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The Technical Pull of EVE Online

Here at EVE Online Fanfest 2008, members of the press were treated to a handful of special presentations from some of the development squad at CCP – and some of their associates as well. Dissimilar the vast absolute majority of MMOGs, which split their playerbase into multiple separated "shard" servers, EVE is unique for having all of its quarter-million strong population on one collective region. By nature, this results in technical hurdle race for the squad to overcome – it's easy for a traditional MMOG to just buy a new waiter bundle and clone a new shard, but that sort of standard solution just wouldn't make for for CCP and Eventide.

I won't lie to you – the technical details were a second over my head. I did collar both of the specifics here and there: they apparently decide what their next projects testament be via rugby scrums, they're programming in a new language developed by barracudas (or perhaps they've opened a new-sprung agency in Cuba, I'm still ambiguous along the exact details of this one), and they apparently contend their server clusters past sticking out swords and knives into them. Something like that, anyway. I'm a bit fuzzy on the technical industry terms, to be fair.

What was clear, though, were the results:

Since the launch of the Premium graphics update to Evening, the shift towards rendering and generating textures and particle effects via the GPU rather of feeding the calculations through the Processor has bated the drain on the systems significantly. Through optimisation, we were told, they'd reached the channelis where, in one of their tests that they showed us, they'd managed to run 10 separate instances of the EVE node on one (TRUE pass-end) machine. Some of their further goals included procedural generation of planet surfaces that would admit players to zoom in far on the far side the chain where nowadays they'd see the map out break down into pixelization, Beaver State the full dense particle rendering of the EVE universe's gas giants.

The CCP team up besides talked about the optimizations they'd made host-side, and the upgrades in functionality since unmatched year past. In November 2007, the most pilots that could Be in Jita (the primary commercialize hub in the EVE galaxy) before frightening lag set in and their financial support stave queues were filled with requests to make a motion one's ship out of the area was approximately 600. Now, they've had 850 simultaneously without even a single much problem rearing its mind. While in the most jammed mission zones, at peak hours lag could get pertinent where combat and information modules would take 20 or 30 seconds to update – hardly playable by anyone. They announced proudly that they'd slashed that lag tenfold, to where it was now a delay of 2-3 seconds at worst. Furthermore, large-scale fleet scrap was now possible and playable with a fleet size of 1000 ships, up from just 400 a year ago.

Patc the new Quantum Arise expansion wouldn't feature a graphical upgrade like the start between Classical to Superior, the one after that would contain a similar jump – after that, though, they promise to update the gamy in smaller, more reform-minded chunk.

Stick tuned for coverage from Fanfest – tomorrow, we'll beat a closer look at walking in stations, and the CCP team has kept hinting that there's a volumed announcement future for Saturday.