Hi Anyone from CCP
Love the game, will keep playing for the forseeable but I was wondering what was stopping the implementation of Sol servers that can use multi-core? Obviously this is off the back of last nights fight, where the keepstar ended up being TiDI tanked! Just sorta interested in the technicalities.
Thanks
Vinston
Because multi-threaded code, which has to affect the same underlying data, is complex to make work. Leads to all kinds of āinterestingā situations.
itās very very difficult.
Not a tech guy, but the explanation I keep seeing is that the bulk of EVEās core code is written in āsingle-threaded stackless pythonā or something of that sort, which apparently makes it difficult to spread the server load around.
Itās a little misleading.
The core game logic is in python. Pretty much everything else is C.
So what a missile does is python. communicating that to all the players is done in C.
I wish we had more players around that understand what a technical challenge CCPās dealing with here. Itās like people keep forgetting that the foundations of the game were built 15 years ago.
Butā¦But change it.
I changed my phone yesterday (and the week before that, and the week before that).
It canāt be that hard.
And it canāt be that expensive, I mean no one wants the old junk, Iām sure they offer a family plan.
Oh! I read about blockchain yesterday.
Thatās your answer.
āGadget (practicing her Millennial voice).
it is harder than most people can imagine. It is more expensive than most people can imagine (because cost is not a onde-dimension money=f(modification) function)
for blockchain : http://vukolic.com/iNetSec_2015.pdf
blockchain is ATM not suitable for high-frequency modifications.
Apparently the forum requires sarcasm tags,
The matter is, people actually think this. How many people rage because āCCP FAILURE OMG ONLY 6000 PPL IN LOCAL PREHISTORIC SERVER I DO BETTER ON MY SPARE TIMEā ?
Actually I feel it needs non-sarcasm tags.
This is seriously stupid easy to answer.
When eve was first written in 1997 (which is when they started making eve) the Mantra of the day was MORE GHZ!!! Multi core processes were no where on the radar at the time. so eve was written with the expectation that processors would keep getting faster and faster base don increasing GHZ. The first multi core processor was released in 2005, 2 years after eve was released.
Second issue, eve built on its self int hat 2 years they released three expansions. One of which added nasty code, known as PoS. By the time the multi core became common, it would of taken way more work to redo the entire engine as well as the base code and all its system then to just keep ploughing ahead and adjust your systems to try and use things better.
Thirdly, a rewrite of that type would of taken a lot of time and resources, and while eve was growing, it was smarter to add more to eve and get more money, then to halt new stuff and upgrade the core code to use mutli cores. Because lack of new stuff would cause people to leave.
Flash forward to eveās 10 year, and the phase we are in now. We are technically in a rebuild and repair phase, and its taking forever. Every thing they change, most likely is being optimized to use multi core processors, so when they do upgrade the enging and core code, they are ready to go. The issue that has held them back, imo, is the pos code. Its a mess of spaghetti and is tied to all kinds of systems. At one point a few years ago, they tried to make a small change to the pos code, and wound up killing both mining and industry. They also had zero clue why. So they repaired the glitch and left it alone. This is why you saw rewrite of some systems like industry, and sov come before pos changes. They have to get thous systems away from the pos code so they can kill it. I believe, once the pos code is gone (deleted, commented out, or just ignored) we will see new stuff come.
But thats the main reason form what i see, they wanted eve to grow, but at some point the elephant in the room got too big to dodge anymore, and here we are.
Was that the one where a PoS would randomly go skynet on its owners?
i think that was a different change. but yes
I do know when they introduced the pos code in exodus that on the test server someone discovered it killed mining, like you couldnāt mine. was hilarious
All right, back in 2005 the industry step up and it became obvious where its gonna expand for the next decade. But they decided to continue to rely on single core variant. Ok 5 years left and its became even more obvious that since core choice is a dead end. I mean I love this old car and already spend triple time of its price to fix it but hello CCP the time has already came to make this hard step if not itās already to late.
Hell they burnt money on VR project and it was easy but not pleasure to understand where its going and made such a hard decision to close it.
They could bought all those available PS3 Cell CPU and build something specific to handle huge battles on separate server etc and what ever. But knowing that Beast is coming and do almost nothing other that nice vids its a meh.
All these excuses and explanations those are wonāt help anyhow to change the current issues.
DUDE.
Rogue. Citadels.
āContemplating Gadget 
the VR project was started because we, eve players wanted it, at least valk, and at that time they had already started the repair operations, so wha?
And technically ccp doens;t NEED t change the core code, they can leave it as is, eve runs fine server side as long as we don;t have massive fights. but my guess is, they have a plan and to get there, they need to fix it.
They manly work on Ad Hoc scenario while it was obvious they have to have some preventative planning. Not sure how many voices voted for Valk and I know how many been face smashed when Dust got killed.
my understanding i that they rewrote a bunch of the code over the years. I remember reading a dev blog at some point where they were rewriting the worst performing parts of the server code in C. And at some point didnāt they start calculating some things on the uptick and others on the down?
I guess thereās also the question If they know CPU is the bottleneck in big fights, why not get a few specialized nodes with high clock CPUs?
They have. Those are the nodes for reinforcement.
