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Fleet formations

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Gasgat Alur The Order of the Oar P R I M E 0	Posted - 2012.01.15 21:28:00 - [1] - Quote As the title saids, what if a fleet could fly in formation? Except for the fact that it would be pretty damm awesome it could also be used as a strategy if you added so that ships could intercept enemy fire to protect a member of his fleet. The idea is to use a 10x10x10 cube in which the commander can place his fleet ships in anyway that he pleases. And due to the time this could take, he should be able to save formations prior to using them so that he can change in the heat of battle if necessary. Problems: 1. Neutral pilots could be used as shields - Solution: Pilots that are not flagged for PVP can not be hit this way, the enemy fire will pass right through them just the way it is right now. 2. Fleets can "box" support ships in the middle and there by become invulnerable (sort of) - Solution: If you use the 10x10x10 cube idea it could still be done but you'd need 26 ships to cover 1 support ship if you put it in the middle and also adding the spacing between the ships in the formation it wouldnt work very well. At first glance this might look like a stupid idea. But when I had given it some thought I figured, why the hell not? I know it would change a lot of things when it comes to PVP and also PVE but it would make EVE even more "realistic" and add even more strategy to the mix. Fleet commanders wouldnt only have to call out primarys anymore :) Anyway, if you see a problem with this do not hesitate to comment! And also if you have solution to those problems please share! Fly safe
FlinchingNinja Kishunuba Bellum Esca 80	Posted - 2012.01.15 23:07:00 - [2] - Quote I like the idea but the problem is that Eve does not really have line of site. It wouldn't change anything really. The other question I have is how does the movement work? Do all ships submit to formation control until they break it? One use I think which would really make it good though would be Stealth bombers, would look awesome.
Lord Zim Bat Country Goonswarm Federation 516	Posted - 2012.01.15 23:12:00 - [3] - Quote I've seen plenty of "fleet formations", players just have to do this manually.
Gasgat Alur The Order of the Oar P R I M E 0	Posted - 2012.01.16 07:39:00 - [4] - Quote FlinchingNinja Kishunuba wrote: I like the idea but the problem is that Eve does not really have line of site. It wouldn't change anything really. The other question I have is how does the movement work? Do all ships submit to formation control until they break it? One use I think which would really make it good though would be Stealth bombers, would look awesome. I realize that EVE doesn't have line of site but that's one of the things i'm suggesting should change. Exactly, the commander calls for formation and all the members that is a part of the pattern chosen by the commander will move into formation until fleet commander disband the formation or if a fleet members simply changes course. Yes imagine 10 stealth bombers moving in formation against a fleet, how awesome would that be?! Lord Zim wrote: I've seen plenty of "fleet formations", players just have to do this manually. I agree Zim but if you have a determined pattern for the formation that would make it exactly as the commander wanted it to be, it could have a practical use! Such as using stronger ships to cover the weaker ones!
Lord Zim Bat Country Goonswarm Federation 521	Posted - 2012.01.16 08:10:00 - [5] - Quote As has been mentioned before, LOS would have to be implemented for that to be viable, and while that's not the most expensive job in the world, CPU-wise, add that once pr laser group being fired, and once pr calculation tick (i.e. once every second) pr missile (or missile group, I suppose) being fired, and you'll soon end up with servers which are capable of hosting fewer people in a fleet fight than they are today before they either melt down, or when Veritas stops TiDi from crashing, slow down to an absolute crawl. And there'd probably be mutterings about this being applied to drones as well, and oh god the poor servers.
Valei Khurelem 169	Posted - 2012.01.16 08:12:00 - [6] - Quote Quote: like the idea but the problem is that Eve does not really have line of site. It wouldn't change anything really. I like the idea of formations a lot, but again this is only applicable when EVE evolves beyond point and click combat mechanics, with the amount of lobbying going on it doesn't look like this will happen any time soon sadly.
Lord Zim Bat Country Goonswarm Federation 521	Posted - 2012.01.16 08:17:00 - [7] - Quote If CCP reimplemented how you flew drastically, so you actually FLEW your ship instead of just whapping your helmsman with a giant rubber dildo and yelling "go dattaway", then maybe. As it's implemented today, I strongly doubt it.
