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No Time Dilation | Is it possible? Let's brainstorm

Author
Octavian Nero Gaius
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#1 - 2017-06-20 08:57:19 UTC  |  Edited by: Octavian Nero Gaius
I know EVE Online is run on some SERIOUS hardware. That being a military grade super-computer (http://www.pcgamer.com/eve-online-1/)

However I'd like to have an open discussion with the community, and with CCP about how we can achieve this great goal together. I'm a fairly newer player, and didn't have to deal with the insanity of the large scale fights that older players endured. That being said, I really like how the game has progressed (Albeit many will disagree with that) and i'd like to discuss if it would ever be possible to have gameplay without the Time Dilation in effect. ?

First off, is it possible at all? if so then..
What additional hardware is needed?
What are the financial costs?
How many nodes would have to be upgraded?
How long would it take? (If it takes 2 years, give us a roadmap, and update us throughout)
How can we help you achieve this?
etc etc etc

I would personally start a campaign to raise the funds to achieve this, so long as this is made priority as well as a priority on citizen science like project discoveries "ExoPlanets"

I believe we can achieve this together, and make this more than a game, we can make this the first concept in mans voyage to the stars.

I want this game (Honestly ANY game) that can encourage people & get them excited about space exploration and space colonization to do well, continue to grow and flourish and reach as many people as possible.
I believe EVE can be that game. Not to mention the business skills, communications skills, conflict resolution, goal setting, immense failure and trying again, and much more I believe EVE like many games can make a better world.

The principles first found me in a video by a women named Jane McGonigals Ted Talk "Gaming can change the world" which led me the scientific literature and other sources that indeed confirmed, gaming has a profound impact on our brains development. Action games leading to better eyesight, puzzle and complex games leading to greater grey matter development and much much more !

This is purely for discussion and brainstorming the possibilities for the future, it may not be possible at all until many many years in the future with new technology. However technology is advancing rapidly, it may come sooner than we think.

Here's a reddit thread with some existing thoughts and discussion to build upon.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/55luf2/when_will_time_dilation_be_a_thing_of_the_past/
Wander Prian
Nosferatu Security Foundation
#2 - 2017-06-20 09:09:03 UTC
There is no hardware currently available that could run a big fight with or without TiDi without lag-issues. Eve was made before the CPU-manufactures hit the wall with processor-speeds and started doing multiple cores. What Eve would require to get more people into same system without lag or TiDi, would be a new processor that has much higher clock-speed.

Wormholer for life.

Octavian Nero Gaius
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#3 - 2017-06-20 09:18:10 UTC
Wander Prian wrote:
There is no hardware currently available that could run a big fight with or without TiDi without lag-issues. Eve was made before the CPU-manufactures hit the wall with processor-speeds and started doing multiple cores. What Eve would require to get more people into same system without lag or TiDi, would be a new processor that has much higher clock-speed.



Interesting. That's unfortunate. I dabble in the subject matter, but in no way an expert. I suppose even the advancement into 32 core 64 thread processors would be ineffective as you have described. I suspect it would require a complete rewrite of the code. Perhaps we will be blessed with a faster clock speed server grade processor in the near future or a larger development team down the line to consider such drastic measures.

Thank you for your input.
Octavian Nero Gaius
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#4 - 2017-06-20 09:25:57 UTC
Perhaps we are making baby steps in the right direction with this article. Server CPU speeds reaching 3.4Ghz - 1Ghz higher than the average I have been seeing of 2.4Ghz for server cpus. I can only hope and wait and see.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3168061/components-processors/intels-priciest-chip-has-24-cores-and-sells-for-8-898.html
Wander Prian
Nosferatu Security Foundation
#5 - 2017-06-20 09:28:14 UTC
Octavian Nero Gaius wrote:
Perhaps we are making baby steps in the right direction with this article. Server CPU speeds reaching 3.4Ghz - 1Ghz higher than the average I have been seeing of 2.4Ghz for server cpus. I can only hope and wait and see.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3168061/components-processors/intels-priciest-chip-has-24-cores-and-sells-for-8-898.html


Here's a devblog about the current hardware they are running on : https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/tranquility-tech-3/

Wormholer for life.

