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Dev blog: HED-GP Technical Retrospective

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Weaselior
GoonWaffe
Goonswarm Federation
#21 - 2014-01-24 17:44:15 UTC
Gilbaron wrote:
Aryth wrote:
Why has no brain in a box work has occurred? This surely would have improved the jumpin/out experience of so many that were stuck in warp tunnels for hours.


Brain in the box work is happening

how happening

happening in the sense that "oh that's a good idea we should do it sometime once we're finished with dust" or "actual work has been going on since it was announced"

Head of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal Pubbie Management and Exploitation Division.
Evelgrivion
State War Academy
Caldari State
#22 - 2014-01-24 17:47:39 UTC
Weaselior wrote:

how happening

happening in the sense that "oh that's a good idea we should do it sometime once we're finished with dust" or "actual work has been going on since it was announced"


There are multiple programmers on a team working on it.
Bienator II
madmen of the skies
#23 - 2014-01-24 17:48:06 UTC  |  Edited by: Bienator II
Quote:

The other bit is that the decision making code behind drone behavior does a poor job of scaling, often considering all attackable objects on grid when figuring out who to go after.

WTF moment. right there. "poor job of scaling" - in other words "slowest implementation possible". After 10 years you guys figure out that O(n2) loops don't scale very well?

lets stop talking about multithreading or work load distribution. Fix those low hanging fruits first. There are ways how to fix it - and none of them are rocket science. Space subdivision in the easiest form like quad trees can already eliminate 75% of all objects you have to traverse after the first step.

edit: sorry for sounding mad but seriously

how to fix eve: 1) remove ECM 2) rename dampeners to ECM 3) add new anti-drone ewar for caldari 4) give offgrid boosters ongrid combat value
Jessica Danikov
Network Danikov
#24 - 2014-01-24 17:48:16 UTC
The fix is simple you kill the batman optimise drones in the same way you did missiles- each ship can only have one active 'swarm'. Drones are deployed or recalled from that swarm. While the individual drones may still be targetable, the swarm has a virtual center- a single point that represents the whole swarm as far as the server is concerned (actually, it's a touch more complicated with AOE- with the edge case, you should probably consider the 'size' of the swarm and scale damage accordingly if the AOE doesn't overlap the whole blob, but that maths on that isn't too bad and can be optimised with lookup tables and simple linear interpolation).

If you recall or deploy a drone when drones are already out, it has to be to the swarm, so you get a temporary additional object in those cases, but for the most part, players don't do drones by halves (if any do, I'm sure we'll hear from them soon).

This reduces the typical number of drones by 80% on subcaps, 93% on carriers. Simple fix, but I bet the implementation is hard...
Dinsdale Pirannha
Pirannha Corp
#25 - 2014-01-24 17:50:31 UTC  |  Edited by: ISD Ezwal
CCP Gargant wrote:
The fight that happened in HED-GP has been the object of discussion for the last few days, and specifically the technical aspect of it. Our resident space-wizard, CCP Veritas, wrote a technical retrospective on the events in HED and how they compare to another heavy fight that happened in 6VDT.

Read it here.


I read the dev blog.

So you are admitting you are wrecking drones for all players of Eve, for the sake of making the blob-seccer's, a small minority of the player base, happy.

*Snip* Please refrain from personal attacks. ISD Ezwal

How about this?
IGNORE THEM.

Their problem is not a big problem when looking at Eve as a whole.
Why must you cater to such a small percentage of Eve?

And if you say "because we market the game on these massive fights", I will throw up.

How about taking some fraps of any one of the dozens of small gang fights that occur daily in FW zones, and make an ad based on those. The non- Eve player might appreciate ships actually moving on the screen, and not needing to be zoomed way out so every ship is just a red or blue square.
CCP Veritas
C C P
C C P Alliance
#26 - 2014-01-24 17:50:38 UTC
Actual work has happened since Brain in a Box was announced. I don't want to go into amazing details 'cause it could be a devblog of its own, or maybe a Fanfest presentation or something, but I spent about 6 months solid on it personally before I got promoted to technical director. Early in the process I discovered that the fundamental design of Dogma was going to get in the way of implementing BiaB, so I started rewriting that foundation. Since then we had one failed attempt to boot it up with a different team. In December we gave it another spin and I'm very happy with the composition of the new team. I believe once they've come up to speed with the system they'll be able to knock out work at a great pace and put me to shame.

