Pacala
Gallente
AirHawk Alliance
Freelancer Alliance
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Posted - 2007.02.15 16:54:00 -
[1]
There's something else too.
If you think about it, EVE is one gigantic database. Your skills and assets all have to be tracked. The different systems with their moons, plantes, gates and asteroid belts are in there. Moon mineral types, asteroid ore content, complex NPC structures, etc.
This huge database is hard enough by itself. Now let's add over 30,000 individuals. Assets, POSs, ammo, fuel, drones, scans, chats, market orders, contracts, clones, etc. All of these entries are dynamic too.
How would you design a system that managed all that? Would you assign a server blade per star system? Would you make this server track asteroids, POSs and stations? What would happen if a 30-man gang started mining there? What if a 100-man fleet came in and started some POS takedowns? How would you scale up the hardware resources to accomodate this? Would you just buy a bigger server?
Let's try another path, and assume that the entire world is virtual. We all know not all systems in EVE are populated. So it would be silly to give them a server if they're never used. So let's say that the entire world of EVE is software. Systems are dormant and initialize once players enter them. Resources are allocated dynamically where they are needed. A fleet battle occurs, then more and more resources are poured into that system. There has to be a cap though. Otherwise, a place like Jita would eat up a huge chunk of resources to the detriment of many other systems. In this example, how do you account for things that worked well enough with 10,000 people in the world but suck when there are three times that people logged in. What about when there'll be 50,000 people logged in? What about when the Chinese cluster will be merged in? Can you just rewrite the entire EVE database code?
Eve is a continuously evolving environment. Lag used to be even worse. It got better, now as more people join up it's getting worse again. CCP makes money off of this game, and they'll make more money if EVE grows. They'll fix this, but it's not as simple as buying a bigger server, a bigger Internet pipe, or rewriting millions of lines of code.
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