Octavian Nero Gaius
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#6 - 2017-06-20 09:32:10 UTC
Wander Prian wrote:
Octavian Nero Gaius wrote:
Perhaps we are making baby steps in the right direction with this article. Server CPU speeds reaching 3.4Ghz - 1Ghz higher than the average I have been seeing of 2.4Ghz for server cpus. I can only hope and wait and see.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3168061/components-processors/intels-priciest-chip-has-24-cores-and-sells-for-8-898.html


Here's a devblog about the current hardware they are running on : https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/tranquility-tech-3/




Fascinating, thank you for the article it's an interesting read. Seems they are closer than I had anticipated. I am interested now with some of the new tech coming out by what they are currently running, quite a lot to think about now.
Wander Prian
Nosferatu Security Foundation
#7 - 2017-06-20 11:38:37 UTC
The thing with us Eve-players is that every time CCP raises the performance, we just jam more people to the same system and complain that the game doesn't work.

Wormholer for life.

Octavian Nero Gaius
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#8 - 2017-06-20 11:56:32 UTC  |  Edited by: Octavian Nero Gaius
Wander Prian wrote:
The thing with us Eve-players is that every time CCP raises the performance, we just jam more people to the same system and complain that the game doesn't work.



I have seen that as well sadly. I had the idea, and intend to implement it myself, the tactics of real conflicts. That being, flanking and engaging on multiple fronts etc. I intend to engage a fleet with a main force, and simultaneously attack one of their important structures or systems with an ally etc, thus forcing the main fleet to break off at least some forces to pull back and bolster their reserves in the other system. This would create 2 epic smaller engagements (Smaller but still massive) on 2 separate nodes, i hope once people see it's effectiveness, they will begin to implement it themselves.
Merin Ryskin
Peregrine Industries
#9 - 2017-06-20 13:39:18 UTC
EVE is a for-profit business, any talk of donating money to CCP is absolutely stupid. If CCP's engineers find a way to improve performance and consider the new hardware a good investment they can buy their own servers.
Marika Sunji
Perkone
Caldari State
#10 - 2017-06-20 14:32:35 UTC
There are limits as to what is possible to do even with unlimited hardware budget and the reason is simple - our CPUs can only go so fast. Large parts of EVE are inherently sequential in nature - they cannot be split into parallel threads for use with multiple cores/CPUs. I'm taking mainly about physics simulation here - you cannot, for example, simulate every ship in its own thread or you run into race conditions (e.g. server deciding you alpha someone off the grid when in fact you should have died yourself before the salvo even fired, but your thread was faster to process).
Octavian Nero Gaius
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#11 - 2017-06-20 15:06:37 UTC
Merin Ryskin wrote:
EVE is a for-profit business, any talk of donating money to CCP is absolutely stupid. If CCP's engineers find a way to improve performance and consider the new hardware a good investment they can buy their own servers.



And you deciding how others spend their money is just as stupid. If I voluntarily choose to give money to a for profit company, and ask others to do the same, and they to choose voluntarily to give money, to acquire hardware faster than otherwise possible I will do just that.

You are free to do as you please with your money and your time. The question was very specific.
Serendipity Lost
Repo Industries
#12 - 2017-06-20 15:20:03 UTC  |  Edited by: Serendipity Lost
The fix for all this major fight tidi is actually quite simple. When the 'once a year' megafights are in progress - get rid of down time. Just until the fight is over. This would accomplish a couple of things:

1. Real commitment for the fleet. Someone is gonna get wiped off the field (it may take 3 straight glorious days, but man - what a show).
2. It would at least slow down the supercap population growth. As it stands now - drop 100 supers and expect to lose only a fraction (assuming things go wrong) because the artificial fleet saver know as DT will allow you to evac when the coast is clear.
3. It will put some bawls back in 0.0 conflict.
4. (assuming CCP unfunks the current mining disaster) Ore prices will go up.

Remove asset safety from citadels and you'll get some spectacular game play while large fleets duke it out taking down keepstars that house capital fleet reserves. Spais, explosions, escallations and woo hoo!


