Cyhawk
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Posted - 2009.03.21 09:54:00 -
[1]
It seems you don't know much about how game graphics work.
Ok, so theres 2 things for every object in the 3d world. A model (the pretty pictures) and a hitbox (an invisible box that determines the physical shape) So what happens is, we have these really pretty ships with lots of detail, but those Boxes cant match the complex shapes, at best, it overlaps the model. In Eve's case, they decided for various reasons, to make the hitbox smaller, and thus, you have models overlapping the hitboxes, making the appearence of models passing through eachother.
This "bug" as you call it, happens in EVERY 3d GAME IN EXISTANCE in some form or another. Some designers take extra special care to prevent it (mostly alpha blending techs) Others, see it as a fact of 3d game technology as it currently exists.
Now you may be wondering, why not just use the model for the hitbox? Well, there is a VERY good reason for this. Performance. I would estimate, about 75% of all processing power for eve goes into Hitbox detection. Determining if a Line intersects with a box out of a list of thousands in this much space, requires alot of processing power. (And has to be done very often, since you need to determine a hit every "update", which for this purpose, lets say its 10 per second, so 10 times a second, you have to cycle through a list of 1000s of objects to determine if it intersects with one of those objects), this is also the same reason we have hard limits of users in 1st person shooters.. not that it cant handle them.. its just too difficult to calculate hits with so many players. (For example, I made a Quake1 engine capable of 128 players... it worked.. but was unplayable on my i7 system as a server over 70 people due this very reason.. and thats quake 1, god I love my job.. anyways =)
What the Eve programmers did was intersting. Knowing that we'lll be in space 99.99% of the time away from objects, they decided to make this process as simple as possible, by using simple hitboxes and a quick detection method. Combined with other techniques, we achive a VERY fast environment, this is just a side effect.
This is also the same reason you can shoot missiles through asteroids :P Missiles have no hitboxes to intersect with, and there is no calculation other than distance for gun ammo/lasers, unlike 1st person shooters which must make an imaginary line as you shoot, to determine a hit. (Also why we never have true bullet physics in 1st person shooters, takes alot of processing power to calculate a real trajectory for so many shots..)
Make sense now?
Ok.. good. Now, zoom out all the way and turn off audio like the rest of us you nubbin, quit being distracted by the ships :P
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