Capsuleers, we are seeking your help in the fight against lag. We will conduct Mass-Testing on Singularity on Saturday, March 20, 2010 at 20:00 UTC. We need at least 300 pilots to join in, and encourage all medium and large alliances to get involved. More information about how you can help can be found in this thread.

The EVE Online Fansite Kit is now available. Containing logos, wallpapers and banners, this kit will help you create your own EVE Online-themed fan sites. To learn more about the fansite kit, and to obtain the latest copy, visit this EVElopedia page.

Whoa, we're half way there. You might be wondering why I'm spouting Bon Jovi lyrics. It's because much like Tommy who worked on the docks and Gina who worked in the diner all day, we at CCP are also half way there. Half way to bringing you Tyrannis, the next free expansion to EVE Online. I'm CCP Hammerhead, Lead Game Designer of EVE. Take my hand and we'll make it - I swear.


The Singularity Test Server should be updated with the latest in-development code by the time you read this. That means enterprising young hackers will be poring over the latest code and raw game data in an attempt to theorycraft the latest scoop about Tyrannis. Well in the spirit of transparency and in an effort to manage your expectations I'd like to tell you about the Planetary Interaction feature which is coming in Tyrannis and which you will be able to spot bits of if you really dig around on SISI (SISI is the test server's nickname). This is a no holds barred trip into where we're going and what you can get a tiny glimpse of and then watch evolve over the next months.

 

But before we get into that I would be remiss if I didn't give a modicum of back story. Interacting with planets is something we've always wanted to do. We have even shown a rough prototype of planetary flight at the first FanFest. Well, a lot has changed since that first FanFest but our desire to explore these thousands of worlds has remained unwavering. The EVE universe is such a rich and interesting place it's been a shame we haven't been able to immerse ourselves deeper into it. Until today where we are witnessing the first baby steps out of space and into the place where the rest of the inhabitants of the EVE universe live. Steps which will soon be followed all the way to the ground by a link into DUST 514 and inside stations with Incarna. Our final destination being an all encompassing sci-fi simulator where you can experience any sci-fi experience you desire. But I'm getting ahead of myself; we're here to sing 80s tunes and talk about Planetary Interaction.


A little about what Planetary Interaction is; PI is a feature in which industrial minded pilots can now take advantage of the resources on planets which had previously been laying dormant. To do that one simply opens the planet browser, finds a suitable planet via a scanning interface then plunks down various things we have internally been calling PINs (planetary interaction node), links those PINs together and then configures routes for all of the stuff moving between the PINs. PIN is just a working title and we've got our highly trained sci-fi experts on the task of renaming everything so you should expect the name to change by the time they reach Tranquility. Our ultimate goal being to create a nice additional revenue stream for people that's wrapped up in a sexy UI with lots of sci-fi feeling content that eventually ties in seamlessly with DUST 514.


So now let me go a little deeper into the feature and tell you about what is and isn't going to be visible on SISI. I'll take it from the high level and move deeper into the granularity as I feel that's the best way to wrap your head around the game mechanics. The first thing we had to do was come up with a method of distributing all of the resources to the various planets. We need to do this both globally and locally. By that I mean we need the resources distributed so there is a landscape to the regions including risk vs. reward balance of hi/med/lo sec space then that the individual planets also have resources spread across them in a way that looks natural when viewed from the planet viewing UI. This system for distributing resources is getting close to ready on the back end but no authoring or balance work has taken place yet. So on SISI the most you will could possibly get today is "1" of certain test resources. We're currently using our special development server dev hacks to put resources where we want them for testing and balancing on our local servers.

Once the resources are in place it would be nice to have some tools to find said resources. Well we're working on that too. The way one goes about this is to launch a satellite over the planet they are interested in, then pick a specific resource in the new planetary scanning window and get a graphical representation in the form of a heat map of how that resource is distributed on the planet. We use sexy colored spherical harmonics to represent hot spots for the best resources. The "scan planet" button currently only prints "mouseClicked" to the log so sorry you can't use it yet. You can Google image search for spherical harmonics to get a preview. Our version is so cutting edge it's only running on one computer in the whole world.


