EVE General Discussion

Thank you for all the replies everyone.

Firstly, like another poster pointed out, I'm careful with employee reviews of a company. Even if it's as bad as those reviews say, I'm not to deterred by it. If I was applying for a job at CCP, it'll be for a few specific reasons. One of those reasons is the very unique experience it would provide because of EvE's architecture/implementation. This aside, I'd enjoy working on a game a little more than on an algorithmic trading platform, which I believe, would be one of the few other areas where I can get the experience I am looking for while still being interested in subject.

Secondly, spaghetti code sounds tasty and interesting! Debugging and testing are one of the areas of coding I enjoy a lot. Having tutored people in C++, Python, and Java, it still remains somehow exciting when trying and figure out why something is not working, or magically is when it shouldn't. For what ever reason runaway recursion still makes me giggle a bit, though Stackless may have ended that. :(

Thirdly, on the subject of (Stackless)python performance-really any programming language-they all have their place. My assumption is that EvE's event handling would die on C++, because the server's event processing would be as fast as the slowest event driver/participant. With the chain delay caused by each player, since each one is handled sequentially and made worse by their latency, I don't think it's possible for C++ to keep up without some tricky programming(?). I can be totally wrong however on this thought. Though, based on this, I wonder if this is the reason why, when playing some games, a really laggy player can cause all the players to stall. Digressing, Stackless in some situations is faster than C/C++ from what I have read.

I do have two other question for the Devs.

I assume Stackless wasn't used for other areas of EvE because of anomalies that pop up in asynchronous processing?

EvE's server tick is one second, while other games I have played it is 100ms. Is this because of the margin of error needed for the asynchronous processing?


Finally, again thanks for all the replies, especially to CCP Explorer and Steve Ronuken. This has been quite helpful.

PS: I was kind of looking forward to WoD. Cool idea, I would have bought it.

CCP should really hire someone whose sole job is to really dig into and understand the spaghetti.

T-SQL is used because that's the only language available in the database . In other areas, if Python is not used then that's because of performance concerns.

We do use C++ in all operating system level interfaces (disk, network, database) but of course always build a C++/Python bridge and the question really becomes where to draw the line, i.e., where does it make the most sense to build that bridge.

Regarding EVE's tick rate of 1 Hz, this is a question of scale. The lower the tick rate is, the larger number of entities can be in the simulation (i.e., larger battles). Of course at a certain point the tick rate would become noticeably slow but the balance depends on the type of game. Fast-action shooter need a higher tick rate but EVE has a different pace. EVE isn't a fly-by-wire pilot simulation, it's a "make it so" captain simulation.

I know / have known - a number of players with poor connections who are able to play this game over others, because of this architecture.

However, the warp speed changes and timings of attempting to lock and point an interceptor from going into warp push against the envelope, giving an edge to players with superior connections. Another however: that is just one aspect of gameplay poor connections may not be able to participate in.