CCP Choloepus has been working on a truly immersion enhancing feature and he'd like to tell you about it.

Read all about it here, and make sure to leave your feedback and questions for us.

Almost like the good old days in 2006, its like meeting a old friend :) Now wtb the same old engine trails. They were 'im going thi----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------s fast'. Or is that yet to be finalized?

Would it really add that much to include a single bit (hit/miss) to the information your client receives about shots around you that are not directed at you?

I mean, the client must already receive information about all the gunfire because it can render it... and server must be the one deciding what hits and what misses (if it weren't, EVE would already be hacked to bits) so... there must be a steady flow of packets during fleet fights to every participant about every shot being fired on grid as it happens according to the server simulation.

We. Are. Talking. About. A. Single. Bit. Some Pro coding will embed it nicely into the current data (just steal one bit off some value that is being sent about each shot and use it for this), so the added amount of data would be zero.

0/1. Miss/Hit. The rest can be made up by the local (client side) rendering code.

It's not just a single bit... You are mistaken in your assumption that the client receives information about every shot, rather than just when it starts/stops and the rate of fire.

There will be a dev blog on trails next week! :)

Would it really add that much to include a single bit (hit/miss) to the information your client receives about shots around you that are not directed at you?

I mean, the client must already receive information about all the gunfire because it can render it...

It's actually more like the client gets information when someone else starts to fire, and when they stop, but nothing inbetween. Individual damage or hit information packets aren't sent to you unless you're directly involved, your client just renders the pew-pew every few seconds until the other guy stops shooting.

It's not the single bit added to the payload that's the problem, it's that currently we don't send a packet at all unless absolutely necessary.

edit: beaten, thanks Rakshasa Taisab

I love this feature, it's quite possibly my favourite element of Crucible.

I don't want to sound negative or ungrateful, but I was a little disappointed to read that my client will only render missed shots at or from my ship. I was looking forward to observing some spectacular dogfights between third parties.

Is there any possibility that the feature could be amended to provide inaccurate fire animation for whichever ship is the focus of the camera (and the target thereof)? This wouldn't generate any additional traffic, but would just shift the focus to allow convincing spectator immersion.

Really nice update. Once you guys manage to extend it to any ship for a client, you could make those "stray shots" into hitting other targets then the orginal one like what could happen in a real space combat.

Of course it in the hope you won't get shot into the sun like you seem to fear atm

Would it really add that much to include a single bit (hit/miss) to the information your client receives about shots around you that are not directed at you?

I mean, the client must already receive information about all the gunfire because it can render it... and server must be the one deciding what hits and what misses (if it weren't, EVE would already be hacked to bits) so... there must be a steady flow of packets during fleet fights to every participant about every shot being fired on grid as it happens according to the server simulation.

We. Are. Talking. About. A. Single. Bit. Some Pro coding will embed it nicely into the current data (just steal one bit off some value that is being sent about each shot and use it for this), so the added amount of data would be zero.

0/1. Miss/Hit. The rest can be made up by the local (client side) rendering code.

/me huggles CCP
I love you guys again, so much epic material this winter

I really hope to see other players shots missing on day as well, it would really make fleet fights look epic. I don't like the idea of guesswork, but I don't like the current situation (for others, new content is awesome), and I don't like the idea of so much information being passed that it creates lag. Kinda a catch-22, but I agree with the blog, I think "rough simulation of appx miss chance" (i.e. intelligent guesswork) is probably the way to go. Take everything known by the client, average everything else (say assume level 3 or 4 skills, give a 10% chance for using an implant/booster that would affect it, etc), and then decide if it's hit or miss.

Another semi-related issue I'd love to see addressed. Can we please (one day) get shots that hit in a wider variety of places on the model? In othe words, do this, take a bunch of laser abaddons or something out and start shooting a POS. watch ALL the lasers hit either one of the little arms on the side or the bottom part about 3/4ths of the way down. It really looks un-realistic. It's not something you notice as much on ships or in fleet fights, but it's there. It would be great if you really peppered the enemy in a bunch of different places as your shots hit.

Thanks again
-BBK

Thanks, and believe me that we're disappointed that we can't do this yet either!

The look-at suggestion is a great one however. It limits the amount of extra information sent whilst still allowing you to spectate on those dogfights properly, I'll have to bring this one along to Gridlock and see what can be done.