Ahem.... I wandered there for a second. Seriously, just turning off the down time when MAJOR fights are I/P (publish a ship minimum ahead of time so DEV/players don't get hooked into shenanigans if a fight goes this way or that way). So there you have it - a little subroutine and some pre-published 'this is when we push the button' guidelines and it will all take care of itself over time. And a fun time it will be!
Frostys Virpio
State War Academy
Caldari State
#13 - 2017-06-20 15:44:33 UTC
Octavian Nero Gaius wrote:
Merin Ryskin wrote:
EVE is a for-profit business, any talk of donating money to CCP is absolutely stupid. If CCP's engineers find a way to improve performance and consider the new hardware a good investment they can buy their own servers.



And you deciding how others spend their money is just as stupid. If I voluntarily choose to give money to a for profit company, and ask others to do the same, and they to choose voluntarily to give money, to acquire hardware faster than otherwise possible I will do just that.

You are free to do as you please with your money and your time. The question was very specific.


Money is not the issue. The core problem is the software need performance metrics that are barely getting development these days so upgrades are not available. The push for higher instruction per clock is done with parallelism in the industry but the software need more IPC without parallelism since the code does not support it. Fleet fight notification are used to get systems hosted on dedicated nodes and we still manage to cram it so full it slows down to a crawl if not borderline **** itself with module jamming and other similar stuff. Removing TiDi would require a vast change int he game itself so massing more and more player in the same place no longer work but every time CCP did that, Ageis SOV for example, they created something the player base hates.
SurrenderMonkey
State Protectorate
Caldari State
#14 - 2017-06-20 15:53:11 UTC
This is sort of a "Short answer: No. Long answer: Nooooooo," thing.

If there were a technologically and economically feasible solution to TiDi, implementing it would probably be their only priority.

"Help, I'm bored with missions!"

http://swiftandbitter.com/eve/wtd/

Octavian Nero Gaius
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#15 - 2017-06-20 15:58:52 UTC  |  Edited by: Octavian Nero Gaius
SurrenderMonkey wrote:
This is sort of a "Short answer: No. Long answer: Nooooooo," thing.

If there were a technologically and economically feasible solution to TiDi, implementing it would probably be their only priority.



That's quite possible and I am sure they are working hard on just that. The point of this was to be a discussion thread and brainstorming ideas of whether or not it could be done. Either now, or in the near future with advancing technology. They have made significant progress.

Also a video I just watched from Delonewolf (Released 45 minutes prior to typing this the battle of Auga) shows that with about 1700 people the TiDi was actually quite reasonable. Says the camera was still responsive and everything. Once 2200 + were trying to get on the kill mail, it started to increase. But that's quite good to get close to 2000 people with a fairly smooth experience from the viewer perspective as well.

I have hopes it can be done.
Frostys Virpio
State War Academy
Caldari State
#16 - 2017-06-20 16:11:10 UTC
Octavian Nero Gaius wrote:
SurrenderMonkey wrote:
This is sort of a "Short answer: No. Long answer: Nooooooo," thing.

If there were a technologically and economically feasible solution to TiDi, implementing it would probably be their only priority.



That's quite possible and I am sure they are working hard on just that. The point of this was to be a discussion thread and brainstorming ideas of whether or not it could be done. Either now, or in the near future with advancing technology. They have made significant progress.

Also a video I just watched from Delonewolf (Released 45 minutes prior to typing this) shows that with about 1700 people the TiDi was actually quite reasonable. Says the camera was still responsive and everything. Once 2200 + were trying to get on the kill mail, it started to increase. But that's quite good to get close to 2000 people with a fairly smooth experience from the viewer perspective as well.

I have hopes it can be done.


By the time the systems can handle 2500 players in system, we will be trying to cram 3000 players in it.

If you want quick fix ghetto solution, you could always remove at least the onus of 3rd party to come in the fight but that's only band-aid and would ****-off all those who love to 3rd party for various reasons.
SurrenderMonkey
State Protectorate
Caldari State
#17 - 2017-06-20 16:30:31 UTC
Octavian Nero Gaius wrote:
SurrenderMonkey wrote:
This is sort of a "Short answer: No. Long answer: Nooooooo," thing.

