I just sat in on a panel discussion with two game theorists and two representatives from CCP. On one table, we had industry luminaries, Jessica Mulligan and Richard Bartle and they were maybe playing devil's advocate with the idea, because this is an introduction of an idea. It's something you're thinking of, but haven't yet implemented.

And on the other side, you had Dr.Eyjó Guðmundsson and you had Pétur Óskarsson who wrote the white paper for the Council. I thought Jessica and Richard brought up some really good points. Their main issue was managing player expectation in terms of how you implement this. It isn't necessarily something which exists in the game fiction. It very much is something which happens in the so-called real world as a high-quality feedback interface between your fans and CCP...

HP: We have this idea of creating a council which fairly represents the world. Because it's easy to get the vocal minority to be represented -- they're vocal and you hear them. But there's a large silent majority in the world. We're hoping that this method of having them democratically elected will at least be the process that will evolve to the point where we actually get representation from the silent majority.

We have sort of developed a system for that and we have presented that here at this fanfest and we definitely wanted to get devil's advocate-like feedback from industry luminaries. We're very honored to have Richard Bartle and Jessica Mulligan to give us some very pointed questions and guard us from the obvious holes we could trip into. And they did an awesome job today and it was a very... I would say an exchange of ideas and a discussion which I felt brought us closer to the correct solution, and we will continue this throughout the day with roundtables and player feedback and will definitely make sure that everybody agrees that is a path on which we want to go on.

We very vigorously think this is the right thing to do for the game at this point, and we build that on our experience from managing the community from 50,000 to 200,000, seeing the sort of trends that evolve, trying to predict how it will be when it's up to 300-to-400,000 people. You would definitely have to install something like that to make sure that you have a fair representation from everybody within the world.

As with our method of soliciting community feedback and that has evolved throughout the years, our code base has definitely evolved in a similar way to manage the scale. And even though we're not mass-market in the terms that we don't have millions of people playing our game, we're big in the way that everybody's playing the same game on the same shard. So the scalability challenges that we're faced with are maybe larger than [those] of sharded games where you can basically manage scale by adding shards. We don't have the luxury of doing that so have constantly been evolving and innovating both in terms of hardware and software, to be able to manage the scale.

Last year, we completely changed our architecture and moved it over to 64-bit computing from 32-bit computing. Before that, we installed solid-state hard drives into our SQL server to be able to reduce I/O waiting queues which were creating latency within the game. Our next step is something that we are introducing at this fanfest as well: it's the move over to supercomputing where we will take traditional supercomputing solutions from, basically research and academia which have been the fields traditionally using high performance computing solutions. But it's now becoming commercially viable, and HPC as a whole, to the point where you can do simulation-based activity that isn't only batch oriented as it is currently sort of built for.

And we're now in a massive research project with Microsoft and IBM where we are going to construct a substantially large supercomputer, which we estimate will be in the top 500 supercomputers in the world, which we will employ to break some of the limitations our designers and programmers have had to work around. And I'm hoping to talk a little bit about that at my closing keynote this fanfest and explain our motivation for doing it, and also the opportunity we see from doing it.

One thing EVE has always been known for its beautiful visual presentation. It has very strong art direction. In fact, reading through your book, The Art of EVE, one of the quotes from company founder Reynir Harðarson was, "If it looks good, it is good." This is very different for a game development studio because typically, they're run by engineers. And then artists are subservient to the designers. In EVE's case, it seems like that model's flipped on its head. The artists and their visual design seem to drive a lot of the functionality. In fact, in that same art book, there's a section on user interface entitled, "Style over function," that explains that the interface was subservient to the design.

HP: CCP was founded by Reynir Harðarson who is a graphical genius. I have yet to meet another man who has such a strong ability to create his vision in Photoshop. Essentially, he can create any graphical effect that we use in EVE in Photoshop. When I joined initially as the head of the programming department -- I was hired as the CTO in 2000 -- I very much understood how much the art can drive an engineering team. Because all engineers aspire to enable something beautiful. We had something beautiful and we had to enable it!

So I sat down with Reynir and Torfi [Olafsson] who was our technical artist and saw what they were doing in Photoshop, what they were doing in Maya. And when I ultimately had to end up creating our first 3D engine, I tried to make a tool for them to do similar things.

So, rather than create an engine per se, I more created a tool to replicate what I saw them doing in Photoshop and Maya. And that was really the foundation that created the Trinity graphics engine that we're still running on. Their ability to realize their artistic vision through that tool is really what creates the graphics. The graphics of EVE are not a technical achievement. They are definitely an artistic achievement on behalf of them. I just created something so that they could realize it. And then we have really driven all of our outward facing marketing initiative on the look of the game.

Everybody has respected EVE for being "too good to be true." We had some very... [laughs] strange discussions with publishers initially where nobody believed these were screenshots from the game we were sending over to them. And now that we see the rest of the world catching up, we're now taking the next step where we have basically re-written our 3D engine; we have redone all the content to be a "next-generation" qualifier. And we have also taken advantage [of the fact] that the hardware on the GPU side has evolved quite a bit. So we're doing a fully shader model 3.0 enabled graphic engine which in some cases will run faster than our old fixed function graphic engine that we still run on.

So not only will the graphics... It just looks amazing. It's too good to be true again. I think we'll have to argue with people that these are actual screenshots from the game again. Which we celebrate to have the opportunity to do. But also due to the use of shader model 3.0 and what they have there, I think we have the ability to even run faster than our fixed function pipeline on top-of-the-line computers.