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How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

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Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

#11

Post by fatbird »

rauljara wrote: post #8

The report of the battle they link to ( http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve-online-battle-asakai/ ) is even more fascinating to me. You spend hours and hours of effort in order to get a ship, and one way of thinking about them is as the time spent to earn them compressed into 3d form. Unlike (most) other MMO's, battles actually destroy things. So in that youtube clip, you're watching years and years of effort getti…

That feeling of "My ship! My beautiful, beautiful ship!" is offset by the fact that major alliances tend to have strong reimbursement programs. If your dreadnought goes boom in a fleet op, you get the cost of another hull and gear, and get to draw on corp/alliance stores as well.

Otherwise, they'd never get their supercap pilots out of the hanger :)

Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

#12

Post by xenophanes »

Goronmon wrote: post #7
incision wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's like each solar system is a VM, and they can't move their VMs to a new physical server without disconnecting all clients. And all of their physical servers are at 100% load all of the time? I wasn't sure how to interpret that either. I've always been a bit surprised that the the backend systems for these MMOs aren't a bit more flexible. Though, EvE did launch nearly 10 years ago and it has never had a huge numb…

I have no idea whether more recent games have solved these problems. Most games solve this problem with completely separate servers and population caps. I know in Guild Wars 2 they actually stop displaying players past a certain number to improve performance. This works fine in calm areas like cities, but in PvP it causes issues with being killed by "invisible" groups that the game fails to load in time. I may be rem…

Guild Wars 2 is stupid about this. At least on release, they stopped displaying ENEMIES FIRST. So if you're in a big enough group, a couple enemies can walk up and none of you can see them b/c you hit the limit from displaying allies, but they can still see some of you guys and kill you while invisible.

If they prioritized displaying just party members (parties only go up to 5 people) and maybe people on your friends list, and then enemies, it would have worked better.

Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

#13

Post by ChuckMcM »

This is a nice article.

A friend of mine did some research for DARPA/NSF on internet 'crowds.' His research was looking at the question of fractal gatherings, which was basically you were 'near' the people around you in the virtual 3D space and could hear what they were saying, you were adjacent to people who were one space away but could hear them if they 'shouted' and the crowd was at a gathering that was sharing an experience from a presenter who was 'projected'. Basically a virtual concert venue for example where process affinity scheduling took into account where you "were" in the 3D space. The questions are many and as far as I can tell the folks who research this are few and far between.

Process migration continues to be a hard thing to do. VMware and others have made progress, virtualized interfaces and peripherals, self contained 'state'. Works 'ok' at the VM level but still doesn't work at all AFAIK at the 'thread' level.

World of Warcraft addresses this somewhat by 'instances' which is that under certain circumstances (entering a dungeon for example) you and your party of 5, 10, 25, or 40 people all transition (through a loading screen) into a place with nobody else (except you). They can dedicate machines to host an instance and do process migration at that level.

DARPA is interested of course because they would love to have a way of connecting warfighters into a virtual command and control center regardless of where they are physically. Essentially being in two places at once is a big force multiplier.

Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

#14

Post by vmind »

rauljara wrote: post #8

The report of the battle they link to ( http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve-online-battle-asakai/ ) is even more fascinating to me. You spend hours and hours of effort in order to get a ship, and one way of thinking about them is as the time spent to earn them compressed into 3d form. Unlike (most) other MMO's, battles actually destroy things. So in that youtube clip, you're watching years and years of effort getti…

The risk element, to me, makes EVE a much more fun game than many others when it comes to combat. The pay off in fun, excitement and stories to be told is so much greater when there was a risk involved.

Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

#15

Post by outworlder »

incision wrote: post #3
stephengillie wrote: post #2

It's like each solar system is a VM, and they can't move their VMs to a new physical server without disconnecting all clients. And all of their physical servers are at 100% load all of the time? Oh, I guess it's 100% utilization, not 100% load. As in, they don't spin down servers to save power during off-hours I guess. The time dilation is a neat solution to the server load problem, but it's sooo annoying as a player…

>It's like each solar system is a VM, and they can't move their VMs to a new physical server without disconnecting all clients. And all of their physical servers are at 100% load all of the time? I wasn't sure how to interpret that either. I've always been a bit surprised that the the backend systems for these MMOs aren't a bit more flexible. Though, EvE did launch nearly 10 years ago and it has never had a huge numb…

400k+ active players IS a huge number. Specially considering they are in the same logical server. Other MMO's handle this by having copies of the world and splitting the population - which is the same approach used by Ultima Online back in 1997.

So actually, EVE is way ahead of the rest, technology-wise.

Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

#17

Post by baddox »

fatbird wrote: post #11
rauljara wrote: post #8

The report of the battle they link to ( http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve-online-battle-asakai/ ) is even more fascinating to me. You spend hours and hours of effort in order to get a ship, and one way of thinking about them is as the time spent to earn them compressed into 3d form. Unlike (most) other MMO's, battles actually destroy things. So in that youtube clip, you're watching years and years of effort getti…

That feeling of "My ship! My beautiful, beautiful ship!" is offset by the fact that major alliances tend to have strong reimbursement programs. If your dreadnought goes boom in a fleet op, you get the cost of another hull and gear, and get to draw on corp/alliance stores as well. Otherwise, they'd never get their supercap pilots out of the hanger :)

What would be the point of having all this cool stuff if no one else even gets to see it and you don't get to use it?

Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

#18

Post by OmegaHN »

rauljara wrote: post #8

The report of the battle they link to ( http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve-online-battle-asakai/ ) is even more fascinating to me. You spend hours and hours of effort in order to get a ship, and one way of thinking about them is as the time spent to earn them compressed into 3d form. Unlike (most) other MMO's, battles actually destroy things. So in that youtube clip, you're watching years and years of effort getti…

One of EVE's sayings is "Don't fly what you can't lose."

In general, you get that kind of ship especially for these types of fights. There isn't much base-building or PvE inside of EVE; it's all about the PvP. Being able to say that you flew a Titan into a battle is a major accomplishment inside of the EVE universe, so you don't care as much if you lose it (of course, you want to keep it safe, but only to fly it into more battles).

Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

#20

Post by fatbird »

baddox wrote: post #17
fatbird wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That feeling of "My ship! My beautiful, beautiful ship!" is offset by the fact that major alliances tend to have strong reimbursement programs. If your dreadnought goes boom in a fleet op, you get the cost of another hull and gear, and get to draw on corp/alliance stores as well. Otherwise, they'd never get their supercap pilots out of the hanger :)

What would be the point of having all this cool stuff if no one else even gets to see it and you don't get to use it?

If you spent six months grinding the ISK to buy and outfit a carrier, how willing would you be to take it into a battle where any of a hundred things could destroy it, including server lag or a random disconnection?
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