Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I do understand synchronous processing of events really matters. I also see how how the Tranquility infrastructure evolves with the player base. They dedicate a single blade server to a big system fight when they find it. They cherry pick high priority services to better streamline processing. There is the inherent latency of "the speed of light" with all things (darn physics).

What i was getting at is they could free up server blades by off shoring of low priority settings if needed. There are entire regions underutilized that could get crammed onto one blade or off site to a virtual server. Utilizing player resources could be more cost neutral then renting from another company if scaled. There are some Physics events that could be picked out to reduce load.

Maybe they already do this but it could help. They could devote multiple blades by a Russian roll approach. Have one high end dedicated to the on grid, one to the system, another to the constellation, and region. With better resolution, they could split grids to quadrants and run off of multiple server blades for running Grid. Then add predictive algorithm to streamline the cross talk across server blades.

Intels new x9 processor maxes out at 4.5 GHz and puts out over 1 Teraflops and hopefully will make a smoking addition to tranquility.

Good to know, thanks. Guess they are going to need bigger nodes or develop code to make super nodes.

You're really not getting it I think, you could easily compress most of space in Eve onto fewer servers but that wouldn't actually *gain* anything because those freed up servers would just sit not doing anything. The minimum division of Eve right now is one system to one server node, and even within that the limitation is based on things that *have* to be single-threaded, so throwing more resources at a big fleet fight doesn't actually gain you much.

The only major place left for CCP to claw back cycles is by allowing the cluster to divide down to the Grid level, so the big main fight gets its own node and all the smaller fights get to run on other hardware, but even that won't claw back as much as you might think.

In short, you can't run a single grid off of multiple servers. The tasks Eve needs to process do not benefit from that arrangement.

This isn't an architecture problem, it's a coding problem.

Throwing more cores at something only helps if the problem can be broken up between those CPU cores. For the input processing queue and the physics simulation it's hard to impossible to break up the problem into bits that different CPUs can work on. This forces the processing to be done synchronously on a single CPU thread.

No amount of messing with the server or network architecture is going to fix this, nor can the code be changed so that these sorts of bottlenecks don't exist. It's simply how the data has to be processed.

I'm telling you, flat out, that they can't, the closest they might be able to come is using soft gameplay restrictions to limit the scope of what needs to be processed as one unit to split up the processing that way.

The reason Eve has to have TiDi is because we can have 4000 people all fighting in the same space and potentially affecting each other. For example if person A tells their guns to shoot person B and half a second later person B tells their guns to shoot at C, but A's attack kills person B, then it's very important to person C that those actions get resolved in the order they were sent.

This means that A's game input has to be resolved before B's input. The only way to get around this is to go through all the inputs before hand and determine which ones absolutely won't affect each other. The problem with this approach is that in practice it ends up adding more time and complexity than it actually takes away by allowing the processing to be split, since you end up having to process each command twice.

The other alternative is to simply not care about the order things are processed in, but that creates its own problems and can't be done for physics unless you want some *really* screwed up situations, like two ships sticking together and then flying off together as the game tries to figure out how to deal with two objects that are physically inside each other. Also even if you just discard synchronous processing for inputs you can end up with weird cases where someone gets to act after they should be dead, or someone's action takes longer to resolve because it got stuck behind a complex calculation in the queue on that CPU.

In short it's basically impossible to allow fights on the scale of Eve and not run into this problem, and none of the solutions are great. TiDi is just the one that causes the fewest problems for the actual gameplay. The bad effects that Eve players associate with TiDi would actually be dozens of times worse without TiDi, as anyone who remembers waiting half an hour for grid to load after a fleet jump can attest.

Sorry but from a purely technical standpoint you are incorrect, there are optical and other processor technologies currently under development that could end TIDI forever. From a practical standpoint you are unfortunately correct there is little that can be done with the current state of hardware that would completely eliminate TIDI.

Excellent, I look forward to having interesting conversations with you are some point. I bailed out of tech in my early twenties when i had a Sec clearance and learned what being a black hat meant. Now I'm much older and getting back up to speed in computer science and should learn 3d Physics modeling for a side project.

Thanks, that a great help. I was reading up on matlab and wasn't getting it with RL. Hopefully some games will be my speed atm. I'm really left in low gear these days and hit a point where I've started to Thought Experiment somethings that shouldn't be done by mortal minds. I really wished I watched Thermonuclear fusion vs Murphy's law before I got the point of trying to think out a 10^12 particle implosion event. Apparently it melts expensive Silicon.

TiDi will die the day this game is so unpopular big fight can't happen. As long as they can happen, people will throw more bodies into the grinder if they can.

the reason why time dilation exists it doesn't matter how powerful the hardware they would have available to them not everybody else has powerful Hardware they slow things down so it's easier for everybody

I need to tell you about my first experience in a massive PVP battle after 5 minutes of seeing 300 people going my way my graphics card was fried

when I run into players that used to play Darkfall I still make this joke Hyperion owes me a graphics card

you cannot have time dilation in a fantasy MMO :(