EVE Online: More COSMOS Details Emerge

A new developer blog on CCP Games’ website has revealed more information about the upcoming COSMOS community site for the company’s sci-fi MMO, EVE Online. Planned for release with EVE’s winter expansion COSMOS will feature integration with the game, allowing players to keep track of their game information and converse with other EVE enthusiasts.

    This is a very unique project in that it aims to blur the line between the in-game environment, and out-of-game with not just communication features but expansive game related features. I’ll leave it to some of my colleagues to get into the specific features planned in following dev blogs (yes you can call me a tease) but what I want to discuss today is the technical underpinnings of what is a typically ambitious CCP project.

    As this is a site we expect to see heavy demand on, and which we intend to continually enhance over time we have some very serious challenges to tackle. COSMOS has to be able to handle a heavy load, we have to be able to scale it as the load changes, it has to be of extremely high quality, we need to be able to easily maintain and enhance it and it needs to handle full real time data flows with the EVE backend systems without inducing any lag or performance impacts for those in-game. Achieving this requires a totally new architecture using the best components that we can put in place.

    As a general overview, the COSMOS system consists of a number of key elements. There is a web site which contains a content management system; a data service to retrieve data from EVE, databases or caches; integrated applications such as a new forum solution and a custom COSMOS.web application that integrates and controls all of it. We also have a robust distributed caching cluster to handle caching of sessions and back end data to maximize performance and reduce back end load. Finally we have a new application which we call “the Nexus” which resides on the SOL clusters that run EVE itself. This coordinates the flow of real time data between COSMOS and the virtual world and the back end TQ database keeping everything in synch.

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