 If your scanner worked or if you have fancy slash commands and GM menus you would be able to find a good spot to put down your Planetary Command Center. The PCC is your base of operations for all of your infrastructure on a given planet. Skills will likely allow you to have PCCs on multiple planets. After your PCC is down on a good location the next thing you want to do is start placing extractors in good locations based on your survey results. Extractor PINS pull the various resources from the planet be they solid, liquid or gas depending on which type of planet you're prospecting on. There isn't really anything to extract on SISI currently unless you're a dev but trust me, it's amazing.


When you've got an extractor and PCC placed you're going to want to do something with all those lovely resources and my recommendation to you is to add some storage PINS to hold your stuff while you're offline. Although you won't be able to move your stuff from the extractor to the storage without making some links. Links have (or will have) various levels of bandwidth. We've currently got only one test version and it's called Highway to the Danger Zone. Once everything is linked up your next task to use the route designer (GM only for now) to set the resource flows around you network of PINS.


By now you should have a network of PCC, extractor and storage PINS on your imaginary planet (because you've been doing this in your mind as you read the blog). You might be thinking it's time to get this stuff off the planet and onto the market BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! Why waste valuable storage space in your rocket or space elevator (more on that later) when you can do some processing dirt-side and just send up the good stuff? I thought the same thing. This is why we have process PINS. All kinds of process PINS for all kinds of processes which use all kinds of schematics (subject to change of course). You will be mixing and matching various resources and commodities based on those schematics to come up with intermediate commodities to eventually create final products. Some final products can be produced entirely on one planet but most will require transport to other planets to be produced. Nothing on SISI is currently balanced and you most likely won't be able to get this far without dev hacks anyway but this would be a boring story if I just stopped halfway through so let's continue.


Are you wondering about the Space Elevator I mentioned earlier? I am at this very moment. We call our first test version Stairway to Heaven. The Space Elevator is the best way to move things off of a planet. It is so good in fact that many planets won't even have them and we're not even sure if players will be able to build them in Tyrannis. Wars have been fought over access to these Space Elevators. I know because I've seen it. It isn't the only way to get rid of your stuff though. Each command center can launch cargo rockets on occasion and there is a space port PIN that acts as an upgrade from the command center. There is also trade hub PIN which lets you buy and sell commodities from your neighbors on the planet. With a trade hub and a trade agreement setup it's possible to create more complex networks that facilitate more advance process trees. THAT MEANS MORE FUN AND PROFIT! But of course you can't do that yet on SISI as it's technology from the future that hasn't been invented yet.


So I hope you will join me in impatiently waiting for May and the launch of Tyrannis. Check out SISI now for a first glimpse of PI but also be sure to check back in 3 weeks to see all of the progress that happens during a single sprint. I know you can't be here with me wandering around the office bugging everyone to work faster but I can assure you that's what I'm doing. Should I sing Power Ballads until Tyrannis is out the door? Sing with me; YOU LIVE FOR THE FIGHT WHEN IT'S ALL THAT YOU'VE GOT WHOOOOAH WE'RE HALF WAY THERE!


Big hair bonus round: As a treat for everyone who read all the way to the end of the blog we've decided to give you a special something. CCP Nimbus, one of our QA engineers on the Planetary Interaction team drew up some concept art for the basics of how the UI and functionality in PI works. What follows is the unedited results of his labor. We hope you enjoy it and that it helps you visualize the complex structure of the PI feature.

* Instructions for downloading the test client and logging into SiSi can be found on the Singularity page in EVElopedia.

RMT elements drain our resources with incessant account hacking. This is an Industry-wide problem and most MMOs are beset by non-stop issues with players' assets and hard work being stolen and sold off for real money by organized criminal networks, who will stop at nothing in order to profit.

Until last summer we experienced regular issues with mass hacking a couple of times a year, usually around Christmas and then again in the middle of summer. Nowadays, this is pretty much constant with hundreds of accounts being targeted every day. Many of those are old trial accounts or accounts that have been disabled for years and don't hold anything of value to the RMT types. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of accounts that do have assets and ISK that end up being cleaned out - even the characters themselves being sold off. The damages are sadly not repairable in some cases, regardless of valiant efforts by GameMasters to help the unfortunate victims. The cost in resources is high for Customer Support, with highly trained and experienced GMs working almost exclusively on hacking cases - good people whose time and talent would be much better spent on enhancing the gaming experience and increasing the quality of service we are able to give to our customers.

