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Epic Online Space Battle
New submitter nusscom writes "On July 28th, as has been reported by BBC, a record number of EVE Online players participated in a record-breaking online battle between two alliances. This battle, which was essentially a turf-war was comprised of over 4,000 online players at one time. The load was so large that Crowd Control Productions (CCP) slowed down the game time to 10% of normal to accommodate the massive amount of activity."
This is the largest battle to ever occur on EVE Online.
These men of war, they are so valiant and strong. They are our finest lads, muscled and brawny, fighting for the sake of our realm. They fight not for a single king, nor for a sole lord; nay, they fight for the glory of battle itself, and the pride of their people. We are their people, and of them we are proud.
Less chance of diseases at least.
News for Nerds and you get scooped on the largest MMORPG fleet fight in history by...really the BBC?
Video games are for old kids.
FTFY.
Tomorrow is another day...
Men will be kids
We saw basically the same story six months ago and already discussed it.
Are we gonna put it on the front page each time they add a few people to their cap?
I started my account after hearing about the last huge battle a few months ago and very coincidentally uninstalled EVE the day after this battle. When the game is fun, it's great, but there's SOO much downtime in between PVP fights (PVE, PI, mining and such get old fast). CCP took the approach of more content rather than focusing on playability and new players get a truckload dumped in their laps. The UI is murder on new players and even the plugins could use a major upgrade or at least more consistency with colors. I had major friendly fire annoyances with color tags that were too close or misleading.
Game could be fun if there was more interaction, but from my experience there's a lot of spinning ships in station and yacking on Mumble. My two recommendations would be for CCP to create true CCP-sponsored corporations that stage lots of PVP and training against each other (much like the Blue and Red do) and do away with the non-functional NPC noob corps where new toons get dumped. Second, they need to improve the UI standardize that overview. The colors and codes are head scratching and sometimes *way* too similar.
The curve is just too high for people looking to have fun and not turn the game into a way of life. I felt barely competent after 4 months of play.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Real world is noticeably lacking in large-scale space battles (at least, to the best of our knowledge). Swings, roundabouts...
"Its the same boring shit about how eve's terrible servers can't handle all the buffered state updates and slows to a crawl"
Or to see the half-full glass, it's a story about how EVE is the only MMO game that really even attempts to let stuff happen on this kind of scale; it's the only major single-server MMO, i.e., the only one that doesn't just cheat by only having as many people on any given 'instance' of the game as their server code can handle.
You do. Only a complete lack of response would show otherwise.
And then you hid your screen name, afraid that others will find out that you actually care.
Which means that you not only care - you care whether others perceive that you care. And you try to obscure it by pretending not to care.
Amazing that you have time to think of anything else, actually.
The aliens who are monitoring the video game and looking for those with aptitude. ;-)
Laggy gameplay may seem unacceptable these days, BUT massively multiplayer games without lag have to cheat like crazy. Even classic online FPS games like 'Enemy Territory', with only a handful of players on each side, use 'predictive' techniques to make the experience appear smooth at the cost of true accuracy.
I think EVE Online takes the attitude that the players must see and be able to respond to a 'universal' truth, not a synthetic client-side 'truth' that merely attempts to be convincing enough to most players. Clearly the game is so popular because it actually bothers to notice what really matters to its core audience.
Of course, this being so, there is ZERO achievement when the parent company handles a battle of any given size. "Our system simply slows down under stress" is no kind of technical achievement whatsoever. So, why is the story worth reporting? Because a record number of players fancied a rumble? The BBC is the world's most crap news site of repute (repute with the sheeple, that is), and is never worth using as a reference.
Interesting things have happened in EVE Online, and many have been mentioned here. They almost always have to do with unique meta-aspects of the game. "Biggest battle evar11!!!!!1!1!" is no news whatsoever, unless there is some amazing backstory to the event, or some extraordinary aftermath.
Before I tried out Eve, I thought these epic space battles were technological breakthroughs. At the time, I was playing WoW was was restricted to 40 players and some mobs up at once. When I actually played Eve, I was quickly disillusioned. There are not many real-time controls in the game. You pick an action, then when the game decides when it's time, it executes it. It's a queuing system and it's nearly turn-based, like Civilization. You aren't controlling your space craft in real time. I am not as experienced as a lot of you guys are and you may have other input, but I quickly gave it up because it was boring as hell to do something then wait 10 seconds until it completed.
