Epic Online Space Battle

New submitter nusscom writes "On July 28th, as has been reported by BBC, a record number of EVE Online players participated in a record-breaking online battle between two alliances. This battle, which was essentially a turf-war was comprised of over 4,000 online players at one time. The load was so large that Crowd Control Productions (CCP) slowed down the game time to 10% of normal to accommodate the massive amount of activity." This is the largest battle to ever occur on EVE Online.

This story sounds familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

oh wait

here [slashdot.org] and
here [slashdot.org]

why on earth does slashdot have to report this as news each time it happens? Its the same boring shit about how eve's terrible servers can't handle all the buffered state updates and slows to a crawl, and only eve players actually give a shit about the meta politics.

Re:Lag vs 'playing fair'

[dpidcoe]

Of course, this being so, there is ZERO achievement when the parent company handles a battle of any given size. "Our system simply slows down under stress" is no kind of technical achievement whatsoever. So, why is the story worth reporting? Because a record number of players fancied a rumble?

I think you misunderstand how their system works. When an event such as 4000 players in the same place at the same time all shooting at each other happens (no other MMO has come close to doing this), time in the game actually slows down in order to allow the servers to process everything. Now even though your ship is traveling at 300m/s, it will take it 10 seconds in realtime to travel 300 meters ingame. If your gun cycles in 6 seconds, it now takes it 1 minute of realtime to cycle. Game balance is unaffected, since everything scales at the same time.

It's also notable in that it fails gracefully. As more players enter the system, TDI begins to kick in and everything slows down in proportion to the server load. Eventually the server will crash if enough people show up. However, it's a huge improvement over abrupt crashes and/or disconnects once some load (I think they could semi-smoothly get to around ~600 people pre-TDI) over the more traditional system they used to use (which is still used by pretty much every other mmo out there).

The battles was just bang at the end

[NeoKarn]

I was there (TM) It's not just the battle. It's the buildup. For 4 days we worked the system. Disrupting the enemy, destroying infrastructure. In the background spies worked there magic and Logistics move the materials of war into position. The phyc-ops and propagandist people boosted moral an got people to log in and participate. The battle is just one of the fun bits. 4000 pilots where just in the system. Without a doubt over 6000 pilots were involved on the day and closer to 10,000 for the buildup. EvE is serious spaceship business and this whole war is business. In EvE we are not ashamed to admit. We went to war for the Space monies.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[MacGyver2210]

I don't think you understand. Each 'solar system' in EVE runs on a single core - the system is not multi-processor friendly within a single solar system.

They moved the 6DVT(where the fight happened) system to the same blade server as Jita(the huge trade hub which regularly hosts around 1000-1500 people, most inside a station) but on a separate core.

400% of normal traffic to a single processor. That's impressive. Also, it's running python, so there's that as well.

Re:Snore fest

[iczerjones]

As a frequent nano pilot, I beg to differ. Double click on a point in space, you fly there. Control you engine throttle manually, activate weapons, shield boosters, cap charges, warp scramble opponents, adjust transversal.. You call an action, it occurs. In any other game, you press button, thing happens. Are you instead referring to the lack of a flight stick style control method? If so then yes, you are correct. There is no flight stick or controller input. Are you perhaps talking about warping? That is a bit different as part of the game mechanics dictates that when you select a warp to target, you warp drive has to 'spin up' before you leave grid. This ensures you, as a potential victim, can't just run away without proper planning. Part of that whole 'risk-reward' system that EVE does so well. The controls are definitely real time, though I do understand your position. The EVE style of input is definitely something that takes getting used to. It is not Wing Commander. Well, unless you are flying an interceptor, that is. ;)

EVE Online runs Stackless Python

[steveha]

http://www.stackless.com/ [stackless.com]

They are using Python 2.7:
http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/stackless-python-2.7/ [eveonline.com]

Great discussion of pros and cons of Stackless:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/588958/what-are-the-drawbacks-of-stackless-python [stackoverflow.com]

Here's an interesting page with a few nuggets of info. In the discussion section, some people claim that the game used to crash with space battles as small as 100 ships. Clearly the game has been improved since then.
http://highscalability.com/eve-online-architecture [highscalability.com]

If you are really interested, here's a talk from PyCon 2009 that goes into some detail on what they do with Stackless. They had some problems that only showed up on the crazy load of a real system, so they had to go live with some code to test it!
http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/stackless-python-in-eve-pt-2-1959372 [blip.tv]

P.S. A couple of good trailers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrrVDV_NsNo [youtube.com]

This one bored me at first but then got much better as the music got going.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euMjOHgb9A8 [youtube.com]