I don't think this is necessarily as difficult / gamebreaking as some people are making out. I think you'd just need to classify bookmarks into what they're bookmarked "relative to". Currently everything's position is fixed relative to (presumably) the sun. Just allow people to make BM's relative to any celestial or anchorable structure. So a gate BM would be relative to the gate. Safe spots relative to the sun. POS towers relative to the POS etc.

Then as the POS moves around the moon and the moon around the planet etc, your BM moves with it - it's always "POS position +a on the X-axis, +b on the Y-axis, +c on the Z-axis.

There would be the very rare possibility that as a planet orbits it moves periodically on top of someone's safe spot. Would need a mechanism to avoid people warping inside a planet (or not ).

I don't think it's beyond the bounds of lore that our ship computers are capable of dealing with "relative to" BMs. And I would *love* to see proper orbital motion in EVE.

While we're at it, why do we have single "warp-to" spots for celestials? Given the size of a star, it's a bit ridiculous that two people warping to zero land right next to each other doncha think?

In space, all directions are up.

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To repeat a concern: It is currently possible to "warp to zero" to some star gates and either land too far away (e.g. when you are in a pod), landing outside of activation range, or "too close" (e.g. when you are in a freighter), bouncing off the gate if you don't hit "jump" real quick. It would be good to adjust the spheres of the gates to make this less likely. Would also make most of the "WTZ bookmarks" unnecessary :-)

Just an FYI, some Gallente stargates aren't properly aligned to their destination star. I submitted a bug report for this. (ID#: 118728)

Here's a screenshot of the misalignment: Clicky

booya


You know what would be really awesome though? If you could see the 'spiderwebs' of your constellation's stargates (or even the whole region?) projected between the stars like they appear in the map view, rather than just the stars themselves. Also, imagine if those nearby stars in space showed on the HUD, and you could set destination/jump to beacon/etc just by right clicking on them in space (rather than having to F10 or F11 and use the separate map).

Also, is there any relationship between the stargate location in a system and where it's going to? In a few systems I noticed stargates sending you down in the starmap are actually located high in the system map.

I noticed that too. But I also noticed that sighting down the bore of the gate did show it pointed at the correct star. Then the gate fired and I noticed that the gate effect is not lined up with the gate!

It may be a side effect of the limitations of the graphics. There may be poor granularity in the direction the gate effect can be shown in, and the game just picks the closest option.

5. What if a player is afk at a POS? Does he move with the POS? And what if he's orbiting the POS? I hope you're going to be writing the code for this so CCP doesn't have to.

This change is totally worth re-doing all my bookmarks.

Hate to throw realism into this, but at a distance of multiple light years the size of the star is irrelevant. You can have super-massive stars much further away than say a nearby white dwarf and they'll still both be pinpricks in the sky.

In this case, size doesn't matter.

That would involve a great deal of re-coding. I take it you aren't familiar with programming. It may seem easy to you, but that's only because you aren't going to be the one wading through piles upon piles of lines.

Yes, this would be potentially game breaking. It changes the tactics of PvP and certain PvE aspects quite drastically. If all celestial objects in a solar system are constantly changing position, there are many, MANY game mechanics that will have to be redesigned in the ensuing chain reaction.

1. Warp disruption bubbles will no longer be viable on warp vectors because the vectors will be constantly changing. That will have to be rectified. Bubbles are a crucial part of nullsec PvP in many circumstances.

2. The distance to an anomaly upon entering through a stargate will never be predictable ever again. Some planets have a 30-40AU radius in their orbit around the sun. Some are even larger than that.

3. The element of surprise when a stealth bomber enters a system and tries to dscan an area normally close to the stargate loses said element because the anomaly is now 25AU away, and he couldn't find out until he jumped into the system.

4. CCP would have to figure out orbit paths for literally hundreds of thousands of celestial objects that take different amounts of time to revolve because it wouldn't "make sense" to people like you if they all had the same exact orbit duration.

5. What if a player is afk at a POS? Does he move with the POS? And what if he's orbiting the POS? I hope you're going to be writing the code for this so CCP doesn't have to.

6. Warping to different areas around a celestial would completely eliminate any risk factor whatsoever in bouncing planets for the already agile ships like Cynabals. There are other effects, but that was the most prominent one in my mind.

Fact is, CCP is already making a lot of coding changes, gameplay changes, aesthetic changes, etc. Why load their plate with more crap that just makes PvP harder for those of us who actually run ops and PvP? You should PvP more. It teaches you how the game should and should not be changed.

Yes, it would be, but you should have no need to. Only the graphical orientation of the gate is changing, not it's position in space.

If this happens to you we apologize for the inconvenience, and you may need to move the bookmark....

TLDR; All of your arguments are straw men. Please come back with valid issues that cannot be easily resolved or are not an issue (and in fact are even better for gameplay (e.g. #2 and #3)).

Only drastic changes if you don't think of reasonable solutions. Sure, you can make any change "game breaking" if you refuse to try and think around the box, or perhaps modify the idea to not be so drastic (e.g. see below). Sure, re-coding sucks, but they're doing some of this anyways and, if they have time, some of this would be pretty neat and add new dynamics.

#1: Depends on the rotation speed. If an object takes months to rotate around the sun then this has minimal impact to your bubbles, just "update" them every now and then. How fast do you think these celestial bodies and stargates will move through space? It's all configurable by CCP so as to not cause to cause this issue.

#2,3: Why should it be predictable? Predictable events are boring, especially when they should be moving around.

#4: So? Again not difficult (as someone who has written an admittedly rudimentary solarium in OpenGL with varying orbits for planets and moons).

#5: See #1, but can also ASSuME that if he is inside the POS shield his ship is keeping a relative speed with the POS. Outside the shield...well, that depends. Maybe set relative speed based on the closest celestial?

#6: And this is an issue...why? I believe the "random warp-to" spot would be relative to your starting location. So a fleet in the same spot warping to 30 km to the same celestial would land together, but someone on the other side of the solar system warping to that same celestial at 30 km would not land with that fleet, but on the other side of the planet + 30km.

So...because CCP is already working on projects we can't think of more cool ideas for future projects, even if some of them are trivial (not saying the above changes are trivial)? Perhaps you should PvP more yourself rather than getting all teary eyed that your target now has more options and variability. Things change, adapt or die. Oh, and HTFU. :)

1. Creates too much tedious work for players, even if it would only be updated, say, once a month. Many deep safe spots would either have to be changed or cause people grief when they realize the planets magically switched positions yesterday(how does THAT make sense) but far too late because they've already been dscanned and probed. Why do you think bubbles are anchorable? So we can move them all over the place constantly?

You think planetary orbits are "magical". Maybe you should go play a fantasy MMO instead of a sci-fi one?

Planets orbit very slowly. Very, very, slowly. Jupiter is 5AU from the Sun (next door in EVE terms), and completes an orbit every 12 years. A planet that is, in EVE, outside scan range from the sun (14 AU) would have a period of 50 years. So all your arguments regarding deep safes and scan range are invalid unless you expect to play eve for a few decades without updating your bookmarks.

Where it gets interesting is in the inner planets and moons.

CCP Mannapi wants to tell you about some cool changes to stargate alignment and space-navigation which some of you have already noticed on Singularity, our main test server. Check out the blog right here, and let us know if you have feedback or questions for us.