EVE General Discussion

I was an avid player of Star Wars Galaxies. I was a Jedi early on, I had the big multi-room starship, I had several of the large type homes on several planets.

That game died for me when the new combat system was released. I, and thousands of other players, quit overnight.

I worry about this bullet time feature that is coming to EVE.

Servers are extremely powerful today. Proper coding allows companies to run extreme simulations on multi-core setups.

The Devs want to be "lazy" and stick to the SINGLE-CORE CODE that STILL runs all of EvE.

I worry this will break the game.

Comments?

Can you provide a bit more background as to what was game breaking, I'm unfamiliar with the specific changes to STG

Which kind of lag do you prefer?

(1) Unevenly applied, unpredictable, causes weird effects like ships remaining in space, benefits some types of ships disproportionately

(2) Evenly applied, predictable, everything works as normal, just somewhat slower overall

Team Gridlock talks about this in their dev blog about Time Dilation that if you haven't read this already I highly suggest giving it a glance.

Ya i have a general idea of what Team Gridlock is working on but I'm seeing any possible way for "fixing lag" to break the game

I don't any mechanics changing, I just see that gun might act properly when there is 87241365 people on grid all firing

time dilation as i understand it will only change one thing:

It makes the lag equal for everyone, rather than having some lucky bastards among the pilots who can still lock and unlock reasonably well, while others are stuck in the lag void completely.

Quoting this post as it's a good summary of what we're hoping to achieve with Time Dilation. #1 is what we have currently when the server becomes overloaded, #2 is what we'd greatly prefer happen.

As for this signifying us becoming lazy about server optimization, that's a fair concern, as it'll certainly make the pain of being overloaded less acute. At the same time, it's not cool to leave a painful thing alone just because it reminds us that performance is important. I have a baseball bat for reminding people of that.

Fate willing, we'll be doing public tests of Time Dilation in the coming weeks' mass tests, so you can get a first-hand impression of it there~

The concept of time dilation is pretty ******* awesome. Shame on you OP for having no ******* clue and posting ****.

BTW time dilation works by solving the REAL issue with lag - the server reaching 100% cpu use. Once it hits 100%, the problems we all know and hate start. All time dilation needs to do, is slow the command stack enough that it can sit at 99%.

So in theory, the game may only need to be "slowed" by 1-10% to make it work with no issues. I can't say it would be easy to notice if my autocannons were cycling 2% slower .. so I fail to see any game-breaking mechanics it would introduce.

I <3 team gridlock

In addition, regardless of what other improvements they can make, time dilation offers a very good thing that will be needed sooner or later: graceful degradation (I keep using that term a lot these days…).

So let us say that the coding fairy grants their wish and they now have multi-core capable simulations. Yay. Now we can use a second core and get 50% (completely random number) more people in the fight. Great! So what happens?

Well, everyone obviously brings 50% more people and then we lag, just like now, and things start to break. So we add another two cores, adding another 50%, which again brings 50% more people and then stuff start to break. Se we add… no, we don't because those cores are occupied running Jita. So we're left with a fight that is just as broken as it is today — the lag is still there.

What this situation needs is the exact same thing that is needed right now: a way for the server to gracefully reduce its computational load, as opposed to the current, un-graceful “nah, I'm going to skip you — have fun watching a black screen”. One core or 59 (or one eighth of a shared core), the problem is always the same: there is a limit (that people will push) and once there, things break. So regardless of what other trickery they can implement, TD being there to reduce the breakage is unquestionably beneficial and unquestionably needed.