title says it all.

yes.

+1
Especially the cappie...could make for a nice surprise attack opportunity once the sector list is finally killed entirely.

Great idea

Yes!

Also Lecter the sector list being killed means you could also hide 20 players IN a cap ship :D

20 players in a cap ship would take forever to undock (traffic jam!). Hiding behind one would be that much cooler.

hell even if the view of the player isnt occulded by the cap ship, if they're up real close to it, it should be hard to pick them out from the capship.

Yes.

behemoths should be able to hide small craft too, and the occulsion effect should work on bots too.

behemoths should be able to hide small craft too

nifty.
by that logic though.. taurs should as well.

not sure if I agree, but absolutely worth exploring.

Logically any object should ocllude anything smaller, so for the sake of completeness objects should occlude roids.

I would like to hide behind Behemoths, that 'twould be fun...

I'd imagine that recalculating occlusion for multiple moving targets would be impassibly CPU intensive.

How about they fix the basic stuff and then move on to the "title"? It's still broken Atice.

vskye: I believe all suggestions assume that current implementations of the game work as expected; this thread is no different.

I'd imagine that recalculating occlusion for multiple moving targets would be impassibly CPU intensive.

Why would it be any more CPU intensive than recalculating occlusion for multiple stationary targets? You should really consider writing some programs before you talk about programming.

ladron, there are plenty of reasons that adding more occluding objects would be CPU intensive... even ignoring the fact that there would be MORE occlusion calculations just by the very nature of adding more objects which can occlude. It all depends on a variety of details in implementation (many of which probably cannot be tweaked without great effort). Be a little more forgiving ladron, especially when you're blowing smoke.

Also, let's get back on topic here. I'd hate for this thread to get locked.

If it is implemented correctly, occlusion checking is probably around a O(n log n) operation. But let's assume for the sake of the argument that it's ridiculously high, for example a O( n^3 ) operation. An increase in n from 400 rocks in the sector to 400 rocks + 5 ships would still cause a negligible degradation in performance.

Beside, he mentioned specifically calculating occlusion for moving targets as being difficult, or "impassibly CPU intensive", which suggests that there would be a stark difference between adding 4 more occluding moths vs adding 4 more occluding rocks of the same size.

The sector has a notion of the position, orientation, and velocity of each object, in addition to a band box for radar occlusion. Calculating occlusion involves drawing rays from a given ship to all other ships while checking to see if anything is in the way. Whether or not the things that might be in the way can move is entirely irrelevant, as the speed of light is assumed to be infinite.

Finally, even if calculating the occlusion caused by ships is somehow considerably more expensive than calculating the occlusion caused by asteroids, the occlusion calculations happen in a separate thread. Yes, that's right ladies and gentlemen, that means that those of us with computers built sometime in this millennium will be running the main execution of the game on one processor core and the radar occlusion calculations on a second, if the first core isn't fast enough to handle everything at once. It's just plain silly to suggest that 99% of the VO player base should have to suffer through a game that wusses out of doing 'hard' computations just because there's some dumbass among us who still plays on an 80386.

Now that that's out of the way, back on topic.

Hey, you know me, I can't let someone be wrong on the internet! : p