EVE Online is famous for its titanic battles, and it's during those battles that even people who've never played the stellar MMO pay attention. But EVE is 15 years old and struggles when thousands of players are all duking it out in one gargantuan brawl. CCP reckons it has a solution, however, which it tested out at GDC with a 10,000-ship battle.
The developer has partnered with a cloud-based computing company, Hadean, resulting in the EVE: Aether Wars tech demo. The Aether Engine uses Microsoft Azure and is built on top of HadeanOS, the company's 'cloud-first operation system'.
GDC might be a great place to show off new tech, but live events and technology frequently clash. As Hadean's Ryan King notes in a recent blog post, there wasn't a safety net. But it worked.
3,850 human players participated, fighting each other and against AI connected clients. The total number of ships involved in the battle was an astronomical 14,274, with 10,412 ships fighting concurrently. A whopping 88,988 ships were apparently destroyed when all was said and done. Check out one of the player streams here.
Expect more details about how Hadean managed to support such a huge battle soon, as well as a panel at EGX Rezzed that will cover what was shown off at GDC. More tests, which will obviously require more players, are coming in the future, so keep an eye out for the chance to sign up.
