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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.
EVE Online shows off new toys in the war on lag
It's a bit of a cliche to solve a problem by declaring war on it, but in the case of EVE Online's war on lag the analogy really does seem to fit. The ever-increasing number of players places a growing strain on EVE's single-shard universe, and developers fight a constant battle to keep server performance acceptable. This time last year, the members of CCP's lag-busting development group Team Gridlock released a series of devblogs delving into all the work going on behind the scenes to fight lag and new tools like the thin client and mass testing events. In a new video devblog, CCP Veritas from Team Gridlock shows off the latest toy in the fight against fleet lag. The Telemetry profiler gives developers millisecond-accurate details of what's happening on a server node, from physics calculations and database accesses to sending and receiving of data. By capturing telemetry of laggy fleet battles on the main EVE server, Veritas will be able to directly analyse the logs to find out where optimisations are most needed so that EVE can once again support battles with thousands of players per side. Head over to the official devblog webpage or skip past the cut to watch the video.
Massively's EVE Online Incursion video devblog roundup
Having progressed from being a small independent studio in Iceland to a successful multinational industry leader, EVE Online's developer CCP Games has always had a reputation for being very close to the game's playerbase. Back in July, this view was soured when information from devblogs and the June CSM summit seemed to suggest that EVE would receive no bug-fixes or iterations on old gameplay features for at least 18 months. Players were in an uproar, and a growing perception began to spread that CCP was selling current EVE players short in order to focus on Incarna. In the past six months, things at CCP have take a complete 180-degree turn. Planetary Interaction has received the iteration players were promised, with gameplay tweaks and user interface fixes being deployed at a rapid pace. CCP also instituted team GridLock, whose purpose was to wage an all-out war on lag and fleet issues. In a refreshing and extremely welcome turn of affairs, CCP has been making a gargantuan effort lately to communicate with the players about upcoming changes and collect feedback. Though regular technical devblogs and pre-released test-server patches, players have been kept more informed than ever about what's going on behind the scenes at CCP HQ. Most recently, a series of 18 developer videos was released leading up to the Incursion expansion's final release today. Topics covered include battle reports from the ongoing war on lag, information on server optimisations that have been made recently, updates to planetary interaction, and other interesting topics. Skip past the cut for a detailed roundup of all 18 videos, all hosted on CCP's official YouTube page.
An inside look at EVE Online's CSM: From June to December
Keith Neilson is a Massively guest-writer who's here to recount his experiences at the recent Council of Stellar Management summit in Reykjavik. He writes regularly about EVE Online and has been playing the game since early 2004. Tweet It is undeniable that EVE Online is unique among MMORPGs in many ways. One of these is its Council of Stellar Management, an elected committee of nine players who play an active role in the development of the game, bringing player concerns and proposals for the future direction of the game directly to CCP at biannual summits in Iceland. Until this year, the perception of the CSM among players was that the Council is a marketing tool that does not fulfill its stated role of representing the playerbase. But in June, all of that changed. This term of the CSM brought in some major changes to the way the Council is organised, specifically with the removal of term limits (previously delegates could only serve two terms on the CSM) and the extension of terms from six months to a year. In addition to this, the CSM has been given "stakeholder" status within CCP. This means that the Council members have an equal say in the planning of future development along with the internal teams at CCP. This has allowed the fifth CSM to have a significant influence on the future development of EVE.
