TLDR: Lots of players leave clients running when AFK, and sometimes those clients DC, but keep using the same amount of energy. Thus, CCP could make their MMO a little more green, without negatively impacting customers, by making DC clients automatically shut down after a few minutes. An alternative would be to use the new “no 3D graphics” mode that can be enabled by pressing ctrl+shift+F9.
Longer version: The situation
The eve client seems to consume the usual amount of energy, even after disconnect. Like many other plays, I basically never close my Eve clients. When I stop playing at night, I just send my computer to sleep. When it wakes up, the eve clients are still running, but obviously disconnected. Despite this, however, they still use the usual amount of CPU/GPU resources. This wastes a lot of energy.
The solution:
I can think of two solutions that should be relatively straight-forward to implement:
Have the client shut down X time after disconnecting. A reasonable time-frame would be 1 minute to 5 minutes, IMHO.
Have the client auto-press ctrl+shift+F9 on disconnect, the new short-cut to disable 3d graphics. This would significantly decrease the idle energy usage of the client.
Sleep mode suspends power to all components of the computer aside for RAM, which it keeps powered so that it doesn’t lose it’s contents, allowing you to quickly resume what you were doing later. This is good for battery life and power usage, because RAM uses a relatively low amount of power, especially when it comes to gaming computers with power hungry CPU’s and GPU’s. Thus, the short and skinny of it, is that no, the clients won’t be using a ton of power while your computer is asleep.
Also, you do realize that you’ve just made a post asking for developer resources to be allocated to changing client behavior because you’re a weird edge case who’s too lazy to spend 2.3 seconds manually shutting down programs when you’re done using them, right?
I might have not been very clear about what my issue is. Sleep is not the issue.
My issue is that a client consumes a significant amount of resources even after it’s “dead”.
It is not possible for a client to recover from being disconnected - you have to close it and launch a new client. Therefore, there is no reason why it should continue to consume as many resources as a “living” client indefinitely.
Okay, are you trying to make a green argument. If so, you might want to phrase it something like this:
Lots of players leave clients running when AFK, and sometimes those clients DC, but keep using the same amount of energy. Thus, CCP could make their MMO a little more green, without negatively impacting customers, by making DC clients automatically shut down after a few minutes.
I agree this would be a positive change given the amount of apparent afk behaviour in game.
I’m more excited by the idea of a non 3D mode. I’m picturing 2D doom like graphics in space where the images mirror as they turn and have classic 16 bit explosions and it sounds glorious. I’d actually just switch that thing on most of the time.
My point is that a “dead” Eve client consumes the same amount of resources as a “living” client. There simply is no reason it has be like that. A lot of things could happen when you get disconnected:
The client could just close itself
The client could go into the “no 3d graphics” mode (ctr+shift+F9)
Another alternative would be to send the client back to log-in screen on disconnect. That solution would likely be far more complicated to implement, but would offer big advantages to people who play with bad internet connections. They could be in the game again far quicker and might not lose their ship.