..... Real worlds. You know, the kind with actual girls you can talk to and touch (if you're lucky). I guess for the typical EVE online players, they'll stick with virtual women because it's the closest they can get.
Many EVE online players have far more experience with women than you. They are merely married, get close every night but don't get to touch nearly as much as they would like. So they have plenty of time for video games.
If you ever see a graph of video gamer ages you will typically see two spikes, one at about age 15 and another at about age 35. Get back to us when you are 35 and let us know how studly your life is when you are married and have kids.
like tears in rain...
why on earth does slashdot have to report this as news each time it happens?
Occasionally they need a gaming story that does not involve a Blizzard game. :-)
Funny, I have been living with a girl for the past 5 years and just got engaged to be married. Pretty much everyone else I know in game has a girlfriend and a social life. A lot of us are professionals too, myself included (I'm a doctor). I think you've got the wrong demographic.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
For the record, not judging here, simply observing. I have to confess I am sometime an old kid myself (usually around christmas...)
Tomorrow is another day...
4000 in the same battle, out of 36k online in the game. There was a large battle a few weeks ago too, at least until CCP mistakenly crashed the node while trying to reinforce it with more hardware. But this one was pretty epic.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Next up, in order to fight lag, all new major alliance wars will be conducted as Play by E-Mail.
Actually in the very early 90s that is close to how EVE-like games worked. For the one a friend wrote and operated it was a big open ended turn based game that had one turn per day. It was EVE-like in the sense that it was space based, involved exploration, exploitation, trade, alliances, government (security and taxation), pirates, smuggling, etc.
Pull it together, Slashdot. If this is "News for Nerds" then let's go full nerdgasm!
"Set the Mertilizer on Deep Fat Fry!" -- Spaceman Spiff
Why is Snark Required?
Just the affected server. The game is hosted on basically a supercomputer consisting of many blade servers and other hardware. Usually when a battle like this happens everything else on that server gets slowed down too (maybe 10 solar systems or so), and the devs try to move all non-essential stuff off the server, or even try to move the fight to their fastest hardware. It's safe to say, however, that most of the rest of the game was not affected at all by this battle, although its repercussions will be felt in the next few weeks as increased demand for "building blocks" on the EVE in-game market. Everything in the game is built by players from very basic materials that are harvested and then assembled through many intermediate components into final products. Demand will be going up to replace today's losses. Happy days.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
4000 players. And their missiles/shots/drones/fighters also need to be tracked. At any time you might have up to 20 objects flying around tied to a single player, so you're tracking 80,000 things in real time. You say you can do that on a 286. OK. Pics, or it didn't happen.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Amazing that you have time to think of anything else, actually.
I read your post imagining it was being spoken using Vizzini's voice. Much more amusing that way.
Because I did take part into some big battles and more often than not it was incredibly boring due to technical difficulties and lack of actual freedom for an individual.
Eve online is a game it is very interesting to read about, but not necessarily fun to play. Especially when it comes to fights involving many players. I find it pretty sad that this kind of news is almost the only thing reaching people outside New Eden when there are things so much more interesting in this game, be it its unique economy, the freedom players have or the game's unforgiving nature.
"Epic Excel Spreadsheet Recalc" just doesn't have quite the same ring to it :-P
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I was there (TM) It's not just the battle. It's the buildup. For 4 days we worked the system. Disrupting the enemy, destroying infrastructure. In the background spies worked there magic and Logistics move the materials of war into position. The phyc-ops and propagandist people boosted moral an got people to log in and participate. The battle is just one of the fun bits. 4000 pilots where just in the system. Without a doubt over 6000 pilots were involved on the day and closer to 10,000 for the buildup. EvE is serious spaceship business and this whole war is business. In EvE we are not ashamed to admit. We went to war for the Space monies.
Enders Game : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1731141/ Well, soon to be art, anyway...
That's EVE Online.
I don't know, some of those Prostitutes in game are pretty...well, sketchy at best.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
"Time to die", or in this case
"Time to slow down the game time to 10% of normal to accommodate the massive amount of activity" ; ).
