EVE Online is notable among the MMO titles on the market for having a game with a single shard setting. Whether you're an industrialist mass producing exhumers or fighting in fleet battles for a large 0.0 PvP alliance, you're active in the same setting rather than shards. Keeping as many as 50,000 concurrent users active in one vast galaxy has been a challenge for CCP Games, and of course there have been numerous growing pains along the way. Namely, something called "desync".
Desync has been a catch-all term to describe the various things that can go wrong during gameplay, but in short it's been something that has plagued a number of EVE's subscribers. In the words of EVE Software Engineer CCP GingerDude, desync is "the situation where the server and client disagree on the position of an object in space at a given time." Although it's been an issue for years, the problem has just recently been solved, according to CCP GingerDude's dev blog "Facing Destiny".
If you like tech-focused dev blogs that explain the nuts and bolts of how servers and game clients operate, then this latest EVE Online developer blog from CCP Games is for you. It's a peek behind the curtain at what CCP Games does to run the game server-side and deals heavily with "Destiny" -- the game's simulation engine -- and how changes made to it have resulted in smoother gameplay.
"Facing Destiny" chronicles the extremes to which the devs went to solve the desync issue... but you could also just check it out to read about the chaos ejecting 50 Avatar titans from a devhaxed cargohold will cause.
