One other issue, and this is the same for ion storms and the like, is that it doesn't seem to extend to NPC's. The fact that NPC's could hunt you down in an ion storm when you had no chance of detecting them until they were bearing down on you with guns blazing has always been a weak point in VO's gameplay for me. Is this the case with occlusion, or am I just absolutely horrible at hiding from NPC's?

Reread first point in inc's (first) post.
In short: only affects players now as it's too cpu intensive for now.

Granted this would only really benefit pirates hunting miners

Eh, could benefit the miner who hopes to creep out of the rocks, safely away from the searching pirate, without being spotted until he's far enough away to be able to make a run for it.

Occlusion based on proximity rather than angle actually sounds like a really good idea.

angle is so much cooler.

Angle-based occlusion offers much more realistic and tactically interesting gameplay. It also incorporates, in effect, proximity-based occlusion, since distance from the occluding surface will affect the angles.

However, to the extent that angle-based occlusion is too complex for the Devs to get right, prox is better than a screwy angle-based system that essentially hides the ball on what you need to do to be occluded/find someone who's trying to hide.

And any of the above beats the everliving shit out of what we have now.

Proximity based occlusion isn't without its real world connection either though. If you look at how nautical radar works (on a consumer level anyway), it can't distinguish between a log in the water and the bird sitting on the log. Much in the same way that kayaks don't show up on radar in any significant swell.

That said, the argument that game mechanics need to adhere to any sort of real world implementation makes almost zero sense. It's the year 4437 for f**ks sake.

And if you'll look at how radar works, the reflective properties of a ship might be very different from the rock behind it.

That's true, most ships would act like massive radar reflectors. We need stealth technology.

And what about having Players occluded from bots?
I understand it would also be calculation intensive, but...

It would be interesting for those (like me) who find it fun to mine in roid fields infested with bots: quickly fly in your Marauder behind that huge helio or pentric roid, and mine, unseen -- just have to shoot these one or two curious bots which have spotted you while you were warping in and trying to hide...

From first post:

It only occludes players for now, not NPCs. It's too CPU-intensive, in the current implementation, so until we optimize it.. it's players only. We're working on optimizations, but I wanted to drop in this early implementation now, so we can get feedback while we're continuing to develop.

..We're not done yet.

You say it's 4437, but you fight with weapons that are only effective to 300m maybe 400 on a good day. You probably fly a vulture that has a cruise speed of 147 mph.. not knots but mph. Then you go full afterburner and go 500 mph. Your weapons have a muzzle velocity in the hundreds of meters per second even though current weapons (ie the m61A1 20mm cannon) launch projectiles at 1100 meters per second. The rockets have less blast radius than an 82mm mortar. Radars have a paltry 5,000m range (AWG-9 had 100 times this range) and you're now concerned with "reality?"

Give up on realism in this game because it's nowhere near existant.

Yes, definitely. Fun >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Reality. That being said, I have nothing against Reality when it's also Fun.

Anyway, a couple of things about the occlusion implementation. It turns out I was wrong about the whole sphere-query thing. Ray told me (Fri night) that that was how it was going to work, and thus the related inaccuracy issues and whatnot. But sometime that night he decided to do full OBB queries instead and not tell me about it. So, that would be why the occlusion is, in fact, very accurate right now.

We're working on a couple of things for Fri:

1) Making the occlusion-query-type selectable (by us) in the web-object-editor. This will let us, for instance, treat most asteroids as "spheres" and only do OBB queries for ice crystals or whatever. This would inherently add the whole "proximity" thing that people are requesting, which I thought would be inherent in the whole "sphere" implementation that.. I thought we were releasing on Fri. So, yes. We'll see how that goes.

2) Changing the data structure from Sweep-and-Prune to an Octree, for this specific usage. It's about 2.5x faster, based on preliminary testing. It may be a lot faster in the worst case.. since octrees are more spatially coherent, it's simpler to have things like "radar range limits", where the S&P tends to wander through the whole sector object list (there are optimization for S&P to segment by locale, but that's beyond the scope of this post).

3) Threading the whole occlusion thing. This will result in no negative impact on single-core or single-CPU people, but should be of substantial benefit to multi-core or multi-CPU people (and I imagine most reading this are now multi-core).

4) If possible, at least removing the distance from the radar list for occluded people, for now. This is not as good as removing the entry entirely, of course, but I have other plans for the list, and this is a quick-and-dirty thing. We're still not ready to get into gameplay-specific changes or improvements for the occlusion, our focus is still just the nuts-and-bolts of making occlusion fast, flexible, and usable on all ship types (NPCs or PC). So, the sector list is not a priority until things are made better on our end, but we'll see about nixing the distance if we can.

So, fingers crossed, hopefully things will be that much better after Friday. Unless it all explodes and we can't release it. Woo.

I'm kinda curious how this behaves if somebody is sitting inside a roid. If they become completely invisible or or not at all.

I'd also be in favor of making targets within 250m or so show through roids. It'd avoid stupid situations like losing lock just cause it bumped into a roid or or some pebble got in the way.

A question about this: if you can't resolve someone on radar, but they somehow manage to hit you, will it still tell you who is shooting you in the flash? I can imagine simply marvelous possibilities for sniping if not, and in fact I would petition for the flash to just tell you "Unknown" or something like that in that case. This is more realistic, and, in my opinion, a very fun kind of realistic!

interesting point. I wonder if the newbie sectors "feel" a lot emptier given the occlusion.

I tried to bring a roid into a fight tonight, and it kind of worked, even though it was a tiny ice-yo, so yeah, I lost, can see this working well for my egg in Bractus, told ya it would be important one day Bojan :P

To keep newbie sectors sane, for the moment, we'll probably have bone asteroids use OBB occlusion, and keep sphere occlusion for the big black grocks and other stuff (aside from the huge black grock that's used in the newbie sector).

I would petition for the flash to just tell you "Unknown" or something like that in that case. This is more realistic, and, in my opinion, a very fun kind of realistic!

Seconded

Is a grock like a grue?

Still, this is the best release ever.