GDC 2019: Here’s how CCP’s 10,000 player battle tech demo went down

Developer CCP Games currently holds the world record for the largest PvP battle in gaming history, which was awarded in recognition of January 2018’s 6142-player Siege of 9-4 in EVE Online. The studio wants to push those numbers higher, and recently partnered with Hadean to put on an EVE-themed live demo of its Aether simulation engine that it claimed can handle 10,000 players simultaneously fighting in the same area.

The demo took place last night at GDC as we covered yesterday, with thousands of pilots logging in from around the world to put the Aether engine through its paces. A total of 3,852 real players logged in, and developers then piped in AI connections to reach the 10,000 pilot mark and test the server at that scale. I took part in last night’s event to see how the new server tech held up and assess whether it might useful for EVE Online. Read on for a breakdown of the event.

The event kicked off with a number of technical issues as everyone tried to log in at once and many players crashed, but things eventually stabilised. The test gameplay was simplified to an extremely networking-friendly system, with just the W button for forward, the mouse to aim, and left click to fire. The only weapon was a missile that fired straight forward, with what appeared to be a client-side “lock on” visual effect if you aimed at someone for more than a second.

Firing missiles had significant delay and their positions, movement, and collisions were very jerky, but this is to be expected and a polished game engine tends to hide from the user using slick animations. The game quickly grew until there were around 3,000 players were online, at which point some server issues became apparent. Pings varied wildly from numbers in the single-digits to over 100 milliseconds, and players and missiles would teleport to completely new locations every few seconds as my client appeared to resync with the server (this issue with intermittent).

Something seemed to be going badly wrong with the missiles now and then, too. I noticed an extraordinary number of them all flying on the exact same vector even before bots were added, which seemed unlikely. Sure enough, sometimes my own missiles would appear to fly upward or downward from my ship, and I frequently observed every missile on the battlefield suddenly turning and flying in the same direction or all missiles converging on a single point. If Hadean wasn’t doing this deliberately to clear the field, it’s possible that something was going wrong with the physics simulation.

It was difficult to get a sense of the number of players in the fight, but when bots were added, the sky definitely filled with missiles and the minimap in the top right lit up with activity. While this test wasn’t without its problems and it’s a long way from something that could be used in a live game, the server stayed online, and it was a pretty good test of the technology that got thousands of people interested enough to participate. Hopefully Hadean got plenty of data from this on the effect that real world variables from real pilots have on their technology, and stay tuned as further information and tests will be coming down the line.