[jere]

I haven't really played Eve, so I can't say. I'm imagining ships flying around and changing course constantly in a battle, but if someone can give a better description, I'd appreciate it. It'd be further reduced by several players sharing a ship... no idea how common that is.

What I'm describing is definitely leaning more towards players that are constantly moving around though. It helps explain to me why in Asheron's Call, for instance, when you had too many people in the same city a "portal storm" arose and people started getting teleported out of the city randomly.

[mbell]

Eve doesn't have WASD controls, there really isn't constant input.

The ship movement command in Eve are limited to:

* Set course / speed (double clicking in space, speed set via clicking a speed dial thing). This is not something that gets constant tweaks, more a 'move in a general direction' command.

* Orbit x @ y distance

* Keep x @ y distance

* Approach x

In addition other actions in eve are relatively long lived, there isn't fps style aiming but 'locking on' and activating modules which have cycles times of 2-60 seconds.

In practice, even in the heat of battle, I doubt the average player gets even close to 1 input action per second over the course of a fight.

[jiggy2011]

Combat in Eve is more D&D and less Wing commander. When I played (a few years ago) you would get text based messages pop up saying stuff like "X hits Y for 38 damage"

[izend]

Eve's gameplay could be represented as a text based game, it is not a fast paced space shooting game.

[gnarbarian]

I also have been toying around with trying to create a MMO fast action space simulation of my own creation. I have a few ideas on how to limit areas of dense players with game mechanics. I haven't even really started on multiplayer beyond the ability to download modify and upload solar systems though.

I think for some really hard engineering problems like this the best course could be to try and find a 'good enough' approach that will allow a significant ammount of players to interact while limiting the upper bound with a game mechanic to make it feel less artificial.

http://code.google.com/p/stableorbit

here are a couple videos from the never ending pyopencl port.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnOmy1ly6M0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCvRBHtPbzE

[afterburner]

If you check the video you'll see it's very slow paced and the ships basically don't seem to move at all (maybe tiny unseen ones do I don't know)

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve-online-battle-asakai/

[gknoy]

Part of the reason it is so slow is that (as mentioned in the article) the server slows time down (as far as 10% of normal) in order to ensure that nothing gets lost.