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EVE Evolved: Time dilation and the war on lag
When EVE Online launched back in 2003, it quickly gained a following of over 40,000 subscribing players. With around 5,000 solar systems for players to explore, those players spread themselves throughout the galaxy rather than gathering in one place. Players would often come together to trade or make war, but the server generally kept up with the action. As the number of subscribers rose, the size of the average PvP fleet increased and CCP upgraded the EVE server to handle the additional load. 2005 saw EVE's subscriber numbers explode from just over 50,000 to around 100,000 players. Server upgrades suddenly didn't cut it any more, and lag began to set in during large fleet battles. Ever since then, CCP has waged a largely unseen war against the impossibility of keeping all of EVE's players in one single-shard universe. Holding on to that core ideal that's made EVE the successful sandbox game it is today, developers have pursued every avenue in the fight against lag. While funding research into Python's Stackless IO and constantly optimising code, CCP built the biggest supercomputer in the games industry to house New Eden's growing population. With over 400,000 players now inhabiting the same world and a typically weekly peak concurrency of over 50,000 characters, CCP has been forced to develop some big guns in the war on lag. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at some of the biggest developments CCP has made in the war on lag, including the new Time Dilation feature that literally slows down time to let the server catch its breath.
DirecTV's new HD UI revealed to testers, is prettier and faster than the current one
While DirecTV may tossing an old standard def look on the new DirecTiVo, beta testers got a treat tonight (even better than news AMC HD is on the way) when their boxes downloaded a brand new user interface. It's the HD UI that was mentioned during the last earnings call, and brings not only fully 16x9 formatted graphics but also, according to testers, a serious performance boost to satellite receivers. If you're in the test group restart your box and punch 0,2,4,6,8 to snag the new software and have a look for yourself, but if you're on the outside looking in hit the source link for one of DBSTalk's typical thorough walkthrough PDFs. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
