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The Pulse

First, you vote with what you view at Ten Ton Hammer, and the result is the Ten Ton Pulse.

1. World of Warcraft
2. Warhammer Online
3. Age of Conan
4. Runes of Magic (UP 10)
5. Star Wars: The Old Republic
6. Atlantica Online (UP 5)
7. EVE Online (UP 1)
8. Dungeon Runners (UP 7)
9. Lineage 2 (UP 3)
10. Lord of the Rings Online (UP 2)

If the Top 10 isn't enough, we also show the Top 20 and Top 50 lists as well, available to everyone on our homepage. (What is Pulse?)

Daily Column

Loading... powered today by 5-hour energy drinks and seasonal affective disorder (still dark at 9am here).

Day One of EVE FanFest in Reykjavik, Iceland has come and gone, and though members we were treated to press briefings on bleeding edge tech updates for both the EVE servers and the game client and a quick sneak peek of the big feature this year, Walking in Stations, CCP kept most of the exclusive goodies for today and tomorrow. But even if you're not a fan of EVE, you have to admire how CCP is pushing the technological boundaries for the benefit of not just EVE, but tomorrow's MMORPGs as well.

Most of the tech jargon went right over my head - if you can explain how ambient occlusion mapping creates shadows without the processor overhead of figuring out where light hits and doesn't hit or how CUDA will soon redefine particle effects, you're a better techie than I. And you'd probably be interested to know things like how CCP is taking the plunge into High Performance Computing (HPC - an initiative that could potentially see CCP trading teraflops with the fastest server architectures in the world) with Intel Wolfdale 64-bit processors (though CCP is anxious to get its hands on some Intel Halon processors when they hit the market next year), new Windows HPC Server 2008 architecture (chosen over Linux because of the great support and feedback loop CCP has established with Microsoft), 20 GB/sec internal wiring, dual-core server blades, and a new job scheduler that makes sure all the various levels of servers are pulling their weight. A test shard running HPC is already functional, and the practical outcome of all of this work is that a common complaint against EVE, server-side lag, will effectively be no more.

On the client side, CCP is doing a number of things in the background to take better advantage of today's video cards (even the modest, motherboard-integrated GPU in your mid-range laptop), something most games don't do very well. For example, the old method of drawing a spaceship from memory is far less efficient than handing your GPU a bunch of texture layers and letting it put the spaceship together using math. EVE's trademark Gas Giants can be rendered more efficiently using Nvidia's newly acquired PhysX technology, native to newer Nvidia GPUs. CCP is also redesigning the core to be multi-processor friendly, since most of today's gamers have a dual-core system, and in general start sharing art and audio assets when more than one copy of EVE is running on a single machine (a common occurence among EVE players). In one recent test, a CCP dev was able to run 10 instances of the client on his admittedly beefy machine, but CCP hopes to make things so efficient that even a low-end rig can run 2 or 3 copies of EVE easily.

It's great that CCP can be so open about what their doing backstage, and they can do so simply because much of what their doing is one of a kind, fueled by their vision of a one-shard MMORPG where thousands can fight and interact in one area at the same time. Someone remarked that, unlike BlizzCon, the first question is never: "What server do you play on?", and I'd add that you never have to start over on another shard to play with your friends. It's all about corps and alliances and interacting in-game. Even if you dislike EVE, you have to admire how they're pushing the boundaries and building an fast and incredibly efficient foundation to build future MMORPGs upon.

Of course, great tech is nothing without great gameplay, and now that the techish details are out of the way I hope to share with you much more about the future of EVE Online gameplay this weekend. This will be the last Loading... this weekend, but please check our EVE FanFest 2008 portal regularly to stay up-to-date.

What do you think? Does one shard beat all, or do you like the traditional multiple server approach? What are the benefits and drawbacks to each? Post your thoughts in the Loading... forum, or email me if you like. Have a great weekend!