http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/ Massiveclan is here to kick ass en Wed, 08 Sep 2010 01:35:02 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/images/ca_evo_db/misc/rss.jpg http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/ http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15066&goto=newpost Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:38:12 GMT Colorado Springs CO: The U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and Northrop Grumman Corporation have finalized verification and validation of the... Colorado Springs CO: The U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and Northrop Grumman Corporation have finalized verification and validation of the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) Performance...

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More... ]]> Defence talk feed gatherer http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15066 http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15065&goto=newpost Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:38:12 GMT WEST POINT, N.Y.: A report released Aug. 11 by Forbes ranked the U.S. Military Academy at West Point fourth in the country in their annual ranking of... WEST POINT, N.Y.: A report released Aug. 11 by Forbes ranked the U.S. Military Academy at West Point fourth in the country in their annual ranking of America's Best Colleges."West Point is again...

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More... ]]> Defence talk feed gatherer http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15065 http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15064&goto=newpost Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:38:12 GMT Image: http://www.wulffmorgenthaler.com/striphandler.ashx?stripid=3cf1a21c-27e7-4f21-b20e-c248a1de0aaa Image:...



]]> wulffmorgenthaler feed gatherer http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15064 http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15063&goto=newpost Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:38:12 GMT There will be no live broadcast of Antiwar Radio for today, Friday, August 20. For those of you who will miss Scott Horton’s insights, Mr. Horton will be taping upcoming television appearances this weekend. Please see the Antiwar.com Blog for updates.

More... ]]> The World At War feed gatherer http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15063 http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15062&goto=newpost Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:38:12 GMT from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for August 20th, 2010: New York Times: Mark Manzetti and David Sanger report that the... from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for August 20th, 2010: New York Times: Mark Manzetti and David Sanger report that the Obama administration has “persuaded” Israel that Iran is at least one year — if not more — away from having the potential to build a nuclear bomb. (This is consistent with [...]

More... ]]> The World At War feed gatherer http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15062 http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15061&goto=newpost Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:38:12 GMT Image:... AP - Haiti's electoral commission said Friday that hip hop artist Wyclef Jean cannot run for president of this Caribbean nation, ending his outsider's bid to lead a country struggling to recover from the Jan. 12 earthquake.




More... ]]> World Forum feed gatherer http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15061 http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15060&goto=newpost Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:38:12 GMT Image:... AP - Iranian and Russian nuclear technicians made final preparations to start up Iran's first reactor on Saturday after years of delays, an operation that will mark a milestone in what Tehran considers its right to produce nuclear energy.




More... ]]> World Forum feed gatherer http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15060 http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15059&goto=newpost Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:38:12 GMT SEPTEMBER 20 We often refer to a strong sexual attraction as animal magnetism, but arousal involves more than just base instinct. At the ... SEPTEMBER


20 We often refer to a strong sexual attraction as animal magnetism, but arousal involves more than just base instinct. At the Mind Science lecture series , psychologist Stephanie Ortigue will describe how desire depends on complex mental processing. Her talk, “The Consciousness of Desire,” will reveal the brain regions associated with longing and how they are influenced by mirror neurons--brain cells that fire when we either perform or observe an action. [More]



Brain - Neuron - Mind - Psychologist - Philosophy

More... ]]> Technology + Science feed gatherer http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15059 http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15058&goto=newpost Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:38:12 GMT There is no such thing as the Nobel Prize in Mathematics, but fortunately the field of math dishes out its own top honors every four years, bestowing... There is no such thing as the Nobel Prize in Mathematics, but fortunately the field of math dishes out its own top honors every four years, bestowing the prestigious Fields Medal on two to four researchers. (Unfortunately for mathematicians, the cash prize attached to the Nobels is a far sight bigger.) [More]



Fields Medal - Mathematics - Math - Nobel Prize - Mathematicians

More... ]]> Technology + Science feed gatherer http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15058 http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15057&goto=newpost Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:38:12 GMT The Pope met with the College of Cardinals to discuss a proposal from Shimon Peres, the former leader of Israel.

"Your holiness," said one of the Cardinals, "Mr. Peres wants to determine whether Jews or Catholics are superior, by challenging you to a golf match."

The Pope was greatly disturbed, as he had never held a golf club in his life.

"Not to worry," said the Cardinal, "We'll call America and talk to Jack Nicklaus. We'll make him a Cardinal, he can play Shimon Peres ... We can't lose!"
Everyone agreed it was a good idea. The call was made and, of course, Jack was honored and agreed to play.