The methods the hackers use differ and constantly change but the result is always the same - your account is ruined. However, users can take steps to limit the chances of getting attacked and following is a list of things that can help make your accounts more secure.

Do not use the same usernames and passwords for different games

Every day, we see countless attempts to log in with pairs of usernames and passwords, amongst them many usernames that don't exist in our systems. Obviously, those non-existing usernames have been harvested from somewhere else. They have been gathered via keyloggers, phishing sites, trojans, hacked forums and whatnot and long lists of such username/password pairs are traded between RMT types for use against gamer accounts all over the place. A good way to avoid problems with this is to simply use different login details for each game.

The same should also go for third-party sites and forums as those are quite often targeted by the hackers to harvest login details. Login details for such third-party sites may or may not be encrypted so keeping separate usernames and passwords for your gaming accounts is the way to go.

Change your passwords regularly

If your login details have been harvested, a regular change of passwords may prevent attacks from being successful.

Use strong passwords

Passwords should be complex and difficult to guess. Using a mix of numbers and small/capital letters can reduce the dangers from brute-forcing and lucky guesswork on part of the hackers. Avoid using common dictionary words and keep in mind that longer passwords are less vulnerable than short ones. A minimum length of 16 characters with a mix of lower case, capitals and numbers is strongly recommended for heightened security.

Do not share your login details with anyone

If you give someone your login details, your security is only as good as his. If he is hacked, you are hacked - given that he won't simply use or sell your details himself.

Don't accept files from sources you don't know

A lot of the mal-ware on the Internet specifically targets gamer accounts. RMT in online gaming is a huge racket - your login details are a valuable commodity and the pitfalls are many. Keyloggers and trojans - all geared towards the destruction of your accounts lay in wait, poised to strike when you open that file or go to that website. Phising schemes abound and social engineering is rife, on an Internet that often seems without law or consequence. One cannot be too careful - it's not paranoia when they're really out to get you.

Regularly scan your systems for security threats with up-to-date anti-virus software

Protect yourself by running updated anti-virus software to find and fix security threats that may have found their way onto your systems.  There are many such programs available, some free and some not free, but definitely worth spending time to set up and the money to purchase. It's imperative to maintain a virus scanner and Operating System by actively checking for new updates and applying them, especially for the virus scanner. Using a firewall is also recommended as an optional measure.

Also see this forum discussion for more suggestions on better security.

By following the simple steps above you can make your accounts more secure and limit the dangers of being attacked by hackers who are after your stuff. Please be sure that we are not sitting idly by either - we are currently working hard on account security upgrades to get this problem under control. There are several items on the menu and the we hope to implement the first countermeasures in the next few weeks.  However, we urge all of you to step up your own security at home by following the suggestions listed above.

Together we will vanquish this evil monster!

-  CCP Grimmi

A small army of developers from CCP will be at GDC San Francisco (Game Developer's Conference), March 9-13. Specifically booth #2505 in the Career Pavilion in the South Hall. As you can imagine, we'll be doing some heavy recruiting, some interviews and lots of note-taking. We'll also be talking shop on Tyrannis and would love to chat with any EVE fans who make the trip.

Powerpoints are prepared and black dev shirts have been ironed. Come join us at any of the four speaking sessions we'll be a part of--from fighting the good fight against RMT to cloth simulation and from scaling EVE's universe to scaling CCP itself.

*The offending use of Frisco in the title has been removed and I humbly apologize. I am at your mercy, residents of the City by the Bay - CCP Manifest

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but one symbol can define an Empire and cause a rift between two peoples.

"Signs of Faith" is a new EVE Chronicle written by CCP Greyscale. Published every other Monday, Chronicles are intended to examine the various aspects of life in New Eden. The entire list is contained here, and a comment thread for this particular story may be found here.

In short, the answer to the question is nothing less than "The CSM4 summit in Iceland has been the best summit so far." The CSM1 summit was also very good, but for a different reason. Back then we were going in blind and much of the summit, although nowhere stated specifically, was about testing the theory and establishing work methods and traditions. The CSM2 summit was mostly about polishing and getting the small nuisances out of the way when it came to having the CSM and the CCP representatives talking together. After the CSM3 summit it was clear that further enhancements had to be done to the CSM as a whole, so we made several more steps there.

