Dev Blog: New Chat Backend Coming With The March Release

As mentioned in yesterday's dev blog about the retirement of EVE Voice, there are some significant back end changes coming to the chat system in EVE Online with the March release.

With the March release, we will replace the text chat backend for EVE Online to use ejabberd, a ‘Rock Solid, Massively Scalable, Infinitely Extensible XMPP Server’. Ejabberd will run on a cluster of machines in the cloud, so we're not just separating chat from the game server application, we're also taking it outside of the EVE cluster.

There is no intended change in how text chat behaves, but this is a major infrastructure change so it is inevitable that some bugs slip through. We'll be monitoring text chat behavior closely when this change is deployed on Singularity and trust in you, our pilots, to report any anomalies you may experience with text chat.

Why?

There are several reasons why we want to do this:

• We want to break up the EVE game server into more manageable parts and this is one of the steps that gets us closer to a Microservices Architecture.
• Text chat accounts for a significant portion of CPU use on the game server's proxy nodes.
• Running text chat as a standalone service with an industry standard protocol opens up new future of possibilities.
• Easier access to text chat logs for Customer Support.

In the short term, this change should not affect you at all – if we did it right then you will hardly notice a change.

In the long term, this a step towards keeping EVE alive forever, and future proofing New Eden for decades to come.

As always, we'd love to hear feedback, so please be sure to head on over to the feedback thread for this dev blog on the official EVE Online forums.

There'll be a more detailed blog in the coming weeks once the March release has been deployed that explains this change in more detail.

Until then, fly safe!