The day after the match, Nicklaus reported to the Vatican to inform the Pope of his success in the match. "I came in second, your Holiness," said Nicklaus.

"Second?!" exclaimed the surprised Pope. "You came in second to Shimon Peres?!"

"No," said Nicklaus, "second to Rabbi Woods." ]]> jokes and funny stuff trixter http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15057 http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15056&goto=newpost Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:38:12 GMT What did the blondes right leg say to the left leg?

Nothing, they haven't met! ]]> jokes and funny stuff trixter http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15056 http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15055&goto=newpost Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:38:12 GMT Free-to-play option for SOE's fantasy MMORPG now available; $200/year top-tier plan to launch August 31.



The big news surrounding Sony Online Entertainment's EverQuest franchise occurred earlier this month, when the storied massively multiplayer online role-playing game maker announced EverQuest Next, a working title. The third flagship installment in SOE's MMORPG universe, Next is a reimagining of the land of Norrath, telling all-new stories in locations that will be familiar to the franchise faithful.

Norrath now has a caste system.


However, that isn't the only notable development out of SOE. Last month, the publisher said that 2004's EverQuest II would soon offer a free-to-play option in addition to the game's standard subscription fee. Today, SOE announced that EQII's free-to-play scenario, called EverQuest II Extended, is now available, and players can sign up for access through the game's official Web site.

EQII's new business model breaks the game's payment plan up into four tiers: bronze (free), silver (one-time, $10), gold ($15 a month), and platinum ($200 per year, available August 31). At the lowest three tiers, players are limited to four races, of 19 total. Bronze and silver memberships are limited to eight character classes, out of a total 24 options. A comprehensive breakdown of what each payment level offers is available on SOE's Web site.

EverQuest II Extended is the latest in a string of MMORPGs that have transitioned to the free-to-play model. Two other recent examples are Turbine's Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online.

For more on EQII, check out GameSpot's previous coverage.

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"EverQuest II Extended goes live" was posted by Tom Magrino on Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:43:22 -0700


More... ]]> Gamespot pc news feed gatherer http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15055 http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15054&goto=newpost Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:38:12 GMT Convention's jury crowns Sony's long-awaited, 3D-enabled racing game as best of show, best console title; PlayStation Move, Guild Wars 2, Crysis 2 also take prizes.



Every year after the Electronic Entertainment Expo, a panel of game journalists from top press oulets convene to bestow the Game Critics Awards on the convention's top games. Nintendo's 3DS handheld took top honors this year, along with Bethesda and id's post-apocalyptic shooter-driving game Rage.

Gran Turismo 5 took two top honors at Gamescom 2010.


Today, Gamescom announced the winners of its own equivalent of the Game Critics Awards. A jury of press and industry figures selected by the organizers of the Cologne, Germany-based convention handed out awards in seven categories. Gran Turismo 5, the long-awaited racing game from Polyphony Digital and Sony Computer Entertainment, won in two of those categories: Best of Gamescom and Best Console Game.

Sony also earned another trophy for Best Hardware Accessories with its PlayStation Move motion-sensing system, due out in North America on September 19. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and 5th Cell snagged the Best Handheld/Mobile Game prize with Super Scribblenauts, and NCsoft got the Best Online Game award for Guild Wars 2.

The Best PC Game honor went to the recently delayed Crysis 2, which will also be out on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Curiously, the jury also handed out an award in a Best Family Entertainment category, which Nintendo nabbed with Kirby's Epic Yarn for the Wii.

Best of Gamescom: Gran Turismo 5 (Sony Computer Entertainment)
Best Hardware Accessories: PlayStation Move (Sony Computer Entertainment)
Best Console Game: Gran Turismo 5 (Sony Computer Entertainment)
Best Handheld/Mobile Game: Super Scribblenauts (Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment)
Best Online Game: Guild Wars 2 (NCsoft)
Best PC Game: Crysis 2 (EA/Crytek)
Best Family Entertainment: Kirby’s Epic Yarn (Nintendo)


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"Gran Turismo 5 speeds off with Gamescom's top prize" was posted by Tor Thorsen on Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:10:39 -0700


More... ]]> Gamespot pc news feed gatherer http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15054 http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15053&goto=newpost Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:38:12 GMT I like planning. I really do. I think calendars are pretty sexy and my OCD acts up when things aren’t color coded, have point values or do barrel rolls. This summer, I planned to sneak a few smaller items onto my teams backlog and positively surprise the Council of Stellar Management (CSM) when they got here. I ended up going to all these CSM summits, talking about features new and old, but never actually got to tell the CSM about some of the small things we had lined up. My plan didn’t work out, but the job got done, which is what matters.