CCP Veritas - Technical Director - EVE Online
Evelgrivion
State War Academy
Caldari State
#27 - 2014-01-24 17:50:58 UTC  |  Edited by: Evelgrivion
In the thread: players with no direct understanding of Eve's architecture offer in depth technical solutions to complex problems, which they only became aware of ten minutes ago.
Jowen Datloran
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#28 - 2014-01-24 17:52:35 UTC
Ah, so when the system approach 10% TiDi, all drones recall automatically due to "system interference" which would even be true.

Would also encourage peeps to stop using those idiotic ships.

Mr. Science & Trade Institute, EVE Online Lorebook 

Anharat
Cutting Edge Incorporated
#29 - 2014-01-24 17:54:11 UTC  |  Edited by: Anharat
I'll give you 2 variants how to "deal" with the "drone" meta.
1. Make the level of leadership skill a character has determine how much of drone bandwidth in mbit can be assigned to that character. One level of Leadership could be 50mbit in drones that can be assigned to a single person with that skill , different numbers for wing command, fleet command.
2. Have any form of ECM (damp, jam, td) affect the drones of the ship that the ECM is being applied to.

Now this won't obviously reduce the server load that a gazillion drones will create.
But let's face it. Drone assist is cancer and the faster you make it less terrible the faster big ass fights will be more like 6vdt and less like hed-.
CCP Veritas
C C P
C C P Alliance
#30 - 2014-01-24 17:54:51 UTC
A general response here:
I'm fundamentally against any solution that proposes to change game mechanics based on TiDi factor. The purpose of Time Dilation was to maintain game mechanics under high load, not to give a platform to distort them.

CCP Veritas - Technical Director - EVE Online
Weaselior
GoonWaffe
Goonswarm Federation
#31 - 2014-01-24 17:57:09 UTC  |  Edited by: Weaselior
CCP Veritas wrote:
Actual work has happened since Brain in a Box was announced. I don't want to go into amazing details 'cause it could be a devblog of its own, or maybe a Fanfest presentation or something, but I spent about 6 months solid on it personally before I got promoted to technical director. Early in the process I discovered that the fundamental design of Dogma was going to get in the way of implementing BiaB, so I started rewriting that foundation. Since then we had one failed attempt to boot it up with a different team. In December we gave it another spin and I'm very happy with the composition of the new team. I believe once they've come up to speed with the system they'll be able to knock out work at a great pace and put me to shame.

What is "Dogma"? I'm sure you've mentioned it before but I can't remember what that system is.

edit: also, I hope CCP keeps your team intact: this sort of thing should be ongoing since this sort of stuff is really key for the game and these sort of massive battles being playable is a huge selling point to new people and retention for existing people (and, them being not playable leads to a lot of "**** this **** i'm out")

Head of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal Pubbie Management and Exploitation Division.
Moira Ayindi
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#32 - 2014-01-24 17:58:16 UTC
CCP Veritas wrote:
A general response here:
I'm fundamentally against any solution that proposes to change game mechanics based on TiDi factor. The purpose of Time Dilation was to maintain game mechanics under high load, not to give a platform to distort them.


Awesome answer 😃 But Dinsdale don't believe you, he is a freak or troll xD
Alicia Fermi
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#33 - 2014-01-24 18:00:18 UTC  |  Edited by: Alicia Fermi
It was not covered in the devblog but is there a significant difference between drones when it comes to the load on the server? There is a suggestion that all drones cause lag because they are self-contained units that need to move and shoot, implying that Warrior IIs are just as much a source of lag as Garde IIs. If that is the case, why all the furore about droneboats when most ships in these fights will be sporting their own flights which will be lagging out the system whether they are assisted to a player or not.

A quickish fix would be to rework the additional drone in space bonus of certain capitals to additional damage.
progodlegend
Amok.
Goonswarm Federation
#34 - 2014-01-24 18:00:57 UTC
Weaselior wrote:
Gilbaron wrote:
Aryth wrote:
Why has no brain in a box work has occurred? This surely would have improved the jumpin/out experience of so many that were stuck in warp tunnels for hours.


Brain in the box work is happening

how happening

happening in the sense that "oh that's a good idea we should do it sometime once we're finished with dust" or "actual work has been going on since it was announced"


Dust doesn't take away from EVE development, you know this already.

As far as other things, Team Gridlock is there to improve server performance, so I imagine they are going to prioritize whatever is best to fix server load.
CCP Veritas
C C P
C C P Alliance
#35 - 2014-01-24 18:01:27 UTC
Weaselior wrote:
What is "Dogma"? I'm sure you've mentioned it before but I can't remember what that system is.