So, how was the fourth CSM summit different? Several key things were changed. First of all we had two days of CCP discussing current and future design ideas while we had only one for CSM3 and none for the first two. And not just discussing but brainstorming with the CSM. And not only that, because by having the CSM in Iceland so early in the development process of Tyrannis a subtle effect is noticeable in the overall design course EVE is on. Taking a conscious step backwards and have the CSM discuss macro designs and the general heading of EVE's development was taken.

Another change is that we had a dedicated secretary taking the minutes, instead of having the Secretary of the CSM taking them. That resulted in the minutes being published six days after the CSM was in Iceland! The minutes are available here. And it left the CSM secretary free to participate in the discussions as keeping up with 11 to 13 people is doable but leaves little room for the person to express itself.

As the minutes indicate there is solid progress going on with the CSM and you should all keep an eye on this space over the next weeks when we will give you further insight into it. Some quantitative data will be given out at a later date and the changes being made to the CSM will also be detailed.

But what did the CSM members feel about the summit?

Tim, aka Sokratesz commented that ''I was very skeptical initially, but the trip has convinced me that CCP has an active interest in the playerbase and is willing to listen. One of the best moments for me was when Noah [CCP Hammer] grabbed a pen to take notes during a heated debate between council members.'' He also noted that ''The goons weren't living up to their reputation. They were actually being useful''

Greg, aka Alekseyev Karrde states that "Making the CSM an official stakeholder in the development process was extremely significant. It will be in a much better position to address the long standing concerns of the player base while still remaining a valuable sounding board for CCP. From this, to our discussion with the GM department, to the sincere debates with CCP staff on features both large and small I believe we had an extremely productive summit."

Jason, aka TeaDaze: "I wasn't sure what to expect from the summit other than further debating the issues we'd already raised with CCP. I was pleasantly surprised that whilst we did spend over a full day on those issues that a large amount of the time was spent on discussion and feedback about current and future plans. I can see improvements in the CSM process but going forward it needs to gather even more support from the player base. If the stakeholder promise works out I think the CSM is in a good position to achieve something unique in the gaming world."

John, aka Zastrow, the only reelected member of the CSM has the word: "While there has been very little communication between CCP and the CSM between summits, at the summit it is very clear that CCP takes the CSM very seriously. For 3 days straight we sit down for all day meetings with the Executive Producer, Lead Game Designer, and a senior programmer and go over their proposals for the next expansion and our summit agenda."

Until the next blog!

Hello eSports fans!

It is my proud duty to bring to you the details of Alliance Tournament VIII - it's like Alliance Tournament VII, but with an extra I!

Along with this blog release comes the latest update to the Alliance Tournament section of the site. Cast your eyes a little bit to the left, and a little bit downwards; almost...almost...there we go!  Both the rules and the format sections have been updated, so I'd like to explain some of the thought processes behind these updates.

We have seen quite a bit of evolution in the rules between tournaments five, six and seven, to the point where the rules in seven were praised so much that it kind of left me wondering where to go next. I spoke to a lot of people in-house over various ideas for changes to the way we do things, and we were kind of struggling to make a decision. Our next stop was the CSM, who were firmly of the belief that the rules are fine the way they are and that further evolution of the tournament would occur naturally with balance changes and ship changes in EVE. In the end, this made the decision; we would not completely rewrite the rules for Alliance Tournament VIII. So what did we change?

Well, the first major change is that pilots may only compete on behalf of alliances that they have been members of for a minimum of 60 days before the beginning of the tournament. Much like real life sports events, this creates a ‘transfer window' and will curtail some of the more undesirable methods of player-switching that sometimes take place in tournament teams. The second major change is that the maximum number allowed of any given ship type has gone up to three, from two. We felt that this limitation was a good thing but maybe a little too strict, and that three would still do the job of stopping complete homogeneity in team setups.

As far as points go, Heavy Assault Cruisers have gone down one point in cost, T1 cruisers drop two points, and faction cruisers go up by a point. These are the usual simple balance changes that will always occur; HACs were too expensive in AT VII, as were cruisers, partly by design as these ships had been so popular before. They should now be in line with other ships in cost vs effectiveness.

