Fanfest 08: The Technical Side of EVE Online

The Technical Slope of EVE Online

Here at EVE Online Fanfest 2008, members of the press were treated to a handful of special presentations from some of the development team up at CCP – and both of their associates as wellspring. Unlike the vast majority of MMOGs, which split their playerbase into multiple separated "sherd" servers, Eve is unique for having all of its quarter-million strong universe on one collective realm. Of course, this results in technical hurdles for the team to overcome – it's easy for a traditional MMOG to just buy out a new waiter cluster and clon a new shard, only that sort of common result just wouldn't work for CCP and EVE.

I won't lie to you – the technical details were a little over my head. I did nab many of the specifics here and there: they ostensibly decide what their succeeding projects will be via rugby scrums, they'ray programming in a parvenu language developed by barracudas (or perhaps they've opened a new federal agency in Cuba, I'm shut up unclear connected the exact inside information of this one), and they apparently manage their host clusters by sticking swords and knives into them. Something like that, in any case. I'm a trifle hairy connected the subject field industry terms, to be fair.

What was unmortgaged, though, were the results:

Since the launch of the Premium graphics update to EVE, the shift towards rendering and generating textures and particle effects via the GPU as an alternative of feeding the calculations through the CPU has faded the drain connected the systems significantly. Through optimization, we were told, they'd reached the taper off where, in one of their tests that they showed U.S., they'd managed to run ten sort instances of the EVE client connected one (admittedly top-end) machine. Some of their boost goals included procedural generation of planet surfaces that would allow players to rapid climb in far on the far side the range where today they'd visualise the correspondenc take apart into pixelization, or the full dense particle rendering of the EVE population's swash giants.

The CCP team also talked about the optimizations they'd made server-side, and the upgrades in functionality since one year ago. In November 2007, the most pilots that could exist in Jita (the main market hub in the Eve coltsfoot) in front horrendous jug set in and their support staff queues were full with requests to move one's ship out of the area was approximately 600. Straightaway, they've had 850 simultaneously without straight a single such trouble rearing its head. While in the most crowded mission zones, at height hours lag could get to the point where combat and information modules would take 20 operating room 30 seconds to update – hardly playable by anyone. They announced proudly that they'd reduced that lag denary, to where it was like a sho a delay of 2-3 seconds at worst. Furthermore, large fleet combat was right away possible and playable with a flit size of 1000 ships, up from fair 400 a year ago.

Patc the new Quantum Rise expansion wouldn't feature a graphical upgrade like the jump 'tween Classic to Bounty, the extraordinary aft that would contain a similar jump – after that, though, they hope to update the game in smaller, more progressive chunk.

Stay tuned for reportage from Fanfest – tomorrow, we'll get a closer look at walking in stations, and the CCP team has kept hinting that at that place's a large declaration in store for Saturday.

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/fanfest-08-the-technical-side-of-eve-online-2/

Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/fanfest-08-the-technical-side-of-eve-online-2/

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