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
I don't think you understand. Each 'solar system' in EVE runs on a single core - the system is not multi-processor friendly within a single solar system.
They moved the 6DVT(where the fight happened) system to the same blade server as Jita(the huge trade hub which regularly hosts around 1000-1500 people, most inside a station) but on a separate core.
400% of normal traffic to a single processor. That's impressive. Also, it's running python, so there's that as well.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Men will be kids
As long as it's for the sake of national security. Remember, in online chat rooms, chicks are chicks, guys are chicks and kids are cops.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Yeah, I was gonna comment the same thing. Do we *really* need a front-page story every single time there's a battle on some MMO? What next, a Slashdot article every time the Horde raids Stormwind?
I mean, I get that it's interesting how much load their servers were hit with and such, but if that's why you're posing it you should talk about *that*, not who was fighting over what.
Then again, what do I care...I used to read practically every single story on Slashdot...now I just pop in when I have an abnormally boring shift...
Would be nice if the summary talked about *that* then instead of just who was fighting over what....
The scientists changed their minds; glass is considered a solid again.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
In big battles you aren't some sort of superman. You are a grunt. One of many, many cogs in a giant organization playing your role and trying to not get squashed.
The real joys of Eve are in both the subversion of structure or the creation and management of it. Being a market manipulator and crashing a market segment just because it gains you an extra 20% on your investments for several hours or creating your own empire within an empire complete with command structure, commerce, human resources and manufacturing facilities. Being a kingmaker because of your connections and savvy or a destroyer of alliances through a diverse intelligence network are all part and parcel of such an immense environment to certain people.
People that go into a game like Eve and expecting to be a walking god like every other game, being in a never ending war and felling no loss or casualties, having their hand held and directed where to go for greatness, or not having to make many allies and a few friends just to survive will always be disappointed.
Eve is too much like real life. The people that have the most fun are those that are already winning in life or could if they didn't have some specific issue in their way. The rest just see Eve as work. Nobody wants to indulge in escapism by entering a world where they feel the same as everyday life.
CCGCKC got it...
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
The load was so large that Crowd Control Productions (CCP) slowed down the game time to 10% of normal to accommodate the massive amount of activity.
"Its the same boring shit about how eve's terrible servers can't handle all the buffered state updates and slows to a crawl"
Or to see the half-full glass, it's a story about how EVE is the only MMO game that really even attempts to let stuff happen on this kind of scale; it's the only major single-server MMO, i.e., the only one that doesn't just cheat by only having as many people on any given 'instance' of the game as their server code can handle.
So, the story is their code and single-server suck because they can't handle the load, right? If the game has to slow to 10% how does that prove anything good? I can run a simulation on my home computer and have it run at 10^-100 slower than it would run on the cluster at work. It will run, but be slow as glass flowing at room temperature. When they can do that at 100%, I will be impressed.
Or you can play a game like Everquest 2 where the lag can get so bad sometimes (because SoE blows most likely) that it takes 20 secs for your button press to register, if not longer.
And that is with 24 people in the zone.
Be seeing you...
It's actually pretty slick how they throw in some uniform time dilation to ensure fair and timely performance across all n number of pilots in a fight while the resources are dynamically allocated to reinforce the fleet battle nodes. Definitely an improvement from the prior lopsided disconnects and variable frame times. Rather than the network or cluster deciding the battle, the players do. Since they are the *only* game in town that provides this sort of scenario, I find it rather intriguing to hear about the ceiling being pushed further and further. There are many more questionably appropriate and even dull topics that are seen daily here. Internet spaceships and clever realtime server management don't seem so unwarranted.
Surprising that this topic is getting as much hate as it is. I can say as an 'on again, off again' EVE player that I really enjoy hearing these stories. As it goes, life is just too demanding at the moment and as the saying goes, "EVE is the best game I don't have time to play." To each their own I suppose. If these stories were not posted here, they would still make my news feeds, so I could do without if that would satiate those who find it offensive.
