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My name is Hallan Turrek. This is my blog.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

My Immersion, It is Broken.

There're all sorts of things going on these days. What was left of the Provi NIP has disintegrated(and as one of the guys that participated in it's formation, let me tell you: not a moment too soon).

The first part of incursion has released, with some nice changes. These were my favorites:

Rockets.
Faction, Deadspace, and Officer Items have a special icon now.
The MWD and AB have different icons.
T2 Close Range Ammo no longer blows.
You can rename a ship without needing them to be active.

But since this is a good day for CCP, I've decided to use it to complain about things, specifically immersion breaking moments in EvE. This will get a bit sciency. Fair warning.

Lets get the ball rolling.

First of all...
Stars aren't pink, and they aren't green. There, I said it. Stars come in 7 different flavors, from hottest to coldest: Blue, White-Blue, White, White again, Yellow-White, Orange, and Red.

88% of stars fall in the Orange or Red category. 6 percent fall into the Yellow-White category, with the remaining 6% reserved for varying Blue and Whites(almost all whites stars, by the way). The dominant color spectrum is one thing... our sun for example has a spike in it's yellow, even if the human eye(without atmospheric scattering of blue) interprets it as white.

Same thing for any star with a spike in the green, it's light may tend to be more green, but the human eye sees it as white as well. Yet I fly through systems all the damn time with green stars. That isn't to say that a star can't form with a heavy amount of some element that makes it green(oxygen for example), but those stars would be incredibly rare, once in a lifetime sights, not commonplace.


Second of all...

Why do our ships decelerate once the engine gets turned off? Unless you're moving in a medium of some kind, that shouldn't happen. You should have to flip around and burn the engines in the other direction to slow down. Instead it's as simple as turning the engines off and waiting to coast to a stop.

Now, if someone threw a chronicle at me that said the engines in EVE are more advanced than asimple propulsion system(They look suspiciously like ion thrusters), and that they work by changing the laws of physics to make you move, we're golden(sure it's pseudo science, but it's Sci-Fi). There isn't one though, and the complete ignoring of physics makes me cry.

Third of all...

We're back to the stars again, according to this article... every system that has a jump gate should be binary, and it should have the gate(s) placed between the two stars. That is not the case. No systems with jump gates have more than one star and the few that do have no gates at all. The pseudo science was questionable to begin with, but they don't even follow it. This is on top of the fact that a huge portion of star systems are binary to start with, but none of them are inhabited. I could buy that none of them have habitable planets(that's reasonable, given the complexities of the orbits), but not that none of them are worth hooking up to for mining. Or perhaps they could use inhospitable planets high in resources to build bubbled(or underground) colonies on. There is plenty of precedent for that in the normal systems.

Fourth of all...

What eve planet type is Mercury? The rest roughly fill their roles(Venus... maybe a storm planet). Mercury isn't a Barren planet, because every barren planet in eve has bacterial life. There needs to be an additional planet type to describe rocky planets like Mercury, and there isn't one. And lets not forget the ice planet orbiting close to a star while the desert planet orbits far out.

A little bit of math and planetary systems would make a lot of sense. That would of course require actual stellar classifications. The information is THERE though, and the math could be done to bring all the systems into some semblance of realism. This is especially easy since every system has but a single star. It's not that hard to just once calculate a size, mass, magnetic field, and age for each body in a system. Rough approximations will do the job. The problem of course is that it would require quite a lot of work, but give very little as a reward.

Which is why I don't really care. Yeah after all that, I'm stating that I don't care. This is a game, and it's important to treat it as such. Sure it's not realistic, but obsession with reality is boring.

Peace.

10 comments:

  1. How engines work is really simple actually, by _________________________ they cause ______________________ which therefore results in ________________ thus explaining why we stop if we turn our engines off.

    *parts have been edited out to protect state secrets (and from you building your own engine =p)

    -Jimqi101- _______ of _______

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  2. 'Empty' space isn't entirely empty, in truth. There are particles floating around which partially fill the void. If you're not moving very fast then this is fairly insignificant, but once you start moving at speed you'll encounter a significant number of particles in your path.

    I agree that a ship's momentum would keep it going in space for a lot longer than it does in the EVE universe, but it would break the game a bit if MWDing for a few minutes got you up to 0.9c, no?

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  3. I read all that, then I got to the last sentence, with a pithy reply about what immersion really is and how its not really based on reality or science at all but on how we think reality should be already in vestigial form in my squishy brain bits, and I lol'd.

    You trolled me good sir, masterfully so XD

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  4. There are systems in EVE with two stars in it???
    Which ones?

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  5. Here's another big one...bookmarks. Everything is in motion in space. The planets revolve around stars, moons revolve around planets, and the stars themselves are in motion. On top of that, the galaxies are in motion as well. The idea of a static bookmark that is always in the same place is wholly unrealistic. But as you point out, it's part of game mechanics. Any alternative would probably be so complex it wouldn't be much fun.

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  6. Obsession with reality is a boring. Excellent ending comment.

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  7. what about the planets don't spin nor revolve around any stars??? Am I the only 1 that noticed this?

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  8. I think with regard to your point #2, I believe it maybe be that EVE ship physics is based on fluid dynamics, not empty (or nearly empty) vacuum mechanics.

    But yeah I agree...that stuff really isn't immersion breaking for me. My willing suspension of disbelief is quite adaptable.

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  9. I lol'd to this, definitely. I've had many a debate with people trying to "explain" the submarine-like physics of the game, but it just comes down to the fact that this way is more exciting (and less intensive to the game).

    I do wish they'd bother fixing that jumpgate chronicle though.

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