Usually, smaller changes get bunched up and released with the coming expansion. This particular change is a little different though, as part of the code is needed for a bugfix, meaning we will be deploying it in the near future instead of this winter. The change we are introducing is going to end ghost datacore accumulation.

Currently, any character collecting research points from an agent will continue to do so, even after your account lapses to inactivity. This is a pretty massive loophole to making substantial amounts of money and it is now being closed. When this change is deployed, characters will stop collecting research points when your account lapses into inactivity. You won’t lose the points you’ve accumulated up to that point, but simply won’t gain anymore. When you activate your account, your character will automatically begin earning RPs again. This change is long overdue and will hopefully benefit our active players.

On a sidenote, this was an issue our team picked off the CSMs list of priorities. It’s a great list that outlines both big and small concerns in the community and hopefully we can continue to address it. Summers are pretty quiet here, due to holidays and it’s a great time to go over the list and pick a few items for your team. Hopefully, we can bring you more items off the CSMs list, but till then, here’s one of them.

If anyone is interested, the CSM item is here.

The complete list is here.

Anyway, I should have more blogs coming up as we speed up for the winter release.



Till then, toodles.



More... ]]> Dev news eve dude http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15053 http://www.massiveclan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15052&goto=newpost Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:38:12 GMT EVE has a deadly cobra strike force team alpha of extremely dedicated and proficient developers fighting the Lagmonster tooth and nail as their only... EVE has a deadly cobra strike force team alpha of extremely dedicated and proficient developers fighting the Lagmonster tooth and nail as their only mission. Through their work and the work of others, there's now, at this moment, a perfect storm within the company and we have a great number of fixes in the pipes that will knock your socks off.

Our hope is that very soon our beloved Tranquility will be able to support fleet fights of a scale that far exceeds anything you've seen before, hopefully going beyond the roof of roughly one thousand on a dedicated node.

That's tough talk, and we mean it. We will continue to go into detail in our ongoing series of dev blogs, some of which have previously been outlined in a dev blog by CCP Zulu. As soon as the optimizations are ready they will be pushed out to Tranquility individually and you will be able to gauge the difference yourself.

Character Nodes

In this blog I am going to talk about one of the optimizations we've been working on over the past few months: Character Nodes which we have already started deploying to Tranquility with phenomenal success.

The EVE Server is architected such a way that functionality is split into logical load balancing units and these units are statically assigned to a node which is a server process running on a single CPU core (since the server process is single-threaded). As long as any individual load balancing unit does not exceed the capacity of that CPU core we're fine since we can just add more nodes if the load becomes too high. However, if a single load balancing unit needs to do more work than a single CPU core can handle then we're in trouble.

A market region (Forge, Lonetrek, etc) is an example of a load balancing unit. We have multiple market regions living on a single node and currently four nodes servicing all the market regions. If the load on the market increases we can just increase the number of nodes dedicated to that task and decrease the number of markets on a given node. What this means is that when you're in Jita and browsing the market, you're not talking to the Jita node at all and don't feel any Jita lag effects (up until the point where you buy or sell something in which case the Jita inventory system gets involved).

Another example of a load balancing unit is a solar system. Typically we will have multiple, even hundreds of solar systems living on a single node. We call these types of nodes Location Nodes. Typically these solar systems have such low load that they can be mapped onto a node with a lot of other systems in the same way as the market is. However, now comes the gotcha: If a single solar system exceeds the capacity of the CPU core we have lost the ability to further balance it.

This is the problem in solar systems like Jita and in systems where fleet fights are occurring. We cannot split the solar system up into more units and spread them out and we cannot spread the work out onto multiple cores. We are effectively stuck between a rock and a hard place (stupid GIL!).

Because of these absolute constraints it's important that any work that doesn't need to be done by the location node is taken elsewhere. Therefore things like planets (in Planetary Interaction), markets, corporations and alliances are load balanced separate of the solar system you're in and if your EVE Client calls these services (such as when you are viewing your corp bulletins) then it's talking to different node than your location node. Your client is at any one time talking to half a dozen different nodes, depending on the call context.

Because of the very strict request-response model that we employ (you click a button (make a request), the server does work, you get a response back) in our business logic a lot of the game systems lend themselves very well to distributed load balancing (e.g. away from your location). However, historically the location node has been viewed as your 'primary' node for a lot of the auxiliary logic that runs on the cluster. If a particular call doesn't have a specific place to go to it will get routed to your location node. Now, that's just lazy.