Indeed. VGA planets? Trade Wars? Barren Realms Elite? EVE is a beautiful step forward for the genre and is easily the best game I don't have time to play. (though I still manage occasionally much to the dismay of my lady friend)
I'm amazed how much effort people put playing games these days. I honestly think some like games (like EVE Online) are more like jobs than entertainment, if what I've read is any indication. Shit, if some people spent their time in the real world doing and learning things with the same level of zeal and dedication as they do in the virtual world, we might all be Tony Starks. :)
Having said that, the virtual world provides more immediate payoff for your efforts compared to the real world sometimes... which is probably what makes gaming so addictive.
They seem to have a very self-superior attitude as though they are just better because they play a Bettar Game(tm) and if you aren't good enough to hang with them then screw you, you suck! However on the other hand they hate the other MMOs because they take players away. The wish there was no WoW, no Rift, etc so that people HAD to play EVE.
Basically, what they really want is a large quantity of people who are not good at the game that they can pick on and hate on. They want to be the ruling class that has a lower class to shit on. They are bullies, more or less.
He's mad at you because you tried the game and left, rather than stuck around to give him another potential target to beat up.
A real doctor or an MD?
An MD I can see.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Sounds like VGA planets to me. Man I miss that game. Play by Email, 11 races, excellent special abilities and functions, fairly easy to run and automate. Very slick for its time.
It was the one example I can give where an entire game franchise was destroyed by a virus (primary programmer was infected and it killed his 90% complete new version). Sure he had no backup, but it was 1994 or '95, and it was a one man operation. He eventually recreated a VGAP 4.0, but it never caught on like the 3.5 version did.
Do you need time to play it? It uses the progress quest mechanic for player skills, doesn't it?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
You're a teenager. And yes, we CAN all tell from your post.
This is what I clicked through to see. Not being an MMO player myself, I was wondering how that affected game play for the end user. Hopefully there will be more useful comments below.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Soon TM
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
i don't play eve (or any other MMO), but have been following it for a year. this is "stuff that matters" for 2 reasons
first is the server load. ccp swapped out the node that normally hosts the home world and used it for this battle, they slowed things down in a planned way (time dilation), and there was lag beyond that. so this battle was the limit of their technology. if ccp is able to handle battles like this, the battles will get bigger, so what comes next, from a server and software standpoint, should be interesting
but maybe the more interesting aspect is that outside of the game, the 2 coalitions have built up technology infrastructure for organizing and coordinating the players. prior to the battle there was a huge push to motivate players to log on similar to the promotional blitz for a new game or a movie. and during the battle much of the communication happens outside the game itself - multiple channels of mumble, jabber and the web
it's news when twitter enables the arab spring. and it's news (to me) when 4000 geeks get together using online tools and coordinate their actions to achieve some goal (however useless that goal might be)
as for the game itself, i played for a few hours and found it boring. it's nominally played in a huge 3d world, but the locations are largely limited to small regions around a 2d "grid". the number of ships and weapons is mind-boggling and complicated, and the actions all more or less amount to selecting an from a menu, eg you don't aim at a target, you select it from a list. so after a few hours i found myself wishing it had a command line interface and quit
My blog
"and looking for those with aptitude. ;-)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptitude_(software)
Why, are they not using Linux? It's in the repos. :P
Nope, no Linux. They have been warned of earth virus so they avoid the GPL.
guessing that they just picked the most "prestigious" source. there's been a lot written about the technical aspects of the battle on reddit - here's the best that i can find at the moment:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/1j8sjz/ccp_explorer_says_theres_no_cap_in_6vdth/
the technology and organization outside of the game is also interesting - thousands of people acting in a coordinated manner to achieve a real-time goal using technology (mumble, jabber, irc) is news - even if the goal is (much) less impressive than hacking the linux kernel
My blog
http://www.stackless.com/
They are using Python 2.7:
http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/stackless-python-2.7/
Great discussion of pros and cons of Stackless:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/588958/what-are-the-drawbacks-of-stackless-python
Here's an interesting page with a few nuggets of info. In the discussion section, some people claim that the game used to crash with space battles as small as 100 ships. Clearly the game has been improved since then.
http://highscalability.com/eve-online-architecture
If you are really interested, here's a talk from PyCon 2009 that goes into some detail on what they do with Stackless. They had some problems that only showed up on the crazy load of a real system, so they had to go live with some code to test it!
http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/stackless-python-in-eve-pt-2-1959372
P.S. A couple of good trailers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrrVDV_NsNo
This one bored me at first but then got much better as the music got going.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euMjOHgb9A8
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
not sure what an "entity" is, but it's 4000 humans acting in a coordinated manner. wouldn't be shocked if the military manages the same with war games, but doubt that it's an order of magnitude more than that (couldn't find any numbers for omni fusion). i don't play the game, but the organizational structure for these coalitions is extensive
My blog
Try http://planets.nu/ if you want to relive that nostalgia.