Gasgat Alur The Order of the Oar P R I M E 0	Posted - 2012.01.16 08:25:00 - [8] - Quote Lord Zim wrote: As has been mentioned before, LOS would have to be implemented for that to be viable, and while that's not the most expensive job in the world, CPU-wise, add that once pr laser group being fired, and once pr calculation tick (i.e. once every second) pr missile (or missile group, I suppose) being fired, and you'll soon end up with servers which are capable of hosting fewer people in a fleet fight than they are today before they either melt down, or when Veritas stops TiDi from crashing, slow down to an absolute crawl. And there'd probably be mutterings about this being applied to drones as well, and oh god the poor servers. I agree that this idea might not be possible due to the extra ammount of traffic that would be generated and may overwhelm the server. However, I believe this would be easily implemented into the game and worth a try on the test servers atleast :)
Lord Zim Bat Country Goonswarm Federation 521	Posted - 2012.01.16 08:33:00 - [9] - Quote It's not even traffic, it's CPU usage. And I don't have to run a test on SiSi to know that it will literally eat the server alive.
Gasgat Alur The Order of the Oar P R I M E 0	Posted - 2012.01.16 08:43:00 - [10] - Quote Lord Zim wrote: It's not even traffic, it's CPU usage. And I don't have to run a test on SiSi to know that it will literally eat the server alive. I do not agree. I believe that CCP might find a way to make this work without eating too much CPU. They should give this idea a few hours of thinking atleast, I think it's worth it.
Lord Zim Bat Country Goonswarm Federation 521	Posted - 2012.01.16 08:56:00 - [11] - Quote I'll just assume you haven't done much programming, then.
Gasgat Alur The Order of the Oar P R I M E 0	Posted - 2012.01.16 09:00:00 - [12] - Quote Lord Zim wrote: I'll just assume you haven't done much programming, then. Yes I have but not for EVE. Have you?
Lord Zim Bat Country Goonswarm Federation 521	Posted - 2012.01.16 09:08:00 - [13] - Quote Yes, I have. And I know LOS will be prohibitively expensive for this, unless it's moved to client-side. I wouldn't hold my breath there. Edit: Clarification, not for EVE, no, but I have experience with LOS calculations.
Gasgat Alur The Order of the Oar P R I M E 0	Posted - 2012.01.16 09:15:00 - [14] - Quote Lord Zim wrote: Yes, I have. And I know LOS will be prohibitively expensive for this, unless it's moved to client-side. I wouldn't hold my breath there. Edit: Clarification, not for EVE, no, but I have experience with LOS calculations. Agreed, "EVE" and "Client-side" can't even be used in the same sentence hehe. But still I believe this could be done! I don't know the first thing about LOS calculations compared to you apparently but there might be a simple solution to this CPU eating problem that we haven't thought of.. Something similar to the Battle recorder idea? Putting ship directions and speed into a single file etc etc... But hey, what do I know? Just saying, the solution might be easier than you think :)
Lord Zim Bat Country Goonswarm Federation 521	Posted - 2012.01.16 09:18:00 - [15] - Quote How's that going to tell you if client X can shoot directly at client Y, instead of going through client Z's butt?
moimambo Garoun Investment Bank Gallente Federation 0	Posted - 2012.01.16 09:22:00 - [16] - Quote Yes! And we also need star wars styled side by side fighting! Too bad eve is too realistic for fighting with less than 100m between ships ;_;
Gasgat Alur The Order of the Oar P R I M E 0	Posted - 2012.01.16 09:23:00 - [17] - Quote By saving every ships X, Y, Z axis with their LOS along with their speed into a file, their exact position can be calculated.
Lord Zim Bat Country Goonswarm Federation 521	Posted - 2012.01.16 09:32:00 - [18] - Quote They have "position this tick" along with "direction" and "speed" in memory already, it's what they use to do the calculatins for where you'll be on the next tick. This still doesn't solve the problem of figuring out whether or not the direction one gun is firing will actually hit the intended target, or someone that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Same goes for missiles, and they have to be calculated at each tick to see if they have hit something in between tick X and tick X+1, which means you're going to spend a fair bit of CPU just calculating them as well. We've seen quite decisively how much CPU missiles use back when fighterbombers used missiles, add a lot of calculations to them (and to guns), and ... well, yes. I hope you like time dilation.