Plus, even if we get the client-side simulation working, it would gives us a properly accurate option for important targets layered on top.

Thanks, and believe me that we're disappointed that we can't do this yet either!

The look-at suggestion is a great one however. It limits the amount of extra information sent whilst still allowing you to spectate on those dogfights properly, I'll have to bring this one along to Gridlock and see what can be done.

Plus, even if we get the client-side simulation working, it would gives us a properly accurate option for important targets layered on top.

I like the new feature, it's great for gauging how often a fast moving ship is being hit when manual-piloting.

Please don't do any averaging or guessing for 3rd party misses though, I'd rather see accurate misses or none at all. It might look neat to see the misses from a third party perspective, but it will totally break the immersion the first time an estimated miss blows up the target.

I don't think that would happen without the servers blowing up.

Thanks!

Something which has been suggested on these fora and which I really liked the sound of: as the quality of the shot increases (grouped weapons assumed), you have more hits arrive at the same point on the model. So a wrecking shot would look like current TQ, but a standard hit would hit different points on the ship, and light/barely hits would partially miss the target.

The last is currently in testing and art approval by the way, it may not arrive with Crucible but I'll try to get it live as soon as possible.

Thanks!

Something which has been suggested on these fora and which I really liked the sound of: as the quality of the shot increases (grouped weapons assumed), you have more hits arrive at the same point on the model. So a wrecking shot would look like current TQ, but a standard hit would hit different points on the ship, and light/barely hits would partially miss the target.

The last is currently in testing and art approval by the way, it may not arrive with Crucible but I'll try to get it live as soon as possible.

Thanks!

Something which has been suggested on these fora and which I really liked the sound of: as the quality of the shot increases (grouped weapons assumed), you have more hits arrive at the same point on the model. So a wrecking shot would look like current TQ, but a standard hit would hit different points on the ship, and light/barely hits would partially miss the target.

The last is currently in testing and art approval by the way, it may not arrive with Crucible but I'll try to get it live as soon as possible.

i fear for the lag this can create in battles cos of sync....

hmm a shot missed does not have to be drawn exactly the same for all clients...
that is to say that it the shot is a miss it does not have to reproduce it exactly for each client....alot of overhead. Best is if miss shot, let each client random generate path of laser maybe....this way the only thing that has to be synched is the message of miss and nothing else....
based on the position of ships, each client can more or less "tell" the angle of the miss shot...it does not have to be perfect....
Its a dirty fix i know.....

One thing many people forget about is that many clients are not powerhouse computers. To do what is suggested here is not only extra CPU work (minor if you only have one or two other ships, but fleet fights?) but it can also be a graphical chore, depending on what needs to be drawn and how. What I am thinking about, is the less repetitive the task, the greater that GPU workload. I could be wrong about that, but I don't think I am entirely. However, someone that actually attempts coding this would know better.

And it could only be a minor addition to the client workload (Yay, I'm wrong!) Just food for thought.

The audacity of this post blows me away, you are obviously not a programmer.

Please don't never ever make any sort of guesstimation on whether a shot should be drawn as a hit or miss. If it ever becomes possible to draw others' shots accurately, I'm all for it, but don't make the client lie to us. I'd rather have all shots visually connect and know that they might or might not have missed, than to have some hits and some misses (even if in the right proportions), but have the target actually take damage when the shot visually misses. Providing no information is always better than providing false information.

I don't care about the ratio of hit/miss. I'm not going to stare at someone for a few minutes, watching him get shot at, to determine that approximately 60% of those shots actually mised. I want to see that the last three shots from the enemy battleship landed on the friendly interceptor, and he will most likely need repairs NOW.

Outstanding work!

Please forgive this suggestion if it is not practical, but a reasonable solution to showing other ships hit/miss effects:

Ships that are in your watch list currently send accurate damage information, as well as any ships you have targetted (at least I presume so since we have a guage showing their curent damage level). If this information is already being passed, would it be possible for at least these ships (which are points of interest, and often closest to you) to show the hit/miss effects?

If so, that would probably take care of most of the ships you'd care to visually see hit/misses. Accurate info, points of interest around you covered, but without having to try and fake it for large numbers of ships.

As far as showing the hit/miss effects for ships you have your camera focused on... would be nice, and great you are considering it, but I would think it would be the least practical solution. However, if it is possible this would be great too.