Now, on to format. The team selection procedure has been one of the toughest things to get right, so this time we're going to try a slightly different approach. 16 slots will be reserved for the top 16 finishers from Alliance Tournament VII, and 16 slots will be sold via auction. The remaining slots, however many that may be, will be allocated by random draw as in previous tournaments. The decision to use an auction method came about because it was something that we had already talked about - allowing the ‘big alliances' that have sometimes missed out on a tournament spot a way to leverage their size and make sure they get in to the tournament. The CSM brought this idea up also without it being mentioned, and since we were both on the same page it became a final decision. At this point we have not yet decided on the precise auction method; details will be announced in the alliance tournament forum soon.

We also have a slight change to the way teams score points through Intentional Handicapping. This is a system that allows teams to purposefully put themselves at a disadvantage in order to give themselves a large potential for scoring. The minimum number of points allowed per team has been reduced to 50. We don't expect this to hugely change the format, but it may allow for some interesting comebacks and does mean that teams who are happy with their setup, for example maybe somewhere in the 90-100 points range, can choose not to use any ‘filler' ships and instead aim to gain a few extra points. And now, for the grand finale...

Flagships!

"A flagship is the lead ship in a fleet of vessels, a designation given on account of being either the largest, fastest, newest, most heavily armed or, for publicity purposes, the best known. In military terms, it is a ship used by the commanding officer of a group of naval ships."

Flagships are the elite of your tournament team. They are the strongest, toughest, most damaging (and most expensive) ship you can field. Flagships must have a name, and successful flagships can become the stuff of tournament legend. The disadvantageous side of this, though, is that flagships are famous. As a tradeoff for their power, your opponents will know in advance what they are capable of when their setup is advertised for all to see. This raises the question of when you should field your flagship -if at all. Do you use it in the early rounds, and risk losing it? Do you save it for a late game where you may need some extra power? And if you do that, will your opponent predict it and counter it? And will we see some rare battleships fielded as flagships, heralding the return of the most expensive ships in Eve to the tournament? I'm excited just thinking about it.

And that, PvP lovers, brings us to the close of this summary of the changes for Alliance Tournament VIII. We hope you like the rules, both the things that have stayed the same and the things that have changed, and we hope you are looking forward to June 5^th as much as we are! We have some more announcements we will be making in the leadup to the tournament, so stay glued to the news and keep a watchful eye on the tournament forum.

Until then - fly deadly!

On second thoughts, don't fly deadly. That's the worst signoff I've ever heard.

March 3, 2010 marked the final day of the collection of PLEX to aid victims of the devastating Haiti earthquake. EVE Online players were extremely generous: 2776 PLEX were donated through 1107 contracts. An additional 9.5 billion ISK was donated, enough to purchase 37 additional PLEX from the market. 100 percent of your donations will be given to the Red Cross. Thanks again to everyone who participated.

Attention capsuleers! Today, March 3, 2010 at 17:00 UTC we will be conducting another mass lag test on Singularity. More information about how you can help out can be found in this thread.

Since November 25th 2009, a few days before the deployment of Dominion, we have experienced frequent unscheduled reboots of Tranquility. Almost all of those were due to a bug in the networking subsystem that causes the SQL Server to fail over.

Why, oh, why and what are you doing about it?

As soon as the first failover happened, we, per our policy, opened up a support case with the vendor regarding the incident, since our logs, surprisingly, showed nothing. Their response was that the problem had been caused by a race condition in the system.

We have worked closely with the vendor's support and development teams in an attempt to isolate the bug, collected vast amounts of diagnostic data and implemented changes that were considered potential solutions by the vendor. We believe we've found a workaround that makes it unlikely that the bug is triggered, but does not 100% prevent it. This has yet to be confirmed however.

As one can imagine it is difficult to diagnose a running, high performance production environment like ours without causing lag or other performance or reliability problems. The vendor has been working diligently to attempt to reproduce this issue in their lab, although collecting diagnostic data from similar systems presents a major challenge - doing so without negatively impacting performance levels for customers.

We do have programmers and virtual world system administrators working on putting together a test script to run on the database server we use for Singularity and Multiplicity, and if we are able to reproduce the issue there, we can supply our vendor with code that reproduces the problem in their lab.