Gasgat Alur The Order of the Oar P R I M E 0	Posted - 2012.01.16 09:42:00 - [19] - Quote Technically you could use a X, Y, Z axis for weapons as well. Atleast hybrids, cannons and lasers as their damage is instant, all you need is firing point of origin and target position, any ship in between will take the damage. Missiles however would be tougher but maybe you could use some of the functions from bombs? explode on impact. Also a way to limit the CPU usage is to only activate fleet formations and interceptions for fleets with 2 or more members. Meaning that people that does solo OPs will not be using this, nor the NPC's. Also, ships that are not in formation but only is the same fleet will not be using it either. I believe this should limited the CPU usage a lot.
Lord Zim Bat Country Goonswarm Federation 521	Posted - 2012.01.16 09:55:00 - [20] - Quote Of course you would have to use a start coordinate and a vector for the weapons, you still have to check along the whole route whether or not there's something in the way, and with missiles you'd have to either simulate the movement of the other ships as well during that second, or just say **** it and check for ships from the start coordinate to the end coordinate (which is calculated given start coordinate, vector, speed and time (1 second)). And uh, "2 or more members"? How'll that "limit CPU usage", given that what I'm thinking of is fights of 500+ in a system? And uh, "ships not in formation but only in the same fleet won't be using it either"? Huh? Either LOS is enabled for everyone, and thus would further encourage formation flying, or it isn't enabled, and there's still an ecouragement of keeping f.ex logis 70km or so off the main fleet, in the opposite direction of the enemy fleet to be able to rep more efficiently without having to worry too much about getting shot at themselves, or keeping the entire fleet within 50km of their triage carriers (I'm not entirely sure about the distances, I don't do logistics) so there's actually reps to be had.
Gasgat Alur The Order of the Oar P R I M E 0	Posted - 2012.01.16 10:02:00 - [21] - Quote How that'll limit CPU usage? well the other 35.000 players that are not participating in the 500+ fleet battle would not be overloading the server with calculations. I dont know much about fleet battles or even PVP but from what i've heard there's already a lot of lagg when huge fleets are fighting. This is now being corrected with time dialation as I understand it? The diffrence between having fleet formations and not having it in big fights while time dialation is active might not be that big and what do we gain from it? A complete make-over of combat overall, for better or worse, definetely worth a try as I see it, fleets and formations goes hand in hand.
Lord Zim Bat Country Goonswarm Federation 521	Posted - 2012.01.16 10:05:00 - [22] - Quote You do realise that we're working with a server shard, not one server, right?
Gasgat Alur The Order of the Oar P R I M E 0	Posted - 2012.01.16 10:07:00 - [23] - Quote No I do not, please explain!
Lord Zim Bat Country Goonswarm Federation 521	Posted - 2012.01.16 10:15:00 - [24] - Quote Long story short, eve runs on a huge cluster of servers. Normally, each server has multiple solar systems running on it, one python process pr solar system (I believe), because there's no reason to dedicate one server to each solar system. This is, however, done when we're expecting large fleet fights (or in some cases, this reinforcement request is never sent), so that the fleet fights have as many resources available to them as possible, to limit lag. Unless I'm mistaken, everything within a system, from the market, stations, POSes, PI, pilots, drones, missiles etc etc etc, is processed within that one solar system process. The rest of the eve universe isn't anywhere near that process. This is why, when the solar system isn't reinforced, and a huge fight goes down, sometimes you see solar systems at the other end of the universe starts bitching about lag. Add to all this the fact that lowsec lags even harder than nullsec because of extra rules, then add in LOS calculations ... and what do you think will be the result?
Gasgat Alur The Order of the Oar P R I M E 0	Posted - 2012.01.16 10:48:00 - [25] - Quote Right now I get it! Explains a lot hehe Anyway if this is how it works, wouldnt it be possible to put aside one of the servers/shards and use it merely to calculate? If it were possible the formation and calculation wouldn't affect the game lagg at all. You're probably thinking that it's not worth the cost? I disagree (as always!), in the long run this could possible pay off as it would make for cooler videos that should interest people to sign up for EVE (combined with the battle record that's going to be pretty epic btw).