Think of any situation in Eve where a number on one item modifies a number on another item. A skill level giving a bigger bonus, a shield resist module changing the resistance of the ship, a gun reducing the hitpoints of another ship, fitting a module reducing available CPU/PG. There is where you find Dogma. It also manages module activations and the like. It covers a huge amount of what you'd consider EVE core gameplay.

CCP Veritas - Technical Director - EVE Online
Edmark I
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#36 - 2014-01-24 18:04:00 UTC
WarFireV wrote:
Guess in the end, it was the 1000 domis that doomed CFCRUS.


You are correct sir. As we have long suspected- drones do much more in terms of processing than guns. Drones and mass drone doctrines are a major problem.
CCP Veritas
C C P
C C P Alliance
#37 - 2014-01-24 18:04:57 UTC
Alicia Fermi wrote:
It was not covered in the devblog but is there a significant difference between drones when it comes to the load on the server? There is a suggestion that all drones cause lag because they are self-contained units that need to move and shoot, implying that Warrior IIs are just as much a source of lag as Garde IIs. If that is the case, why all the furore about droneboats when most ships in these fights will be sporting their own flights which will be lagging out the system whether they are assisted to a player or not.

Indeed, for the most part a drone is a drone is a drone. There is, however, a difference between a ship who has a standard dronebay and a drone-focused boat that's going to have space for spare flights and such. In the first case you'll have drones, sure, but they can be cleared by AoE and then you don't have drones.

CCP Veritas - Technical Director - EVE Online
Querns
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#38 - 2014-01-24 18:08:09 UTC
To those of you who are perhaps donning the tinfoil a little too hastily, keep in mind that this situation is very similar to the situation a few years ago when massed drakes in fleet fights were causing servers to (in one case) literally catch fire due to missiles having unoptimized routines. CCP was able to largely eliminate these problems without affecting the state of game balance. (Indeed, the fall of the heavy missile from grace was due to a wholly separate gameplay change.) I imagine that a similar approach will be tried here, and that this "war on drones" will not necessarily be coupled with a gameplay change.

This post was crafted by the wormhole expert of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal, the foremost authority on Eve: Online economics and gameplay.
Dinsdale Pirannha
Pirannha Corp
#39 - 2014-01-24 18:15:29 UTC  |  Edited by: ISD Ezwal
CCP Veritas wrote:
A general response here:
I'm fundamentally against any solution that proposes to change game mechanics based on TiDi factor. The purpose of Time Dilation was to maintain game mechanics under high load, not to give a platform to distort them.


Then if you are against any solution that changes game mechanics, you are doomed to repeating this over and over, and stop allocating ANY resources to it, because giving people a platform to distort game mechanics is PRECISELY what you have now.

Do you seriously believe that magically, some genius at CCP will come up with a hardware /software solution that will fix all the problems with a 40,000 object fight (ships and drones)?
Or how about 80,000, when the blob-seccers game the system again when you have your miracle cure for 40,000?

The only way you fix this is through a massive overhaul of the game mechanics, and maybe, just maybe, a total re-write of the code controlling system combat.

*Snip* Please refrain from personal attacks. ISD Ezwal

Call it a day and focus on the rest of the game's subscription base.
Frostys Virpio
State War Academy
Caldari State
#40 - 2014-01-24 18:16:37 UTC
CCP Veritas wrote:
Alicia Fermi wrote:
It was not covered in the devblog but is there a significant difference between drones when it comes to the load on the server? There is a suggestion that all drones cause lag because they are self-contained units that need to move and shoot, implying that Warrior IIs are just as much a source of lag as Garde IIs. If that is the case, why all the furore about droneboats when most ships in these fights will be sporting their own flights which will be lagging out the system whether they are assisted to a player or not.

Indeed, for the most part a drone is a drone is a drone. There is, however, a difference between a ship who has a standard dronebay and a drone-focused boat that's going to have space for spare flights and such. In the first case you'll have drones, sure, but they can be cleared by AoE and then you don't have drones.


How much does a drone "lost" in space cost in performance? What if you have thousands of them? We are not supposed to drop large quantity of jet cans in space because it can cause lag and I would assume drones are counted as objects too.

How about entirely removing the auto attack behavior of drones and have the controler have to actaully control them with direct command/trigger on ship attack/assistant attack? Wouldn't that remove some of the ridiculous load generated by the thousand entities in space trying to analyse wich one of the 4k ships in space should be the next default target?

It's also eliminate some AFK play...