Pretty nifty reimplementation which is 100% web based.
They should all go to a big field and then sort out their differences with butter knifes.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Chicks are chicks; so somebody that appears to be a chick, is in actual fact a chick.
And guys are chicks; so I guess you intend to mean that some of those chicks (right hand side) are in reality just guys (on left hand side).
But that would means that people that appear to be cops are in fact kids.
Or is it the other way around, that those who appear to be kids are actually cops and the ones that seem to be guys are in reality chicks?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
There's a little gathering in the Pennsylvania hills this week.. but they use sticks.
Www.pennsicwar.org
That is an interesting idea to simulate combat confusion by reducing the amount of data you get back as the shooting gets worse. Except you are not commanding one ship, issuing orders to dozens of smaller ones.
You are way off base. I did it in Hermione Granger's voice. Try it - you'll see. And you have to stretch the word "actually" out a bit to do it correctly.
4000 players is WAY more than 4000 PIECES on the board because large ships carry and command individual small fleets... So tens of thousands of pieces were in play.
Did you even look at the footage? You sound like someone going "Pffrt, flew people to Mars in 6 months? I can get to work in 6 minutes! When they do that in 6 days, I will be impressed."
it's the only major single-server MMO, i.e., the only one that doesn't just cheat by only having as many people on any given 'instance' of the game as their server code can handle.
Anarchy Online merged their servers earlier this year and now only runs a single world server, and while there are instances for missions (think 'dungeons') the world server itself really does just shove all the players together.
Now, whether Anarchy Online can boast 4000 active players is another matter entirely ...
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
That url is just too close to www.peniswar.org for comfort...especially for stick-fighting!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I agree. Eve online is pretty interesting from the standpoint that the devs seem to be taking the reverse tack of other MMORPGs. Rather than throwing a big ol' banhammer at in game strategies that challenge the infrastructure they've created a work around to allow it. If only it didn't use yet another point and click, leveling grindfest, as it basic game mechanic...
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
The aliens who are monitoring the video game and looking for those with aptitude. ;-)
I didn't realise the aliens were involved in a massive accountancy war.
They should all go to a big field and then sort out their differences with boffo weapons.
FTFY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_ZEU0EsMcw
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
The aliens who are monitoring the video game and looking for those with aptitude. ;-)
I didn't realise the aliens were involved in a massive accountancy war.
So you didn't know about the 235214-year war between accountants and phone sanitizers?
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
A real doctor or an MD?
Well, he doesn't have a Tardis, if that's what you're asking.
paintball
Do you need time to play it? It uses the progress quest mechanic for player skills, doesn't it?
Yes (assuming you mean that it uses game-time based skill acquisition, where you set up a list of skills you want to acquire and your character slowly learns them whether you're playing or not). But unlike most modern MMOs which have interesting solo games, it's only really worth playing if you can get deeply involved in a guild (or corporation, to use the local terminology), which demands quite a bit of time in most cases.
Also, it's running python, so there's that as well
I was impressed when I first heard about Eve's 4000 person battle, now I'm blown away. Given the overall horrible quality standards of MMO's, the Eve devs look like they might be the pick of the crop!
He _can_ have it run 10^-100 slower. It doesn't mean that is his home computer's top speed.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
Don't know if you were being sarcastic, but EVE doesn't use levelling
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I don't think you understand. Each 'solar system' in EVE runs on a single core - the system is not multi-processor friendly within a single solar system.
They moved the 6DVT(where the fight happened) system to the same blade server as Jita(the huge trade hub which regularly hosts around 1000-1500 people, most inside a station) but on a separate core.
400% of normal traffic to a single processor. That's impressive. Also, it's running python, so there's that as well.
