Eve Online launcher being revamped with BitTorrent tech

CCP Games says it will update Eve Online's game launcher, which updates and patches the space sim, to work with the "widely used and battle-tested" BitTorrent protocol, transitioning away from the current HTTP protocol-based implementation.

"The main reason why we are doing this is that BitTorrent itself can utilize a number of different transport channels at the same time and is thus less prone to failing on that level," writes CCP developer "Aporia" on Eve's official website. The current Eve Launcher, the post reads, is not optimized for transferring large amounts of data and could potentially corrupt players' local files.

Using BitTorrent protocols can address those issues, Aporia writes, as well as offer improvements for the launcher, "for instance the ability to create your character while the game is still installing." Blizzard Entertainment also uses BitTorrent for some of its game launchers, giving players the ability to start playing the game before the full client finishes downloading.

CCP addresses potential concerns from Eve Online players that transitioning to BitTorrent may eat up personal bandwidth as bits and pieces of files are shared with others.

"By default the new Eve Launcher will only make you share the data required for installing the client while you are downloading," Aporia writes. "Once your download is complete you will not be distributing it to others, unless you explicitly enable this in the options.

"We are also, by default, limiting the upload rate so that it should not affect your normal internet usage."