Born on a small server cluster called Tranquility (so named after the lava field where Apollo 11 landed on the moon), EVE Online launched at the bottom of the dot-com bubble and remains popular even today.
Its premise: take 100 thousand hard science fiction and computer science fanatics, combine them in a shared simulation 106 light-years wide, and watch as geopolitics and hyper-capitalism shiver the galaxy. That’s as audacious now as it was back then. Yet the magnitude of the vision led to nagging performance issues that have only worsened over time.
The game is best known for its stupendous starship battles. The fights grow so large that they easily swamp the game’s IT system, causing play to slow to a stasis. To get to the bottom of this problem, the game’s developer, Fenris Creations (formerly CCP Games), is modernizing its technology stack. But overhauling a decades-old massively multiplayer online game (MMO) can be a massive challenge.
“There's this sci-fi trope where it’s like, oh, there's this ancient technology, and no one understands it anymore, so we have to figure out roughly how this works,” said Nick Herring, Technical Director for EVE Online.
“After working on a product that was built in the late nineties, and has been running since the early 2000s, that trope makes the most sense ever,” Herring told The Forecast.
Herring spearheads the “Quasar” project, a multi-stage push, already four years underway, to speed up the game’s giant fleet battles. In large part, this is accomplished through infrastructure renovations. The studio has introduced a bevy of cloud-native technologies, including the container orchestration platform Kubernetes, and has begun to unpack over twenty years' worth of legacy source code and data.
“Basically, we’re taking all these technologies and applying them to EVE and how we can effectively liberate data and the transmission of information,” he said.
Onslaught of Legacy Challenges
In EVE Online, when a feud erupts between alliances, swarms of ships descend by the thousands, firing off volleys of streaking projectiles. The game begins to wobble and soon becomes unresponsive, a problem exacerbated by legacy programming language.
“Even if someone is in a different part of the solar system, like, if you are at the sun, and the fight is going on at some other planet, you're impacted by that,” said Herring.
Back in 2012, the engineers introduced a safety valve called “time dilation.” As a server node approaches exhaustion, time dilation kicks in, slowing down the simulation speed of the game so that the processor can catch up with the demands of battle.
As a result, fights unfurl in slow motion and literally drag on for half a day or even longer. Even so, node crashes still happen. Furthermore, the operations team has little recourse for scaling resources during the fray.
“The only tools that we have now are proactive. Players will say, ‘Hey, a big battle is going to go down. Can we get reinforced nodes for that?’ And we will reassign that solar system to beefier machines at the next downtime,” he explained.
“If a fight breaks out spontaneously, and thousands show up, there's not really a whole lot we can do about it until the next day at 11 GMT,” he said.
52 Million Lines of YAML
Herring blames some of these woes on the game’s overgrown codebase and single, shared database. Over the years, everything became clumped together in the same monolithic place—the planets, the asteroids, the ships, the bullets, the x,y,z coordinates of the universe—weighing on the game’s performance.
To address the issue, the engineering team started reorganizing things, decoupling data from the code that executes it and moving it to cloud databases.
Then they set to work on a microservices-style remodel: breaking the environment into smaller, domain-centric apps (a.k.a. microservices) and functions. Wrapping them in containers. And offloading them to the cloud or to a dedicated thread elsewhere in the data center, where they can be scaled independently of the main game loop.
“We want to get to the place where all of the domain services are independent of one another, and not tied together in this feral ball of Python that's evolved over the course of 20 years of game development,” Herring said.
He estimates that, when all is said and done, these measures will net a sizable performance increase, speeding up battles by 30 percent or more.
Rethinking Logic Simulation and Solar Systems
The simulation engine, which handles the complex math for game logic and parameters, is next in line for optimization.
After decomposition, “we can clear the table and get more into the rules engine, and why we have to slow down time to process all that data, and figure out how … to calculate that more efficiently,” and avoid superfluous computations, he said.
“[If] 9,000 people shot the same guy, he's definitely dead. There’s no reason to calculate all that,” he offered by way of illustration.
Another issue that needs addressing is the structure of EVE Online’s universe. New Eden is composed of roughly 8,000 solar systems, giant chunks of the game world that, due to how the game is written, must be treated as single, large processes.
“Ultimately [we want to] get to the point where our smallest unit of scale is not a solar system, but a grid of space that we can reason about. That might be multiple, smaller pieces of a solar system,” he said.
“Then we can scale vertically on just those parts, potentially even horizontally, depending on how we change things, but that's the idea,” he said.
“That way, if we get 9,000 people in one place, awesome, but that doesn't slow down everything around it,” he said.
Epoch of Innovation
Correcting the problems that require time to be slowed down would be a big win for the developers. Herring believes that it would bring an epoch of innovation to EVE Online, evolving stagnant ideas and ushering in new battle tactics and emergent behaviors.
“That's the interesting thing that we haven't had an opportunity to reason about. We don't know what that means exactly,” he said.
“So, if I snap my fingers and modernized all these different pieces overnight, and time dilation goes away, does that change how people play the game?” he said.
“It might change how the logistics of battle happen … It might change the meta, and what ships people field in those circumstances,” he said.
He speculates that battles could spread to faraway solar systems and span multiple levels of the game design. Fighting could erupt at enemy staging systems and at military bases where reinforcements are dispatched. There might be a greater focus on interdicting supply lines.
“[Those are the types of] battles we would like to see more of, as far as the strategy of EVE is concerned, because then we can build more interesting gameplay mechanics around that,” he said.
Editor’s note: Learn how the Nutanix Cloud Platform solution helps modernize IT, Nutanix Enterprise AI technology helps manage agentic AI, and Nutanix Kubernetes Platform software helps manage modern applications across different IT infrastructures.
Jason Johnson is a contributing writer. He is a longtime content and copywriter for tech and tech-adjacent businesses. Find him on Linkedin.
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