Planned Lag Fix: Ship Collision Damage

[GonTar]

Greetings.

Its been a long time since i've beeen on the forums, and i wanted to touch a topic that we all know and deal with every time we play StarMade online on a Multiplayer Server.

And that is LAG.


But, what do we know about lag? Lets be specific about this, no random talking, because we are talking about lag spikes specificly, and why are they tormenting us while playing Multiplayer on populated servers.

90% of these lag spikes are caused by 1, and only 1 in-game phenomenon, wich makes servers stress to their limits and cause our game to freeze while waiting for server to answer for (sometimes) a deadly ammount of time, and we experienced players know what this all is about.

This phenomenon is known as "Ship Ramming" or "G.S.C.I.S." also known as "GIANT SHIP CRASHING INTO SOMETHING"

So, that's the problem, but we all know that, i know, that isn't any news.

We do know the issue, and there's plenty of ways to solve it, because we have to point that it's not the end of the world, our planet isn't tearing appart and devs / schine staff are always on duty, vigilant for new ways to improve and update StarMade.



So, here's the Suggestion.


Simple Ship Collision Damage:

WAIT! Before thinking... "I've heard this before! it requires a lot of planning, coding and calculation n stuff n asdfasfdasdfa before even working on it! And it would require a lot of Block Damage calculation for every block on ships and..."

NO!, it can be simple and efficient, there's no need to check every block on every ship for damage and stuff, i was thinking about this for a while, playing on a server that was literally lagging to hell way too often because of those giant ships having intercourse with planets/stations (almost literally if you know what i mean bro)



Lets get to the point for science sake! (i know i know)

Explaining SSC "Simple Ship Collision".

Its supposed to be related to ships Size and Speed like this:

Detecting and Hooking Ship A "size" and Ship B "size" at the moment of collision

Therefore OverHeating the Smallest Ship Core (or damaging it to reach core overheating if crashing multiple times)

That's not a difficult calculation at all, you can also add:

If Ship Collides with "Planet/Station/Shop, etc entities" Then Core OverHeat Triggering Ship End

Could add a minimum speed required to OverHeat instantly, if not matched, then just deal a small amount of damage.

So, a quick example of this suggestion on action would be:

Lets say "Ship A" Rams "Ship B"
-Ship A has 50 Mass lets say its a fighter/drone
-Ship B "big one" has 350 Mass a big deal compared to that fighter/drone.

-The impact of the Small ship striking the Big one overheats the small fighter core on a second after bouncing off his powerfull shields, leaving the small fighter pilot dead because of the High speed crash agaist the ship who was bigger.

Another example:

another example would be a Ship ramming planets, stations, shops, its simple, those who lagged you trolling n ramming will perish trying to lag you this time, ramming their ships against stuff they will find out they are not indestructible lag machines any longer.

And because of the force of ships ramming against each other with no consequences and no end, cores could over heat, to prevent Lag Trolling from troll users, to take "Ship Care" on the table and to create a clean and lag free universe!


Its as simple as that, now you can comment and suggest and discuss anything you like.

 

[Calbiri]

Good suggestion, you'll be happy to hear its already something that has been discussed and confirmed. The collision system has updates planned for it that will destroy colliding objects far more quickly than the 1 block per bump rate that we have now. However, instead of just burning out a core, imagine if each impact triggered an explosion, whose size and damage was based on the weight and speed of the two colliding objects. Hopefully you'll be dreaming of fighters suiciding into the bridges of capital ships now, enjoy!

 

[GonTar]

Awesome, thx 4 the time on your reply, what you just said was the ideal of a ship collision system, if possible "in my opinion" that's the best system you can use, but when i talked about triggering explosions depending on ships mass n speed somebody said it would require way too many calculations, guess they were wrong!
Keep up the good work! Your hours of service are appreciated!

 

[Auriga_Nexus]

Good suggestion, you'll be happy to hear its already something that has been discussed and confirmed. The collision system has updates planned for it that will destroy colliding objects far more quickly than the 1 block per bump rate that we have now. However, instead of just burning out a core, imagine if each impact triggered an explosion, whose size and damage was based on the weight and speed of the two colliding objects. Hopefully you'll be dreaming of fighters suiciding into the bridges of capital ships now, enjoy!

Build kamikaze fighter out of warheads. Die gloriously for your Emperor. Respawn. Rebuild. Repeat. Banzai b****es.

 

[Valiant70]

Good suggestion, you'll be happy to hear its already something that has been discussed and confirmed. The collision system has updates planned for it that will destroy colliding objects far more quickly than the 1 block per bump rate that we have now. However, instead of just burning out a core, imagine if each impact triggered an explosion, whose size and damage was based on the weight and speed of the two colliding objects. Hopefully you'll be dreaming of fighters suiciding into the bridges of capital ships now, enjoy!

I would suggest that you show some discretion with the use of explosions in cases like this. They're cool if volatile system blocks, especially power/shield capacitors (sooooo much energy in there!) get destroyed, but if a few blocks of hull and a few cannon barrels get slammed, an explosion makes little sense because there isn't any pent-up energy to cause a blast.

There's no reason it can't be handled like an explosion in the code, but visual effects and the shape of the destroyed part might need to be altered for less volatile blocks. I'm sure the system you eventually come up with will be believable enough.

