When python started incorporating asyncio my initial reaction was fairly negative. I was behaving like a grumpy graybeard programmer ("kids these days should learn how to use concurrency instead of working on a new runtime altogether!" [0]).
But after using it for a production project I have to say I'm deeply satisfied and surprised by the maturity, quality of APIs and performance in general.
I started more than 15 years ago and recently got back into it. I would say that game has stagnated a lot more, character numbers may seem like it isn't that low but in reality most people who play it has around 5 accounts which they multibox with. So number of actual people who play it went really down. It is looking bleak for the future, and i can confidently say that it is all CCP's fault (called Fenris Creations now). They started aiming for short term gains and they probably realized themselves long ago it won't last so they started investing in other IP's but they were all mega failures so far.
I too would love to know the answer to this question. I loved Eve as a teenager / young adult. It was a brilliant burst of nerdery, and the first time I ever met someone who wrote linux kernel modules for a living.
I sometimes think about logging in (I think I ragequit likely in a pod inside a wormhole in the middle of nullsec) and then I realise that way madness (and much sunk time) lies.
Yeah if I ever have the need to occupy an inordinate number of hours of my life again I’ll log back in, the temptation to dust of the account(s) arises sometimes. Think I managed to log off in lowsec but who knows!
This is why I had to quit. I enjoyed it way too much and would spend nearly all my free time playing it, much to the detriment of the rest of my (non-professional) life.
It was kind of a blessing for me that I was forced to quit after they introduced PLEX and in doing created a conversion rate for ISK to dollars. Suddenly I was too aware of how worthless everything I was doing was. It's one thing to spend an evening grinding to buy that new ship, it's another when you know you were grinding for 73 cents an hour. Risking losing a ship you spent a week earning the ISK for is thrilling and scary, losing a ship you can replace for eight dollars is just annoying.
Spot on. Py2 was integer division, Py3 was true division. In Py2 you could get the true division with an `from __future__ import division` (Can't recall which Py2 version this became an import). Fun fact too: In Py3 you can do a // to get back to the floor division affect (e.g. 1 // 2 --> 0)
It really speaks to how great the technical team can be. As crazy as it sounds Goldman Sacks and JP Morgan both maintained 2.7 Python as a core language until just a few years ago (yes, it's still used in production).
Python is used as a kind of 'visual basic' language in a lot of banks especially in front-of-house trading software, e.g murex or frontarena. Migrations between major versions of these can take years, costs 100s of millions and involve thousands of devs. Mistakes can be _expensive_.
It is kind of 'insane' but also, meh..
There's more dragons out there than we've been led to believe :}
Yes, it has had huge concurrency issues for the entirety of its life. Their solution to large fights has historically been "let us know in advance pls", plus "move systems to beefier hw nodes" and "tidi" which stands for time dilation, where the "tick rate" of the whole server goes down and a fight takes 10-20-100x longer than it should.
It's an amazing concept of a game, but software wise it has been a mess since forever.
How much of that is down to processing time is unclear, but I think it's fair to say there is scope for improved performance.
Secondary to that, if you have general performance improvements then you can afford to run a smaller server cluster or smaller servers, reducing costs.
Oh my yes. EVE Online can experience issues when a conflict in a solar system exceeds a certain number of players. Each system in EVE is a monolithic process, so, if a conflict gets out of hand, things get slow.
This is referred to as Time Dilation (TiDi) in EVE -- https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Time_dilation -- it's an interesting engineering rathole, Fenris f/k/a CCP has been pretty open about their stack, and the challenges that have built up.
Anything that speeds up EVE lets more players cram in without experiencing TiDi, and this might let the devs escape Stackless Python, which is another interesting engineer rathole. (It's ratholes all the way down, and this is the one that got EVE on my radar, and has kept it there.)
Python is very strange programming language for a MMORPG. I'd imagine they would write it in C++ or something. They don't quite explain what they use it for.
And yeah, using a faster but safe language could help immensely.
> Every character, every skill point, every asset in every hangar, every ISK in every wallet was written in Python 2 code, and all of it must read back under Python 3 exactly as it was.
This task would be even more challenging under such a dramatic rewrite.
Stackless python had such potential, it could be extremely useful in Agent era for long running tasks with durable state.
modern Python went in a somewhat different direction with asyncio, but with tasklet and continuation it could be a much powerful combo.
When python started incorporating asyncio my initial reaction was fairly negative. I was behaving like a grumpy graybeard programmer ("kids these days should learn how to use concurrency instead of working on a new runtime altogether!" [0]).
But after using it for a production project I have to say I'm deeply satisfied and surprised by the maturity, quality of APIs and performance in general.
I was proven wrong and I'm happy about that :)
[0] Old man yell at clouds type of meme
Can an experienced player gives us a summary of what's the "vibe" of the EVE online community these days? I was lightly involved ~15 years ago.
I started more than 15 years ago and recently got back into it. I would say that game has stagnated a lot more, character numbers may seem like it isn't that low but in reality most people who play it has around 5 accounts which they multibox with. So number of actual people who play it went really down. It is looking bleak for the future, and i can confidently say that it is all CCP's fault (called Fenris Creations now). They started aiming for short term gains and they probably realized themselves long ago it won't last so they started investing in other IP's but they were all mega failures so far.