If there were a technologically and economically feasible solution to TiDi, implementing it would probably be their only priority.



That's quite possible and I am sure they are working hard on just that. The point of this was to be a discussion thread and brainstorming ideas of whether or not it could be done. Either now, or in the near future with advancing technology. They have made significant progress.

Also a video I just watched from Delonewolf (Released 45 minutes prior to typing this the battle of Auga) shows that with about 1700 people the TiDi was actually quite reasonable. Says the camera was still responsive and everything. Once 2200 + were trying to get on the kill mail, it started to increase. But that's quite good to get close to 2000 people with a fairly smooth experience from the viewer perspective as well.

I have hopes it can be done.


I have hopes re: riding a unicorn through Narnia on my way to a naked pillow fight with J-Law and Kate Upton and tbh, I think my odds are better than yours.

Also, Tidi has little/nothing to do with client performance - it's a serverside thing. Client performance is frequently bad in those fights, as well, but that's another matter entirely.

Probably the most practical solution would be in the form of game mechanics that steer away from blob warfare as the most effective strategy, thereby limiting the frequency of such fights. Fozziesov's command node mechanics seem to have been at least a light attempt at doing that. Practical doesn't necessarily mean desirable, though, and it could be that the playerbase would just rather endure tidi than more Fozziesov-like mechanics.

"Help, I'm bored with missions!"

http://swiftandbitter.com/eve/wtd/

Cade Windstalker
#18 - 2017-06-20 16:53:05 UTC
Both the short and the long answer is "no".

There is no amount of hardware or optimization CCP can put the game through that will ever realistically eliminate TiDi. Even if CCP made it so a 4000 person fight experienced zero TiDi tomorrow within 6 months someone would stuff 5 or 6000 people in a fight and ta-da the TiDi is back.

The reason this absolutely can't be done is because some actions have to be processed synchronously, and it's this processing queue that causes TiDi. For example if I push the button to shoot you and blow you up at t=.1 seconds and you hit the button to activate your cloak at t=.4 seconds it's pretty important to both of us that these things are processed in the order they happened. There's no way around this sort of limitation, and the game can't know that it doesn't care about order for two actions until they've both been processed.
Axure Abbacus
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#19 - 2017-06-20 17:04:47 UTC
Yes, they could if they rewrite the eula and slip in "all your base are belonging to us" in page 42. Its also how you build sky net. Also everyone would want to hijack CCP servers to do bad things.

Tranquility is a finite resource where server load can peak out a blade in the cluster. They would have to use server resources and everyone else's desktop resources that had a client loaded to push that fight along.

If they added pooled resource programming like out programs like the seti at home uses home pc's as virtual super computer. They could free up additional server load for big fights and off shore server time from mission runners in lonetrek to all the Jita alts. Ask those guys how to. Optionally they could get quantum processors. Still bad idea.

https://www.sciencealert.com/this-physicist-has-built-a-supercomputer-from-old-playstations

It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid.

Cade Windstalker
#20 - 2017-06-20 17:11:01 UTC
Axure Abbacus wrote:
Yes, they could if they rewrite the eula and slip in "all your base are belonging to us" in page 42. Its also how you build sky net. Also everyone would want to hijack CCP servers to do bad things.

Tranquility is a finite resource where server load can peak out a blade in the cluster. They would have to use server resources and everyone else's desktop resources that had a client loaded to push that fight along.

If they added pooled resource programming like out programs like the seti at home uses home pc's as virtual super computer. They could free up additional server load for big fights and off shore server time from mission runners in lonetrek to all the Jita alts. Ask those guys how to. Optionally they could get quantum processors. Still bad idea.

https://www.sciencealert.com/this-physicist-has-built-a-supercomputer-from-old-playstations


This isn't correct, the problem with Eve and every other game is certain things *have* to be run synchronously or stuff breaks in a very bad way. Distributed computing only works for tasks that can be broken up into lots of little pieces that don't care about the order they're run in. Works great for fights happening in two different systems, doesn't work so well for the physics sim for that one 5000 person fight. That's how you end up with two ships 'glued together' bouncing off into infinity as the physics sim has an epileptic fit.
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