical limitation of the current design.

 

Now, the concept to make it POTENTIALLY possible :

I'm sitting in my spacecrat and I see a foe, I want to agress him.

  *At this point, My game client already have a list of other player's client that I can connect in P2P, they have been selected because they are availible and they have a good ping with     me. Let's call this list, "HostList".
I aim at it, using a crosshair. There is no lock.
  *That's a lie, there is actually a lock but invisible for the player, this lock is actually a list of several potential targets: Knowing the physic of my weapon, ie bullet speed and vector, and because their is already a movement prediction implementation, I can know who may be hit by the bullet, before I press the fire button. With this "maybe hit" list, I start a P2P connection to have their "real time position" and therefore by pass the server prediction, but not with everyone, just this short list. This list must be dynamic someone can enter or leave it. Let's call this list "TargetList"

  *At this point, no physics have been done, only few P2P connections with 2 lists the "HostList" and the "TargetList", only the TargetList is really used to retrieve exact position of the     objects of this list.
Now I'm firing, hopping to reach my target.

  *When I fire, my weapon create a bullet which is a vector and a speed (as said earlier), I send those information to my HostList, I also send the TargetList to the HostList. Now, the HostList will perform the physics for me, they will retrieve the position of the objects (ships) from my TargetList and with the information of the bullet they will be able to determine who get hit, if anyone did.
  *When the Hostlist have finished the compute, they send the result to : Me, the server, the player who get hit (if any).

  *Everyone able to see my shot will see it (like expected, whatever the scenario), including the hit on the target.

  *Damage are computed, depending of the different parameters.

 

There is a lot of things to improve and this is just a concept, for exemple, can we have one list instead of 2 ? Wouldn't be better to have a "turn on weapon system" ? (because you could use the delay of the animation to open the P2P list as well as prevent thosands of list to be opened if people don't actually want to fight).
What is the acceptable delay between the moment I fire and the moment the server is able to say what damage have been done to who.
That's not perfect.

Yet I just wanted to explain the idea, and hopefully it is more understandable than before. Remember that I see it as a feature in plus of the existing and probably just for certain type of weapon, missille and long range weapon should still works on the lock system as explained previously by Twerk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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On 9/9/2017 at 3:07 AM, Partum said:

So if bullets arent going to be able to exist. How would combat take place? What would be the replacement of the bullets? I guess I just dont understand how this would all work.

There ia a difference between "simulated projectile" and "particle effect".

Bullets or shots in-game won't be simulated bullets, they won't have momentum and they won't be phyiscially interceptable.  For all intents and purpsoes, they will behae like laers across the board (i.e. a beam or streak of light that connects with the enemy) then calculations take effect and iof your hit chnace is, let's say, 10%, you will connect the hit, but it will be a grazing blow, thus dealigj very little damage.

If you wonder "but if a hit hits, it should be 100% damage", well, not accordign to physics. 

 

@Aesir your suggestion can't really work, cause of the fact you watn to ping people. That's why Star Citiizen is such a bad game and wil lbe a bad game on launch. People can delay what packets to send to other palyers in PvP. I can simply let other players know "hey, I didnd't got hit", which in turn will just ruin the game.

And even worse, P2P inherently means Johnny the Psycho-Killer can ping the IP of a guy that blew him up in-game and then harrass them IRL.That's how Call of Duty has becoem impossible to play unless you use a VPN, cause otherwise anyone can find you - ltierally, it's not THAT difficult to ping someone back if you know how.

No, no, no target lsit, only Action Prediction systems. If people palying from Australia can't find latency an issue in ESO 's EU megaserver, I can't see why DU would suffer that much with a cloud-server.

 

Yes, what you said can work, nobody sad it wouldn't work, what I am saying is it shouldn't be done, cause of the problems iwth psychopaths who would trac your UP and harrass you IRL. And no, not everyone has a VPN, NOR SHOULD THEY HAVE TO get a VPN to play DU, in-case Johnny the Psycho-Killer woke up the wrong way.

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7 minutes ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

@Aesir your suggestion can't really work, cause of the fact you watn to ping people. That's why Star Citiizen is such a bad game and wil lbe a bad game on launch. People can delay what packets to send to other palyers in PvP. I can simply let other players know "hey, I didnd't got hit", which in turn will just ruin the game.

No you can't, you are not the one deciding if you get hit or not...
 

 

8 minutes ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

And even worse, P2P inherently means Johnny the Psycho-Killer can ping the IP of a guy that blew him up in-game and then harrass them IRL.That's how Call of Duty has becoem impossible to play unless you use a VPN, cause otherwise anyone can find you - ltierally, it's not THAT difficult to ping someone back if you know how.

 

13 minutes ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

Yes, what you said can work, nobody sad it wouldn't work, what I am saying is it shouldn't be done, cause of the problems iwth psychopaths who would trac your UP and harrass you IRL. And no, not everyone has a VPN, NOR SHOULD THEY HAVE TO get a VPN to play DU, in-case Johnny the Psycho-Killer woke up the wrong way.

That's actually a good reason, I knew about it, there is probably a way to avoid it correctly without setting your own VPN. But well, that's part of the things to fix, you could use a part of the server to redirect the messages betwwen P2P co, but that's kinda heavy.
Anyway yes, that's not a perfect solution, it needs more encapsulation and so on to deal with this kind of issues.