Lord Zim Bat Country Goonswarm Federation 521	Posted - 2012.01.16 11:14:00 - [26] - Quote If you absolutely wanted to make LOS etc work, you would have to drastically rework how eve handles players and solar systems etc. If you make each player a python process, then the load would be much more evenly spread out across the nodes, and things like LOD would be slightly more feasible. You'd still end up with issues, chief amongst would be concurrency issues, which I believe is the main reason why we're still at the point where everything that goes on in a solar system is in one process. As for offloading the calculations to a separate server or core, that's just adding complexity to an already complex setup, it's yet another thing that can go wrong. If there's two things you'll learn if you setup larger systems for a living, it's "keep it simple, stupid", and "what can **** up, will". It can work, yes, what if that (or those) servers are loaded to the point of taking more than a second to do the calculations? What if it dies? I'm not saying it wouldn't be hilarious, it would. It would be awesome to actually fly the ship as well, but there are some things which just aren't possible, either realistically, or without making huge changes to the existing system architecture, and them's the breaks.
Gasgat Alur The Order of the Oar P R I M E 0	Posted - 2012.01.16 11:29:00 - [27] - Quote That's true that this would add risks but as you explained it there's already plenty. And why should we hold back on something that could be groundbreaking because there is a risk? there's always a risk, the question is if the risks are worth it which we won't know until we've tried sadly Also, it sounds to me that a server that is running only calculations compared to a server that is handling a solar system is far less risky! Meaning we add little risk for something awesome <- feel free to correct me on that
Lord Zim Bat Country Goonswarm Federation 521	Posted - 2012.01.16 11:57:00 - [28] - Quote The risk as it's structured now is we have essentially 2 servers (well, that's oversimplifying it a little, there are proxy servers etcetcetc in the mix as well, but if they don't work, nothing works), the solar system server and the SQL server (which is a cluster). That's two servers which can have issues, be it hardware, software, external hardware (network, power, etc). If they moved the LOS calculations out to a separate server, that's 3 servers which can have an issue. And that's ... more. The nature of what's beinc calculated is irrelevant, except if you're thinking there could be bugs, in which case I'll just point out that the more sourcecode there is, the more bugs there are. And what happens if the calculations server goes down? The solar system server is now dependent on the calculations server doing its job. Additionally, this is dependent on the server being able to work properly concurrently, i.e. it can fire off the calculation and keep doing all the other computation that needs to be done. If it can't, all you've done is split some functionality out to a different server, you'll still have to wait more or less the same amount of time for the calculations to be done (maybe even more, since you have to collect, serialize and deserialize the data, do the calculations, serialize and return the data, deserialize the data and apply damage etc to the correct ships/modules/etc). We're talking about more that has to be done pr tick, and I'm not convinced the gains would be worth the extra risk and costs, not with the current architecture of the entire server cluster. In short, it isn't "far less risky", it's additional risk. Each server you add to a solution adds risk. You have harddisks that die, memory that go bad, motherboards that fry themselves, network cards that stop working, network switches that stop working, servers losing power, etc etc etc. The more you have that can go wrong, the more will go down.
Gasgat Alur The Order of the Oar P R I M E 0	Posted - 2012.01.16 12:10:00 - [29] - Quote You've made your point and I agree (seriously). Obviously adding another server just for calculations isn't an option. So the question remains, how much of the CPU would it cost to run the calculations on the same server that is running a solar system where a 500 man fleet is in battle (worst case scenario~)? And if it does start lagging, how much more time dialation will be added? Is it worth it? Consider how often a battle of this magnitude is fought compared to a 20 vs 20 with no lag, and both fleets are utilizing formations.
Iris Bravemount Airkio Mining Corp Bloodbound. 0	Posted - 2012.01.16 12:23:00 - [30] - Quote I'm an absolute noob in programming but... Is it possible to make each grid a separate process, instead of every system ? This would remove the concurrency problem while still increasing process granularity.

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