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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 Evolved: The war on lag
It seems as though everywhere I go to read about EVE Online, someone is complaining about lag. Throughout the game's seven-year history, developers and server engineers have waged a constant battle against the lag monster. Frequent upgrades and code overhauls have ensured that the capacity of each server cluster increased at pace with the growing subscriber numbers. When the Dominion expansion came, something in it caused lag to get a lot worse. The issue has yet to be corrected and has even spurred some players to put media pressure on CCP to correct the issue. Until recently, the developers at CCP had been very quiet on the topic of lag and their efforts to combat it. Aside from the occasional fleet-fight mass testing event on the test server and the news that there was actually an entire team dedicated to lag, players were left largely in the dark as to what was being done to address the issue. In the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, many players began to assert that EVE's developers weren't working on lag at all. Earlier this week, we posted that CCP was planning a series of devblogs on lag to showcase the progress it's made. In a surprisingly rapid turn-around, four devblogs on lag and another on CCP's core technology groups have already been posted. They cover such topics as server scalability, the results of recent mass testing events, and CCP's new "thin client" testing tool. In this week's EVE Evolved, I introduce each of CCP's four recent devblogs on lag with a quick summary.
Upcoming EVE devblog series to show CCP's lag-busting efforts
With EVE Online's single-shard universe, the server hardware and game code have to be continually updated to cope with the game's constantly expanding playerbase. Each time the server is upgraded, node stability and lag in large fleet battles improves significantly. Unfortunately, this trend of periodic improvements took something of a wrong turn when the Dominion expansion came along. Before Dominion, fleet battles took place with over a thousand ships on each side and no crippling lag or node deaths in sight. Since the expansion's release, however, fleets of only a few hundred have regularly experienced unplayable conditions. Frustrated by CCP's lack of visible progress in tackling lag, members of the EVE community have been making their outrage known. A recent appeal to the gaming media by a few players resulted in the issue getting very high exposure, which could be bad for CCP's public image. CCP issued a response explaining that lag is a high priority, and that there is even an entire development team dedicated to tackling it. Earlier this week, CCP Zulu expanded on CCP's lag-busting efforts in the first of a new EVE devblog series dedicated entirely to lag.