So I don't see a lot of talk about 4,000 players on MUDs hosted on 486 DX 66 processors anymore, but listening to this drabble about Eve on that can only run a single core on Python should get me excited?
Seriously, there's nothing here. Dead Story before it began.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Modern keyboards come equipped with two shift keys and a caps lock. I think we must assume from lytles' post that either *all three* of these keys are broken or - since they use brackets which are accessed employing a shift key and number keys - they have actively chosen not to employ them. This could be because they fail to understand when those of us who are literate would employ "capital letters", or it could be because they have failed to understand how the use of such letters gains comprehension; it could be because they didn't care at school, or it could be a general contempt for literacy. I would imagine that there are also other possibilities, and would be interested in hearing lytles' response.
Don't know if you were being sarcastic, but EVE doesn't use levelling
And it's not exactly a 2D grid like the GP suggests. There are over 5,000 star (solar) systems but each is basically full size. It's true that like a normal star system, the overwhelmingly vast majority of that is empty space, but you can be anywhere within it. Most of the action does take place around celestial bodies, space stations, star gates, and anomalies, but EVE does a good job of making a galaxy feel mindbogglingly huge, which is appropriate.
You do. Only a complete lack of response would show otherwise.
What if he didn't care about the topic itself, but did care about making his feelings about said topic known?
And then you hid your screen name, afraid that others will find out that you actually care.
What if he doesn't actually have an account? What if he isn't afraid of any such thing?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
..... Real worlds. You know, the kind with actual girls you can talk to and touch (if you're lucky). I guess for the typical EVE online players, they'll stick with virtual women because it's the closest they can get.
Yes, because the only thing in the world that is enjoyable or that matters is women.
If you're talking "entities", I expect there were far more than that. Some players have drones out (up to 5 each, depending on their fit), some people fire missiles/bombs, which adds to the entity count, whenever a player dies he becomes a "pod" and leaves a wreck, so for each kill you transform two entities into one, etc, etc. A conservative guess would be around 10,000 entities.
Now, I've seen 100K particle simulations running at 60FPS on GPUs. I'm really not sure why CCP can't make the entire server a single core i5 2500K with an ATI 7970 and some clever DirectCompute shaders. In fact it's a complete mystery to me why nobody has tried it yet.
It's not the game that gets slowed down, it's the star system (and maybe the surrounding deployment systems) where that battle happens, which gets slowed down with what CCP calls Time Dilation, nicknamed "TiDi" by EVE players.
That's something completely different and IMHO a clever way of handling things. Other players in different parts of EVE's universe won't be affected and can continue to play as if nothing has happened.
Actually it mostly is quantum mechanics.
Oh, the MD vs PhD argument again. Be careful, some medical schools hand out dual doctorates MD-PhD. In my case I'm "just" a doctor of medicine.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It is a piece of paper that allows you to be insufferably smug. Because you have a DR. in front of your name it somehow makes you an expert in everything. Even though the course work for the most part narrows you field of study to a small section of a field.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
FYI, CCP did not slow anything down. TiDi kicks in automatically when server load goes up.
However, in the event of an anticipated big fight, CCP will move a system to a "reinforced node" (e.g. an extra beefy server). Of interest, though, is that many fights this year have not been entirely anticipated, resulting in TiDi being the only mechanism for load handling in play. For example, Asakai was the result of an unplanned misclick - it was supposed to be a small skirmish, but turned into a massive battle when a titan pilot jumped into the middle of the enemy fleet instead of bridging his fleetmates in. TiDi + unreinforced node = interesting mechanics, in which the fight is slowed down to 1/10 time, but most of the rest of the universe is running at normal speed. In the past, fleet battles were usually over in minutes, often with half of one fleet dying before they could even load the grid. Now they can last hours, long enough for reinforcements to arrive and massive escalation.
I've played EVE off and on (more off than on) since launch... I just came back from a five year break, I think I'm going to wind up quitting again in not too long. That said, reading the news of what's going on around the edges of the galaxy is pretty neat. I just don't have anywhere near enough time to participate in shit like that, and the game can easily get very boring if you're not in on the nullsec action.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
That is if you give the cheaters all the control.