 

17 minutes ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

No, no, no target lsit, only Action Prediction systems. If people palying from Australia can't find latency an issue in ESO 's EU megaserver, I can't see why DU would suffer that much with a cloud-server.

You mean because you may have latency with people from your target list, ie if you're in EU and they are in Australia.

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM yes, that's the argument, can't see any workaround from this fact :P

 

 

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1 hour ago, Aesir said:

No you can't, you are not the one deciding if you get hit or not...
 

 

 

That's actually a good reason, I knew about it, there is probably a way to avoid it correctly without setting your own VPN. But well, that's part of the things to fix, you could use a part of the server to redirect the messages betwwen P2P co, but that's kinda heavy.
Anyway yes, that's not a perfect solution, it needs more encapsulation and so on to deal with this kind of issues.

 

You mean because you may have latency with people from your target list, ie if you're in EU and they are in Australia.

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM yes, that's the argument, can't see any workaround from this fact :P

 

 

That's not how Cloud Servers work though. You don't connect two users from EU and Australia directly. P2P in fact is the exact opposite of what NQ wants to implement. Planetsidee 2 does something liek the thing you said, and tat game is just full of cheaters whop are immune to damage. And P2P game is full of these issues.

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13 minutes ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

 P2P in fact is the exact opposite of what NQ wants to implement. Planetsidee 2 does something liek the thing you said, and tat game is just full of cheaters whop are immune to damage. And P2P game is full of these issues.

P2P is something, letting a person involved in a fight doing the damage calculation of this fight on his own computer then send the result to the server, is something else.
You assume that it has to be like this, but no, you can send the physics calculation to tiers computers who have no clue who is fighting who and will give a result, you cannot cheat that, you don't even know who gonna compute your fight. Plus it's not 1 other computer who do the math, but several, and majorities give the result. That's kinda the basic of blockchain.


A and B are fighting, A fire at B.
C, D, E ,F are computing the physics for A and B.

D say: B didn't get hit.
C, E and F says: B did get hit.
"B did get hit" is the majority, and so say the server. A and B can say whatever they want, they have no vote here.

 

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33 minutes ago, Aesir said:

P2P is something, letting a person involved in a fight doing the damage calculation of this fight on his own computer then send the result to the server, is something else.
You assume that it has to be like this, but no, you can send the physics calculation to tiers computers who have no clue who is fighting who and will give a result, you cannot cheat that, you don't even know who gonna compute your fight. Plus it's not 1 other computer who do the math, but several, and majorities give the result. That's kinda the basic of blockchain.


A and B are fighting, A fire at B.
C, D, E ,F are computing the physics for A and B.

D say: B didn't get hit.
C, E and F says: B did get hit.
"B did get hit" is the majority, and so say the server. A and B can say whatever they want, they have no vote here.

 

That's even worse, sicne a group of peoople with hacked cleitns will jsut say "nope, my buddy over here never got hit".

That's actualyl even worse for the game, people will actualyl buy accounts to have more "votes" on whaty actually went down in combat.

Also, you miss something crucial, each ship in DU is an instance on its own, so your confirmations will run off of that isntance's PVO in your model. 

And no, you can't enforce a person with a 16GB RAM to host an isntance. That's actaully an order of magnitude worse than forcing people to have to get a VPN to pla a game without fear of being trracked and on top of that, it's making hacking the game even more possible.


P2P is crap, it always was, it's nop longer 1995 and DU is not a F2P game that can't afford to do something other than partial P2P to cut down o nserver costs. If you ican't see the problems arisign from Peer-2-Peer connections mate,e I can't help you to see the problems yourself.

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1 hour ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

That's even worse, sicne a group of peoople with hacked cleitns will jsut say "nope, my buddy over here never got hit".

That's actualyl even worse for the game, people will actualyl buy accounts to have more "votes" on whaty actually went down in combat.

You don't choose who you are voting for, obviously... neither you choose who is voting for you.

 

1 hour ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

Also, you miss something crucial, each ship in DU is an instance on its own, so your confirmations will run off of that isntance's PVO in your model. 

And no, you can't enforce a person with a 16GB RAM to host an isntance. That's actaully an order of magnitude worse than forcing people to have to get a VPN to pla a game without fear of being trracked and on top of that, it's making hacking the game even more possible.

But you don't do have to do that to simulate a bullet hitting boxes :huh:

 

1 hour ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

P2P is crap, it always was, it's nop longer 1995 and DU is not a F2P game that can't afford to do something other than partial P2P to cut down o nserver costs. If you ican't see the problems arisign from Peer-2-Peer connections mate,e I can't help you to see the problems yourself.

Well I do know the pro and con, we talked about it already ;)

I'm not arguing it is the best model ... it just have pro and con, you clearly don't like it, but it doesn't make it "always crap", saying it's for 1995 F2P games is a but rough. For Honor is in P2P, their is a nice post explaining this choice bellow:
https://www.reddit.com/r/forhonor/comments/5u8jlh/why_forhonors_p2p_is_preferable_over_dedicated/

Anyway, thx for the talk mate, i'm done. See ya.

 

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