Repectfully submitted, although you've probably already considered this.

We could send information about every shot to everyone in a fleet battle, but this would be a huge increase to server load and communication bandwidth to the point where Team Gridlock would (quite rightly) fire me into the sun for even suggesting it.

sorry to say this but that is exactly what is done. the miss/hit effects are between the one that fires and the one being fired at. So since you need to target a ship to fire at it (with the exeption of fof missiles), your suggestion is exactly what this update is about.

Outstanding work!

Please forgive this suggestion if it is not practical, but a reasonable solution to showing other ships hit/miss effects:

Ships that are in your watch list currently send accurate damage information, as well as any ships you have targetted (at least I presume so since we have a guage showing their curent damage level). If this information is already being passed, would it be possible for at least these ships (which are points of interest, and often closest to you) to show the hit/miss effects?

If so, that would probably take care of most of the ships you'd care to visually see hit/misses. Accurate info, points of interest around you covered, but without having to try and fake it for large numbers of ships.

As far as showing the hit/miss effects for ships you have your camera focused on... would be nice, and great you are considering it, but I would think it would be the least practical solution. However, if it is possible this would be great too.

Repectfully submitted, although you've probably already considered this.

I don't care about the ratio of hit/miss. I'm not going to stare at someone for a few minutes, watching him get shot at, to determine that approximately 60% of those shots actually mised. I want to see that the last three shots from the enemy battleship landed on the friendly interceptor, and he will most likely need repairs NOW.

Then finally ever considered giving a bending line for the autocannons? "Firing Arcs" faster the target higher the bend? not sure how much more backend that would require though. You can probably do a modification of this for hybrid/arty misses as well.(where shot spin simply destabilized the round and it arcs off randomly after missing)

No apologies for suggestions! If they've been raised before, it's at worst an extra vote for the feature, and more frequently covers some new ground as well.

As it happens, this has come up before and it sounds like a solid idea to me. Things on your watch list might not be handled in exactly the same way as your targets and ship, but they do get at least some additional information compared to everything else on grid so we'll definitely be checking this out.

I don't think so, of course it will have an (insignificant) impact on the bandwidth, but not on the server load, at least not in a negative way.
It seems obvious that it is more effective for the server to send all the data rather than computing (for each player) a list of what needs to be sent.
Of course I am not aware of the oddities that might exist in the server code, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

I don't see any physical reason, why a completely passive projectile (without any propulsion devices to adjust their trajectory) should have a bent flight path after launched from a cannon.

Did you watch "Wanted" one too many times? Even tough it would surely look funny if turrets would do that "fling" move, it still wouldn't work (as prooved by Mythbusters).

Missiles aren't affected. The mechanics of (and code for) missile combat is very much a different kettle of squamous betentacled beasties.

Under the new regime, you'd be sending out 100 hit/miss packets to each aggressor, for a total of ten thousand, plus the 100 to the gankee. That kind of O(n^2) scaling is less than good.

/begin typical eve player unnessecary rage

More turret love I see. So my missiles are OK coming out of NO WHERE! That's not immersion breaking at all!



Maybe that's a hint you should fix it?

/end

At least it's something ... I'll never see it. Just like I have yet to see the new turrets but yay for everyone else.

I don't see any physical reason, why a completely passive projectile (without any propulsion devices to adjust their trajectory) should have a bent flight path after launched from a cannon.

Did you watch "Wanted" one too many times? Even tough it would surely look funny if turrets would do that "fling" move, it still wouldn't work (as prooved by Mythbusters).

Under the new regime, you'd be sending out 100 hit/miss packets to each aggressor, for a total of ten thousand, plus the 100 to the gankee. That kind of O(n^2) scaling is less than good.

Phsyics apply quite alot over a large interstellar distance, there is alot of gravitional forces ships exert along with the solar system its self all of these are effecthing shot projetories eventually.

[Thanks!

Something which has been suggested on these fora and which I really liked the sound of: as the quality of the shot increases (grouped weapons assumed), you have more hits arrive at the same point on the model. So a wrecking shot would look like current TQ, but a standard hit would hit different points on the ship, and light/barely hits would partially miss the target.

The last is currently in testing and art approval by the way, it may not arrive with Crucible but I'll try to get it live as soon as possible.

