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actual physical targeting instead of locking


Wicpar

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I doubt that any bullet based system emulates every single bullet in any game. Most I know of switches to a bullet box of x100  assumed bullets with a pre rendered cloud of dots or parallel stripes. The box is its self a huge bullet 10 meters long representing bullets all more or less on the same path. It still is an entity that must be tracked and handed off to each server and player node. When FPS games talk of optimisation this is what they are doing, bundling bullets either until they hit or until they get very close then it unbundles them and shot guns the target.   

 

With tab targeting it's just a short sprite fountain and an out going vector at the firer with some sprites making it all the way at very short range. At longer damage the targeted player takes damage, may see incoming sprites vectoring to him (slow rounds) and may see bullet fall on the opposite wall. Both are local. Someone crossing their fire arc may also see bullets flying past because the game knows the vectors and can compute if your in the cross fire.

Likewise if something solid gets in the way the bullets are stopped, that object gets the hit sprites.  The tab lock may or may not be lost, with or without a delay. It is even possible for the game to switch to another target, based on skill or luck because that target ran in fount of or behind your target. I.E. friendly fire or an accidental hidden target kill temporary target switching [nearest neighbour]. 

 

In short in tab targeting you need to pass information to only 2 players/ servers in most cases. In some cases it may be four or five. It's never more than ten or all 1000. 

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Let me phrase it this way:

If it were that trivial to do dont you think EVE would have to do the Time dilation thing in large battles? :P

 

Network latency may doesnt matter for the actual calculations, but it matters massively for the player input.

If that Japanese guy who is fighting in his fighter against me euro guy is always exactly where i expect him with that /at least/ 1/8 of a second time delay hes not using his controls :P

 

Try playing any fast fps with a ping of 125+, lets see how fun it is.

Same problems apply for any online game.

and unless we find a way around the no communication theorem its not going to be solved by ignoring it and saying the physics are easy to compute locally.

 

Eve has its targeting system at the core mechanics, and it was made 13 years ago. 

 

Network latency can be mitigated by taking in account the ping of people. If and only if the input is sent to the server that makes the calculations and sends the results back for render, then you can create a 1s forced latency for every input. it creates a queue and compensates relative to the ping at the moment of reception.

But that system can be exploited by hackers easily by artificially increasing and decreasing ping, thus falsifying the latency. The solution to it is to send a random unique hash to every update tick and use that as an encryption key to send back the input, nothing too fancy, just a way to make input be invalid  if cheating is attempted.

 

It also fits... Space battles if they ever occur in real life will not be manual control affairs.  The velocities and gravitational effects on projectiles and long distances mean a human can't possibly aim accurately.  Computer assistance is needed and even then the ship being targeted could move a different direction... slow down... speed up... thus changing where it's going to be before light reflecting off of it can reach your eyes letting you know that it has moved.

 

In the game:

Even when things appear to be point blank... ship size and position may be abstracted to be larger and closer appearing to you the player so you can actually see the whole battle field and make strategic decisions.  If things were represented more realistically... if you zoomed out to see the whole area you're fighting in... your ship would probably be smaller than 1 pixel on your screen and your exchange of fire invisible...  And that doesn't make for a visually exciting game. 

 

I think target and dice roll is perfect for this game.  The algorithm used for it is the only question.   If done right the instance of frustration due to perceived point blank shots missing should be near zero.  Like within a certain range they could make shots much much more likely to hit... but add in a damage reduction variable to maintain their damage curve.  So yeah you hit it... but maybe didn't do as much damage as you would have liked.  But something like that is only needed if ship size is abstracted.  If there is no abstraction then if you're really at point blank range the algorithm for hitting should be very near 100%.

 

But that's without considering active countermeasures... There could be jamming of your sensors... projecting false images of the ship... dropping drones that fly off with simulated drive emissions...  All sorts of things that could fool your sensors into thinking the ship is somewhere else and that your character through experience and thus a skill stat could correct for.   The game gets bonus points in my book if they actually visualize these countermeasures in such a way that they actually are effective at fooling you the player too. 

 

If warp engine work like i think, you may do jumps to a certain range of vessels (20-30 km)  and thus avoid being shot at 300, 400 km away. Additionally, there would still be imprecision in the shots (like a montecarlo method ray)  like in every gun, but extremely low (would need double precision for a normalized vector, or use scaled up ones). You would have full control on the shot properties: speed, size, force etc... like in From The Depths (which uses the cpu for physics so quite sow for a lot of shots).

so you could have your average shot go 10 km/s or 100km/s depending on your precision and enemy maneuverability, you would always have a way to hit.

Physically based targeting add such a depth in the game it could create 3 categories of jobs (gun scripter, gun balancer and gun space optimizer), requirements of different types of guns in the bigger ships (big ones who are slow but powerful, weak ones that are extremely fast) and all that can be fine tuned.

the best way to but it is like the difference between a linear function (target and dice roll) and a Gaussian curve matrix (physical targeting). 