 

[RoyalWolfe]

see what you guys are doing is over thinking the problem. you expect that every explosion has to destroy all of the interacted with parts and components as one whole and complete thing. sorry but I was in the military, explosions just do not do that.

what happens with an explosion is when the materials it hits is in a wave or energy driven force. this is why when you detonate a second explosive after the impact, it will cause a hole to puncture even armored objects. hence why armor piercing tank rounds work so well. they aren't designed to defeat the armor, just use it to kill you inside with the resulting shrapnel or pieces of the armor it makes.

all of that has a formula which as science will tell you, can be measured, and calculated. Which guess what guys computers happen to be really good at doing, it also happens to be exactly what the hell they were invented for. so stop saying it cant work because your tiny mind cant do it.

P.S. I'm not saying computer are perfect far from it, but they aren't designed by average people to do average math. they are designed by experts that take years learning how to make them do things average people cant do themselves. so please give them their due credit please.

 

[Monchoman45]

I would suggest that you show some discretion with the use of explosions in cases like this. They're cool if volatile system blocks, especially power/shield capacitors (sooooo much energy in there!) get destroyed, but if a few blocks of hull and a few cannon barrels get slammed, an explosion makes little sense because there isn't any pent-up energy to cause a blast.

STARMADE
Presented by: Schine
Directed by: Michael Bay

 

[Snk]

I really hope Power capacitors explode.

 

[Monchoman45]

sorry but I was in the military, explosions just do not do that.
...
P.S. I'm not saying computer are perfect far from it, but they aren't designed by average people to do average math. they are designed by experts that take years learning how to make them do things average people cant do themselves. so please give them their due credit please.

Sorry, but I'm a computer scientist, and computers just do not do that.

Computers are "perfect" in that they do exactly what you tell them to do, with no deviation, every single time you tell them to. If you ask a calculator what 5+7 is, it'll tell you 12. If you come back in 30 million years, and you ask the same calculator what 5+7 is, it'll still tell you 12. In theory at least, since the parts don't have that kind of a shelf life.

Fundamentally you only get basic math operations (+, -, *, /), basic logic stuff (all the gates we have in starmade, plus some more), and logistical stuff like the ability to move data around. You don't even get exponents. The hard truth is that the average 5th grader actually has the mathematical ability to fully simulate a program as complicated as StarMade with just pencil and paper.

It's totally possible to simulate actual, accurate explosions. Military scientists do it all the time. But we don't do that because computer power is not infinite or free, and if every AMC hit was simulated like an actual projectile hitting actual armor, you'd spend all of your game time waiting for the server to finish calculating all of the super realistic and accurate physics involved.

Or, you could do it the easy way and throw around HP values and perfectly spherical explosions.

Fundamental laws of computer science, #5: Laziness is the root of all progress.

 

[MacThule]

Good suggestion, you'll be happy to hear its already something that has been discussed and confirmed. The collision system has updates planned for it that will destroy colliding objects far more quickly than the 1 block per bump rate that we have now. However, instead of just burning out a core, imagine if each impact triggered an explosion, whose size and damage was based on the weight and speed of the two colliding objects. Hopefully you'll be dreaming of fighters suiciding into the bridges of capital ships now, enjoy!

Sounds fantastic. Hope there's a smart minimum threshold to prevent minor bumps between larger ships from becoming absurd catastrophes.

I don't need different explosions for different blocks - I'd be happy with any old explosion to punish reckless pilots. Just base it on mass, because even a pile of grey hull is going to need a reactor of some kind and a few thrusters to do any ramming and I'm perfectly happy pretending that exactly BECAUSE it was designed as a cheap POS rammer it was designed with a highly unstable fission power core and volatile-compound-based engine system... that's perfectly realistic, IMO!

 

[Auriga_Nexus]

Sounds fantastic. Hope there's a smart minimum threshold to prevent minor bumps between larger ships from becoming absurd catastrophes.

I don't need different explosions for different blocks - I'd be happy with any old explosion to punish reckless pilots. Just base it on mass, because even a pile of grey hull is going to need a reactor of some kind and a few thrusters to do any ramming and I'm perfectly happy pretending that exactly BECAUSE it was designed as a cheap POS rammer it was designed with a highly unstable fission power core and volatile-compound-based engine system... that's perfectly realistic, IMO!

Yeah, cause just imagine the tears when some poor bastard just finished the final touches on his sector-long titan, and some noob in a 3-block pod comes flying in from Goddess-knows-where, hits the retros too late, nails him broadside and blows his $#!7 into the next galaxy.

Us EVE Online players have seen this way too many times. Given there is no such thing as collision damage in EVE; however there IS collision force that automatically pushes objects away from each other, with the repulsive force dependent on the relative mass and velocity of the colliding objects. And when you have a ship that literally deccelerates at a rate of 0.1 m/s^2, and you have to have it sitting ABSOLUTELY STILL to use the onboard jump bridge, and you've got an entire fleet waiting for you to open the bridge, and that one noob that forgets to turn off his MWD and rams you fast enough to accelerate your giant ship to 15 m/s... you're going to be waiting some time. Which is why we have this:

 

[jath]

Explosions sound cool. I still think there needs to be a minimum velocity before damage takes place though. You can build something to hold any weight in real life, but in starmade, it's always going to be held by one block First.

 

[Mariux]

I'm cool with such a system as long as the collisions wouldn't bypass shields as it makes griefing or suicide griefing possible.

 

[jath]

My full thoughts on the subject can be found here:

http://starmadedock.net/threads/collision-damage-physics.5549