Oh wow, if you can get visuals varying according to the type of hit, could this be taken further to give differing effects according to whether the shot is hitting shields, armour or structure?

For example, if I'm shooting a target and his shields are still intact the shots would cause shield flare and energy discharge, as a I took his shields down and started hitting his armour that would change to sparks and impacts on the armour plates, and once I was through to structure the shooting would be penetrating the ship itself and causing internal fires and explosions.

Send the Hit Ratio out to the clients every 10 seconds or so, and let the clients randomly show that number of targets getting hit.

Would it really add that much to include a single bit (hit/miss) to the information your client receives about shots around you that are not directed at you?

I mean, the client must already receive information about all the gunfire because it can render it... and server must be the one deciding what hits and what misses (if it weren't, EVE would already be hacked to bits) so... there must be a steady flow of packets during fleet fights to every participant about every shot being fired on grid as it happens according to the server simulation.

We. Are. Talking. About. A. Single. Bit. Some Pro coding will embed it nicely into the current data (just steal one bit off some value that is being sent about each shot and use it for this), so the added amount of data would be zero.

0/1. Miss/Hit. The rest can be made up by the local (client side) rendering code.

If you did send hit miss info to the 100 people in your above example, you would not send 100 packets to 100 people, you would send one packet with 100 hit-miss bits to 100 people. The trick to doing this is to keep the bandwidth down by clever encoding. The client would have to have some sort of ordering of ships it keeps internally, so it can associate each bit with each ship. Also, a bit would be set to "miss" if in that tick the weapon was not firing at all.

Also, showing all hits-misses could be a feature that is normally on, but gets turned off as soon as TiDi cuts in, or gets close to cutting in.

Yup! This involves an artist making some nice impact effects, but otherwise shouldn't be too hard. We've also been discussing having a few more effects for when a shot punches through the last of your shield/armour and starts chewing away at the next layer of tank. This would need a bit of hysteresis built in to avoid it looking silly under reps.

All optional of course, as this kind of stuff would definitely add a small performance hit unless we can claw some frame time back elsewhere.

Unfortunately, it's a lot easier to think up pretty new things to do with this feature than it is to get everything done. Nevertheless it's much better to have a full backlog than the alternative!

We could make any shots which do not involve your ship miss or hit on the flip of a coin, but if it's completely random this conveys no information. Worse, it pretends to be useful whilst actually providing misinformation, so we're not keen on that.

Please don't never ever make any sort of guesstimation on whether a shot should be drawn as a hit or miss. If it ever becomes possible to draw others' shots accurately, I'm all for it, but don't make the client lie to us. I'd rather have all shots visually connect and know that they might or might not have missed, than to have some hits and some misses (even if in the right proportions), but have the target actually take damage when the shot visually misses. Providing no information is always better than providing false information.

I don't care about the ratio of hit/miss. I'm not going to stare at someone for a few minutes, watching him get shot at, to determine that approximately 60% of those shots actually mised. I want to see that the last three shots from the enemy battleship landed on the friendly interceptor, and he will most likely need repairs NOW.

The individual shots themselves don't arc, but the burst "appears" to arc across the sky as the gun is tracking the target.

Either way the shot arcs for auto cannons are not a phsyics thing is an accuracy thing you're leading your target so your entire volley winds up in the target instead of the first few bullets as the rest of the stream flys by.

I guess blasters would work like projectiles. Railguns however send out a short stream of plasma afaik, so that while the stream is leaving the gun, there would have to be a number of animations for each "particle" in the stream, starting from where the gun was when it fired that part of the stream and hitting where the target will be when that particle hits the target.

...
Unfortunately, it's a lot easier to think up pretty new things to do with this feature than it is to get everything done.
...

Since the bottleneck of bandwidth is totally on server side, maybe you can try some P2P structure to exchange trivial messages only about graphical performance, in this case, hit/miss messages.

The load is huge for the server to boardcast hit/miss messages to everyone, but it's hardly a problem for client to recevie them, so maybe you can leave the distribution job totally between clients, server only need to boardcast list of IP address and socket number involved.

Call me paranoid, but I don't really want CCP to be telling everyone my IP address.

Is there any possibility that the feature could be amended to provide inaccurate fire animation for whichever ship is the focus of the camera (and the target thereof)? This wouldn't generate any additional traffic, but would just shift the focus to allow convincing spectator immersion.