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EVE Evolved: Grid-Fu and bending space
In last week's article, I described how EVE Online maintains the illusion of full-scale solar systems by dynamically creating small pockets of high-detail space called grids. It's within these discrete bubbles that everything we do in space takes place, from mining asteroids to running missions or shooting at other players. The system is designed to split up space into manageable chunks to reduce server load while still maintaining persistent 3-D space that appears to span the entire scale of a solar system. Grids have been in EVE since it was first created, but over the years people have noticed a few odd things about how the system works. Flying about 250km-400km away from a stargate causes your ship to disappear from that grid and pop into a newly created adjacent one, for example, but this doesn't always happen. Bizarre occurrences such as abnormally shaped grids and ships mysteriously disappearing and re-appearing on the same grid were always thought to be freak accidents or unintended bugs until an interesting document emerged in 2009. Titled Grid-Fu: A Practical Manual, the 18-page PDF described the process of bending and manipulating space for a tactical advantage. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at the various ways that players have manipulated space to their advantage.
EVE Evolved: Does EVE Online have the world's largest MMO map?
MMO game worlds seem to be getting larger every year, and the debate over which is biggest frequently appears on forums and blogs. It usually starts with people breaking out infographics comparing the size of the various islands and continents in their favourite fantasy MMOs, and it escalates from there. World of Warcraft's Azeroth turns out to be surprisingly small at an estimated 80 square miles, while World War II Online claims to have the largest MMO game map in the world with over 300,000 square kilometers (115,831 square miles) of playable space modeled as a half scale map of Western Europe. Someone in the discussion will inevitably mention EVE Online, and that's when things get complicated. The New Eden star cluster is lightyears across, and its 7,699 accessible solar systems have earned it a place in the Guinness Book of World Records, but can EVE's map even be compared to accessible landmass in a fantasy MMO? All of the space between stars is currently empty and inaccessible, and players warp between points of interest within a solar system without interacting with any of the space in between. With that and the relative difference in scale between EVE and land-based games, it isn't immediately clear whether EVE Online still has the world's largest playable MMO map. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at how empty space works under the hood in EVE Online and crunch some numbers to find out whether it really does have the biggest playable game world.