 

As i have demonstrated the performance and the latency are irrelevant for NQ, compared to the depth added by that feature, i understand there is a high dev cost involved, but this is still the start and as a dev, it is not out of reach of current technology, and affordability, even in the worst scenarios.

NQ relies on the high praise of the revolutionary tech, and this feature would be truly revolutionary at this scale, and in itself would be enough to praise Dual.

 

You can emulate a PvP shooter in a tab targeting system but you can't emulate a tab targeting system in a FPS with bullet mechanics.

To emulate fps simply have a narrow arc of selection and anything is tab targeted automatically but if you mouse off that target you lose tab targeting on that target. Both tab targeting and FPS can have area effect attacks so that does not matter. Homing attacks require some longer lock persistence to work but that's do able in both systems.

Tab targeting with a narrow cone can do friendly fire too but it's more code. 

Bullet drop is easy too by having a "reticule height above target" requirement at the time of firing. The same with leading the target. It already knows the range in both systems. 

 

Knowing this I have difficulty understanding why people even bother complaining about the tab targeting choice. 

 

All game systems, including all bullet based systems, have a dice roll somewhere in the mix to hit or damage. The gods of RNG are not fools.

 

You can shoot the turret or the drive that is just a matter of how many selection boxes a ship gets or whether it has a roll to damage subsystem table with roll biases at each end for what your targeting computer is set to. You can even shoot the gun out of a players hand in a RPG style tab targeting system. Lets see you do that in bullet based code? (It is not impossible.)

 

Here is a game with Tab targeting being switched to a FPS targeting in settings. 

(It needs a little more graphics optimisation, Changed cross hairs, etc. )

 

Hopefully DU will add a FPS emulation setting and the debate will end. Then we will see if my tactics and skills beats your twitch. 

 

FFS emulation is like american cheese: Bland.

why? because you hit his toe, but you sword clearly cut his head off. The problem is that it does not reflect reality and that is frustrating. You get used to it tho, but why endure it when you can be in control. But why have voxels when you can have beautifully detailed static meshes right? 

NQ has made it clear this is not their state of mind and global direction.

 

I doubt that any bullet based system emulates every single bullet in any game. Most I know of switches to a bullet box of x100  assumed bullets with a pre rendered cloud of dots or parallel stripes. The box is its self a huge bullet 10 meters long representing bullets all more or less on the same path. It still is an entity that must be tracked and handed off to each server and player node. When FPS games talk of optimisation this is what they are doing, bundling bullets either until they hit or until they get very close then it unbundles them and shot guns the target.   

 

With tab targeting it's just a short sprite fountain and an out going vector at the firer with some sprites making it all the way at very short range. At longer damage the targeted player takes damage, may see incoming sprites vectoring to him (slow rounds) and may see bullet fall on the opposite wall. Both are local. Someone crossing their fire arc may also see bullets flying past because the game knows the vectors and can compute if your in the cross fire.

 

Likewise if something solid gets in the way the bullets are stopped, that object gets the hit sprites.  The tab lock may or may not be lost, with or without a delay. It is even possible for the game to switch to another target, based on skill or luck because that target ran in fount of or behind your target. I.E. friendly fire or an accidental hidden target kill temporary target switching [nearest neighbour]. 

 

In short in tab targeting you need to pass information to only 2 players/ servers in most cases. In some cases it may be four or five. It's never more than ten or all 1000. 

 

most bullet based systems do emulate EVERY shot, but they usually bake them. They throw a ray at the start and then move it along it. it allows for quite an optimization, but it is simulated. Some do even instant ray hit like CS:GO, and then draw it, but you see how people complain about the glitches that this causes.

 

What concerns rendering, it is the cheapest part. today you can render tens of millions of particles with their physics (no collision) on your average gpu.

How would you render those shots? well, today you can send the GPU an array of dots with a vector, and tell him to render a mesh on it, and that is nearly as fast as rendering standard particles. The hard part today is that there is high latency/broadband limitations between the cpu and the GPU thus making data transfer the most expensive. You mostly have to worry about sending the least data as little as possible. And particles are cheap as hell (per particle) because a GPU is designed to do the same thing a lot of times in a row. rendering Voxels would be the most exensive part of this game honestly, as you have to often rebuild the mesh from the octree, but that can be done asynchronously thus isn't too relevant.

 

 

 

Most of you arguments here are based on fear and ignorance. "let's stay safe and do as always" and that is definitely not the way to go. NQ is here to innovate, not be limited to existant working systems. If they want to succeed they have to put their ideals before the product, as we users most instinctively reason with emotions, and thus are more acquainted with the ideals rather than the product.

This seems contradictory, but it isn't, you have to follow your ideals and rules if you want to be taken seriously thus applying your ideals in your product.

 

For instance, that is how apple got so popular: "think different" is not a product, but an ideal, but they happen to have a product that conforms to it, and sold it out to hell.

But now that Jobs is dead no one has maintained that, and see how bad they are doing, how their new products become old and boring rapidly, or are even stupid from the start. I may not be able to express it fully, but that example shows how important this is, in its core.

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