I too would love to know the answer to this question. I loved Eve as a teenager / young adult. It was a brilliant burst of nerdery, and the first time I ever met someone who wrote linux kernel modules for a living.
I sometimes think about logging in (I think I ragequit likely in a pod inside a wormhole in the middle of nullsec) and then I realise that way madness (and much sunk time) lies.
Yeah if I ever have the need to occupy an inordinate number of hours of my life again I’ll log back in, the temptation to dust of the account(s) arises sometimes. Think I managed to log off in lowsec but who knows!
This is why I had to quit. I enjoyed it way too much and would spend nearly all my free time playing it, much to the detriment of the rest of my (non-professional) life.
It was kind of a blessing for me that I was forced to quit after they introduced PLEX and in doing created a conversion rate for ISK to dollars. Suddenly I was too aware of how worthless everything I was doing was. It's one thing to spend an evening grinding to buy that new ship, it's another when you know you were grinding for 73 cents an hour. Risking losing a ship you spent a week earning the ISK for is thrilling and scary, losing a ship you can replace for eight dollars is just annoying.
> So how do you migrate 2.4 million lines of code?
> Very carefully, and in multiple stages.
That answer is so 3 months ago
> The classic example is division: in Python 2, 1 / 2 is 0; while in Python 3 it is 0.5.
Can someone kindly explain this?
edit: I misread it as “In Python 2 2.1/2 is 0, while in Python 3 it is 0.5”
From long ago memory: in Python 2, 1 / 2 did integer division. You had to do something like 1 / 2.0 if you wanted floating point division.
Spot on. Py2 was integer division, Py3 was true division. In Py2 you could get the true division with an `from __future__ import division` (Can't recall which Py2 version this became an import). Fun fact too: In Py3 you can do a // to get back to the floor division affect (e.g. 1 // 2 --> 0)
It really speaks to how great the technical team can be. As crazy as it sounds Goldman Sacks and JP Morgan both maintained 2.7 Python as a core language until just a few years ago (yes, it's still used in production).
https://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html
Maybe the bank bailouts were a mistake
Or insane
Python is used as a kind of 'visual basic' language in a lot of banks especially in front-of-house trading software, e.g murex or frontarena. Migrations between major versions of these can take years, costs 100s of millions and involve thousands of devs. Mistakes can be _expensive_.
It is kind of 'insane' but also, meh..
There's more dragons out there than we've been led to believe :}
It's a great 'glue' language to tie a lot of systems together, especially when you think of MS Excel as a system.
Although i really love or maybe have some memories, but isn't ms excel outdated , kinda, except the idea that it's always have easy fast solution
Shocking to me they are still on Python. Over like moving the high CPU parts over to rust or something.
Some parts are in C++ and they even made it open source recently:
https://github.com/carbonengine
https://fenris.com/carbon
Does the game have performance issues? I don't see the need to rewrite unless there is a problem with it
> Does the game have performance issues?
Yes, it has had huge concurrency issues for the entirety of its life. Their solution to large fights has historically been "let us know in advance pls", plus "move systems to beefier hw nodes" and "tidi" which stands for time dilation, where the "tick rate" of the whole server goes down and a fight takes 10-20-100x longer than it should.
It's an amazing concept of a game, but software wise it has been a mess since forever.
They have to slow down the game tick-rate to accommodate, something they call "Time Dilation": https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Time_dilation
How much of that is down to processing time is unclear, but I think it's fair to say there is scope for improved performance.
Secondary to that, if you have general performance improvements then you can afford to run a smaller server cluster or smaller servers, reducing costs.
Oh my yes. EVE Online can experience issues when a conflict in a solar system exceeds a certain number of players. Each system in EVE is a monolithic process, so, if a conflict gets out of hand, things get slow.
This is referred to as Time Dilation (TiDi) in EVE -- https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Time_dilation -- it's an interesting engineering rathole, Fenris f/k/a CCP has been pretty open about their stack, and the challenges that have built up.
Anything that speeds up EVE lets more players cram in without experiencing TiDi, and this might let the devs escape Stackless Python, which is another interesting engineer rathole. (It's ratholes all the way down, and this is the one that got EVE on my radar, and has kept it there.)
Will you rust people ever shut up?
The Jehovah's Witnesses of programming
i-use-arch-btw
That's totally ok. "It works on my machine" with no info on what that machine looks like, is much worse
Will you poor contributors ever shut up?
Python is very strange programming language for a MMORPG. I'd imagine they would write it in C++ or something. They don't quite explain what they use it for.
And yeah, using a faster but safe language could help immensely.
Very aggressive. "Will you $FAVORITE_LANG people ever shut up?"
> Every character, every skill point, every asset in every hangar, every ISK in every wallet was written in Python 2 code, and all of it must read back under Python 3 exactly as it was.
This task would be even more challenging under such a dramatic rewrite.
what did they do about stackless? are they using greenlet or did they switch to asyncio?
googled it so this becomes a PSA: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/25/eve-online-move-to-pyt...
so it's neither, it's their own: https://github.com/carbonengine/scheduler
so that's interesting
Had to check the date.
Jan 1 1984
The proposed solution to 2.4M lines of python is.. more python, with the primary motivation being "performance" lol