The problem with today's systems isn't that we are writing code that slow because of lack of trying. But we have to account for more variables.
Hackers and Cheaters (especially for a system where you pay real money for virtual goods) would have a field day if they could flip a few bits and get some of the most expensive stuff in the game. Then sell online without a bunch of other checks on what the payer is doing.
Today our computers would run lighting fast if it wasn't for all the people who wanted to break in into our systems and take data, and cause problems.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It is simulating a few more objects than those muds though. For example, each player is likely to have 5 drones (mini robot spaceships), which takes the number of moving entities that have to be simulated up to 24000...
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Many of those players would have had 5 drones (mini robot spaceships) so that's potentially 24000 moving entities.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Care to name another game that lets that many pilots engage in single battle ?
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
No question, a game is not real life and real lives on the line. That being said, the technology to support this exists. A GAME SERVER had to be slowed to 10% to handle 4,070 spacecraft firing missiles and/or energy weapons. That suggests that 10x the horsepower could have handled the job. If we can do this for a game, using normal technology, why can't we scale it up to upgrade ATC? Is the game industry that much more lucrative, or is it that the downside risk (crashing a game server vs. crashing a plane) is so much higher that nobody wants to take a chance?
I don't believe that they dynamically allocate the resource to reinforce the fleet battle systems. They have to be given a heads up and a GM takes the node down and allocates extra resources to it before the battle begins. I may be mistaken, but that's what I remember from the last time this sort of thing appearing on slashdot.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
5 hours at 10% real time. So this was just a 30 minute skirmish.
Yep, and the guys that run EVE were one of the first major case studies for FusionIO, they proved that a lightning fast local SSD card can improve database performance more than any other reasonably priced upgrade. It's interesting the kinds of things you have to do when you push the envelope in massive multiplayer.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Hehe,
A friend said the fight got on Slashdot, so I just though I should mention that /. user number 42, got some kills in this fight ;)
Click here, for a free 21-day trial :) https://secure.eveonline.com/trial/?invc=e3af1093-bced-4da3-969a-c5788532ed93&action=buddy
Fly safe, guys! :)
magg
I may be smug, but it's the smugness of intelligent people everywhere. My degree has nothing to do with it, in fact if anything my chosen field makes me more humble. It happens when you're tying to figure out what to say (if anything) to a mother who will be dead in two weeks from leukemia, while she holds her 3 year old in her arms in your office and asks about her blood test result.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It must be so tiresome to put up with lesser mortals everywhere you look.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Or is it the other way around, that those who appear to be kids are actually cops and the ones that seem to be guys are in reality chicks?
Well, you could call one up to have sex and you might end up with a stone cold fox or a stone cold killer or a Stone Phillip. You make the call.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Impressive, but I wonder how much better it could be when CCP finally comes up with a multi-processor friendly architecture and replaces some more Python with C libraries. :).
A factor 10 seems possible, and then the same battle could run in real time
C - the footgun of programming languages
Not really as I like educating those below me but what IS tiresome is flag waving douchebags, which remind me of the ancient Mel Brooks joke "all go to hell except cave 76!". I mean do you HONESTLY think that CCP gives a fuck about anything other than your wallet?
Now is that automatically a bad thing? No not at all, as long as they give you good value for your dollars and if you'd like an example I'd point out Gearbox with their Borderlands series or Volition with their Saints Row series, both just love to play the DLC tango but when my boys and I are playing co-op in some massive free for all in Borderlands 1 or 2 or Saints Row 3? I honestly couldn't care less about their trying to squeeze that last nickel by appealing to completionists.
But for an example of where you are NOT getting good value see Eve Online where a LOT of the appeal, hell its even all over the ads CCP have to entice newcomers, is the "huge epic space battles" so the sci/fi fans can recreate some of the excitement of Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica only to find the engine simply can't keep up, which of course i called them out on. If you are gonna advertise huge space battles at least be capable of having epic space battles in real time, otherwise it might as well be a turn based RTS.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I remember when I used to get 2000 of my closest friends together and have turf wars against 2000 people from another "alliance". Now a days everything's virtual and no one meeting each other in real life... How sad the days you can't punch someone in the face for pissing you off... You have to take it out on your keyboard now :p. :)