EVE General Discussion

What you're suggesting basically tantamount to suggesting that buying a laptop will make your desktop faster. Adding a new CPU does not affect the processing power of the CPUs in a cluster. In the initial investigations of multi-threading the simulation showed that it would actually HURT performance most of the time, while costing an insane amount of dev time to implement, plus who knows how many bugs. EVE is written in Python, which does not do multithreading, so to get it to do so would be a "dirty hack" that's extremely inefficient. That said, CCP has been figuring out ways to shift stuff away from python, which, among a lot more server stuff, can be read about in the dev blogs.

it's not about variables, it's about basic game mechanics. How weapons tracking is stored, how explosion velocities are done. Even if you exclude shooting, you still have the problem that on the server, all the ships in EVE are a perfect sphere with no front, back, up, or down. They are essentially 1 dimensional objects. stick/rudder assumes there's such a thing as front and back rather than just current vector and target vector. That can't really be fixed without entirely rewriting the entire simulation engine, and therefore the entire weapons engine.

already being done as in there is a team working full time on optimizing the server with the intent to improve performance. You're saying "there is no magic fix" and yet you just asked for one.

The server can handle a maximum of 1 movement command per second. Adding WASD or especially stick/rudder would be throwing hundreds of movement command per second. From thousands of pilots. All on the same CPU. And trying to do the extra collisions and stuff that's generated on top of it.

From a technical perspective, it's a bad idea. From a development perspective, it's a bad idea. From a gameplay perspective, it's a bad idea. From an "I've never played EVE before" perspective it seems like a good idea. And that's what makes it so annoying every time some rookie suggests it.

Um you are talking out your ass, sorry to break it to you.

Might want to learn a bit about that which you want to argue about on the intert00bz with people before trying to sound like you know what you're talking about.

Mind if I say that, whats the use of flight stick control? It seems to be something utterly worthless compared to the massive amount of work required to impliment. This almost sounds like a quater million project that wont pay for itself off.

You know, when I first got here, ooh in '07 I think, I asked the same thing. Now in '11, I can say with certainty, you're in the wrong game if you're looking for that.

Yeah, I guess we're just talking about different things. You're assuming they stick with the current design, I'm saying they could come up with a design to make WASD work. Whether that would require dramatic changes to their architechture or minor changes to the code I don't think either of us could possibly actually know. Reading a few high level summaries of how the system works and actually being deep in the code are very different vantage points.

Basic math would dictate that 100 is 10000% more than 1. You are advocating at least that much more load with current hardware and software limitations. That is if it is ONLY 100 more calculations. You are correct in saying that it is not impossible but it certainly can be deemed unfeasible. Limits of time and money are a factor here and with CCP's current liabilities as well as laying off staff this idea just cannot be done at this time.

Even if they had the resouces to somehow increase functionality of the server to take 10000% more load I am sure they would use that to make fleet fights better and finish Incarna.

This would be possible if you only had to deal with your own ship plus AI rats.

As soon you have more than one human pilot you'll need to distribute the ships navigational information to all other ships on the grid. And you'll have to do that with relatively low lag or ships will either appear to be being at different locations on different clients.

Offloading some calculations to the client will not solve that since your client have no chance of knowing what my client just calculated and displayed until the server has distributed that data.

The server(s) operate on 1 second tick (or longer in extreme cases with the new TiDi) to be able to let every client have the same data.

Adding more servers, cpus, cores or threads will not increase the processing power until the server code is recoded so that it can use it.

They have already offloaded much (or even most) of the code not related to the active on grid calculations and data handling but to spread the core grid handling over several servers/cpus/cores simply isn't possible without a very deep and serious rewrite.

tl;dr

It might be possible, if you wrote a new game from scratch.

100 is 10,000% of 1? Where do you get the 100 or the 1? I'm not sure what you're talking about.

The info I'm seeing says they have about 2,500 database transactions per second average. (That's from 2007, not sure if it is higher or lower now) Not sure what percentage of client communications require accessing the database, but to be very conservative, lets say 1/4 of them do. If that's so, then their current load is around 10,000 transactions per second. Mkint speculated that adding WASD could generate hundreds of transactions a second. So, lets say 500. If so, that would be a 5% increase in load.

But yeah, even accomodating a 5% increase in load might not be realistic given the economic constraints with the unsubs and layoffs and whatnot.

over a eyar? then you must obviously know that when your in a friggin fleet battle or any battle worth fighting, your not even LOOKING at your ship, your looking at the opponent(s) and your camera is NOT behind your ship, making any kind of meaningful controls with directional keys nigh-impossible.

and lets not even get started on large fleet fights, where your zoomed out so far all you see is brackets. you wont even be able to see where your ship is let alone what direction it is going. and before you say "it would make players keep their camera on their ship for {insert immersion/tactical/etc excuse here}" being close enough to see your ship in LARGE fights is impossible without a computer capable of processing all that, and i know alot of people who dont.

the way the controls work in this game makes sense, whether it be from a function or lore standpoint. lorewise your a capsuleer acting as a bio-computer of sorts giving orders to your ship, such as "head towards this guy, dont go too close" your not at a joystick/steering wheel.

honestly, all directional pads would do is add unneccessary controls during fleet fights making combat more micro-management then pew pew.

He said hundreds of transactions a second per player. So let's say 20,000,000 total. If so, that would an 800,000% increase