Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hello,

can anybody who knows it (developer or player) tell me, what causes server load in large fights? I did some math about number of "connections" between ships (I mean keeping track of distances between them, transversals etc...). I'm almost sure I did it right (heh), so for 3000 subjects like drones and ships, it's 4 500 000 of those "connections".

Informations about speeds, transversals etc. update every second. If you multiply this number (4 500 000), by number of instructions needed to calculate those informations (I have no idea about exact number. It's really hard to tell so i will stick with probably very underrated 250), you get number of instructions processor must execute every second. For this particular example the number is huge - about 1.1 bil instructions.

So am I right, that just calculating this takes tens of percent of processor usage? I'd like to have my idea confirmed/disqualified by any of developers before I write another post with my terrible English.

Suchosh

Lots of people cause the server load.

Do you want Skynet?
Because that's how you get Skynet.

Well... I'm quite interested in "Battle mode" idea.

When TiDi of the system exceeds certain level, Battle mode starts. This will cause that everyone, who doesn't really care about transversals etc., will be excluded from process of calculating those informations. There should be ofcourse some kind of switch in settings, that allows FCs to turn calculating on.

There will be calculations just between you and something you're targeting, as they are mandatory for shooting etc.

This should decrease processor usage by 90% or even more and still don't screw sandbox, because everyone will be able to see transversal velocity if he wants (Lets be honest, 99% of the people in blob warfare doesn't care. It's all about clicking your broadcast history.).

It will be a lot work to do, but it might help to decrease TiDi a bit.

Suchosh

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/what-a-hed-ache/ the most recent "techy" devblog i remember on server load.

"Transversal" is only relevant to parties that you:

A. Have locked and are actively shooting at
B. Are on grid with you if you have the angular velocity column active

Having 100 people in system and on grid only means that the server is telling you the following info:

- Pilot(s) are blue/red
- Pilot(s) are flying from x1,y1,z1 to x2,y2,z2
- Pilot(s) are yellow-boxing you
- Pilot(s) are yellow-boxed by you
- Yellow-boxed pilot(s) have Armor/Shield/Hull HP
- your own status, including but not limited to HP, targeting range, resists, weapon range, tracking, sig rad, weapon sig res.

Soon as guns go hot, then the game starts calculating transversal (because it's used in the weapon hit math), but only for the target(s) that you're actively shooting.

And then there are all the drones that people will start spamming ...

Granted, it's also doing this for the 99 other people, not to mention re-working things as they change (e.g. incoming reps, incoming cap, incoming neuts, incoming damage ... and displaying it out to everyone who needs to see it).

Now, it's also tracking more than one grid/system ... and more than one system / server (unless Jita or hardened node or CCP starts kicking off the less-used systems to give resources to the fighting system).

Really the worst thing for the system is dealing with people coming in (gates, bridges, cynos) and going out (podding ... and all the other things too ... but mostly podding).

Note the above is grossly simplified ... but for the purposes of discussion, as right as can be inferred from the devblogs about TiDi and everything else.

It probably only calculates it on the ticks where the guns fire. Because that's the only tick where it matters.

Yeah, it runs the specific calc for the specific player once every ... what 4 ticks or so ...


But every tick, it still has to check stuff like "yes, the guns are still partway thru their cycle" or "oh wait, no their cycle got shortened" or "no, he lost his ganglinks, now I have to re-work all the things".

Essentially, it goes from "bad" to "really friggin bad" pretty quick.

Although, assuming a normal fight - it's not necessarily the guns and stuff that ruins the server, but rather the loads of people getting on grid or jumping into system -- moving the characters across nodes is (IIRC) the most taxing part of the game.

Having seen ESO personally with 400+ on 'grid' and it handling it, they 'might' just get to over 1000.
On the other hand, that's a brand new on the market MMO with a design focus to enable large scale 'open world' PvP and using a server system that almost certainly takes some of it's inspiration from how EVE functions given they similarly are advertising about being a mega server.

And their PvP zones hard cap at 2000 people max across the entire zone.

With no true 3D movement, no calculations for angular momentum, and far shorter combat ranges.

So yea, EVE is a miracle of MMO's with their tech so far.

Pilots piloting.