Today, after years of optimizations the only true remaining bottleneck on the tranquility cluster is the solar system location and we need to shave off every single cpu cycle that we can. With this in mind we introduced the concept of the Character Node in Tyrannis and have been moving services over to this paradigm since.



Figure 1: Node configuration

Figure 1 shows what this look like. Calls that would otherwise have gone to 'Location' are now routed to 'Character', which is a set of nodes that is very easily load balanced according to number of logged-in characters. This fits nicely with the schema that is already in place. We need roughly 8 character nodes (out of the total of 204 sol nodes in the cluster) to handle the load and this is very predictable.

Now that most of these changes have been deployed, when your client makes a call for things that aren't directly related to your location, that call will typically be routed to your dedicated character node where your character happily ‘lives' along with tens of thousands of other characters.

Since the work coming from an individual client has a long way to go before it exceeds the capacity of a single CPU core and is easily predictable, we're in a good place. The client still makes the same number of calls to the cluster as before and the amount of work done on the cluster is unchanged. All that is different is that other nodes perform the work.

Changing this isn't very glorious or filled with a lot of eureka! moments. It's mostly just eating your vegetables and rearranging logic. The benefits, however, are substantial since, as it turned out, the majority of the calls that a client makes in a given period can be serviced by any node and therefore should not go to the location node.

The results

Okay, all the wall-of-text above was just to explain how the system works. Now that you've eaten your vegetables it's time for the sugar-laden dessert. Let's see the effect this had on Jita last week, comparing the performance before and after the phase #2 of these changes were deployed to Tranquility on 12 August.



Figure 2: Network traffic on the Jita node

In Figure 2 you can see the number of calls made onto the Jita node in four consecutive runs. After moving some services over to the character nodes, up to 80% of the calls were routed elsewhere freeing Jita up for important things like inventory operations and scams in local.



Figure 3: CPU utilization on the Jita node

As expected, moving services away from the Jita node had a good effect on CPU and has allowed us to scale Jita beyond the 1400 pilot limit that has capped its population for a while. Hopefully you should not be towed to another star system when you log in on Sunday evenings for a while.

Even though the metrics that we have gathered are for the Jita node, this change will have a positive effect on all loaded nodes in the cluster--with Jita and Fleet Fight nodes benefiting the most. The reason I use Jita here is that it has a very predictable load pattern whereas fleet fights are anything but. However, the same principles apply. Before this change you would be making something like 5-10 server calls to your location node to finish jumping, each one of these calls could take a long time to complete. Now you'll be making something like 4, with the rest returning very quickly.

We're hoping you'll be able to tell the difference the next time you decide to invade your nearest friendly neighbor. :-)

Also keep in mind that the other benefit of this type of offloading is that you don't "feel" the lag as much. Take Jita for example. If you're just browsing the market you don't notice that it's laggy since you're not talking to that node, you're talking to the market node. With the character node changes that we're doing much of the user experience will be improved greatly since the buttons that you're clicking end up on a lightly loaded node, even if clicking around in space is laggy. This can make a big difference in the overall playing experience.

We have been deploying the character node changes piecemeal to Tranquility throughout August and have a few more going out over the next few weeks. These should give you better performance in fleet fights as well as allow us to push Jita's concurrent player boundaries further.

This is all well and good but keep in mind that ‘lag' hasn't been ‘fixed' once and for all and it might not be in the foreseeable future, but we are pushing the boundaries of the cluster more aggressively these days than we have been for a while. Like I mentioned before, this is just one of the many things that we are working on right now. More services are being moved to character nodes this autumn and we will have plenty of more awesome fixes aimed at fleet fights coming in over the next weeks and months.

Fleet fight tests on Singularity

As stated before, it is very important for us to get as many people as possible involved when we are testing on the Singularity test server (SiSi). Please join in when the tests are advertised and help us test the performance improvements so that they can be deployed onto Tranquility as quickly as possible.

A word about fleet fight notifications

A fleet fight which happens on a node with a hundred other systems is not a good experience for anyone involved since often times the node only has 30% left of its CPU capacity when the fight starts. You can help make sure that the solar system you will be fighting in is on a dedicated node.

Use the Fleet Fight Notification form to let us know about a pending fleet fight. Sending in a petition is not the right way to report this, you must use the form. If you report the fight well in advance we can make sure that the fight is as smooth as we can make it.

Jon Bjarnason
Technical Director
EVE Online, CCP Games



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