I, personally, have been spending quite a large part of my work hours the last 3 months communicating directly with the vendor, collecting diagnostics data, setting up collection tools and working on things related to solving the SQL Server issues.

In short, we are using all the resources at our disposal to resolve this issue. It is a high priority issue for all parties involved as it affects not only our system and customers, but can affect equally massive systems and user bases using similar network and database solutions.

What have we done already? What do we know?

We know that problem lies in the TCP stack and likely has something to do with handling of closed or closing sockets. Our vendor has asked us to implement a few potential fixes or workarounds. We've adjusted various networking features and upgraded our SQL Server engine with a version that has a workaround for issues of this nature. The database handler in the EVE application server uses session pooling and we've experimented with changing various settings there.  Turning off recycling of idle sessions seems promising as a workaround that makes triggering the bug less likely.

We still are working toward a fix, as I said before, and we seem to be able to make the failovers happen less frequently with the latest workaround. Expect to hear more in the near future on our progress with this issue.

- CCP Valar

EVE Radio has put out a last minute call to all capsuleers to get involved in the EVE PLEX for Haiti charity drive, a community initiative to help provide disaster relief funds for the Red Cross in Haiti. EVE Radio is seeking more donations before PLEX for Haiti ends tomorrow, March 3, 2010.

Привет! Sitel, our support partner based in Düsseldorf, Germany, has a Russian game master position available. Successful candidates should be proficient in both Russian and English, have a wide knowledge of EVE Online, and must be able to work in Germany or the EU in general. We especially encourage those with good understanding of computer technology to apply. Please send your CV to karriere.duesseldorf@sitel.com. Удачи!

We are happy to announce the winners of our January 2010 survey sweepstakes! Twenty-five winners have been chosen from all participants. Are you one of the lucky ones? Head to this thread to find out!

If you are not in this list, there will be plenty of opportunities to win in other surveys happening later this year. Stay tuned!

Do you have what it takes to be a player expert for Alliance Tournament 8? After February 28, 2010 we won't be accepting applications, so don't delay in emailing evetv@ccpgames.com! More information can be found in CCP Charlie's blog.

tl;dr Lots of exciting things are happening, including some changes to the way standings work for players. The most important bits are bolded, so scroll down and have a look-see.

Hi everyone, my name is Greyscale, and I'll be your systems designer for various upcoming client changes related to the next EVE release, and tying into the new EVE Gate social network site. Today I'm going to give you an overview of what we've got coming up, how it's going to affect you, and dive into a few changes we're considering for existing systems.

I'm not a web specialist, so I'm going to stick mainly to client-side changes, and let the interweb dudes explain their shenanigans in a later blog. In general though, we're following a mandate to ensure that functionality is comparable in the client and on the web. Pretty much everything I'm describing here will therefore be available in your browser too.

We've got two teams handling the feature work on this project - Team Stonehenge and Team Yggdrasill. Each team is responsible for a particular key feature, and contains a mix of client, server and web programmers, to ensure we can deliver on the web and ingame simultaneously. Both teams have their own QA resources, and a shared design team ensures that everything matches up at both ends.

Anyway, without further goodbye, here's what the teams are working on.

Team Stonehenge

Any questions?

Yes, we're adding a calendar. The above image represents about half a sprint's work, so it's essentially an early visual prototype and in no way even approaching "done". Expect it to be approximately eight times more awesome by release.

For now we're only planning on having a "month" view; we think the majority of players are unlikely to have more than two or three events per day, and the fact that we're a 23/7 game means trying to show "day" and "week" present some visual hurdles. Events can be created for yourself, or for whole/corps alliances (restricted by roles), and we're also planning on having a "CCP" category for occasional official use, and on allowing you to invite other players to personal events. The filters on the left will allow you to toggle all events in a given category on and off, and there will also be an "upcoming events" box in that area (and perhaps in other places such as character selection).

Our initial target has a fairly concise feature set, to give us more room to polish the product. EVE Gate will be an ongoing project, and improvements there should in most places be replicated in the client too.

Team Yggdrasill

EVE Gate is, among other things, a social network site, and you can't have a social network site without a friends list. Thing is, we already have a way of formalizing relationships with people ingame: the standings system. The good news is that the standings system already does about half of the stuff we need to do, but the bad news is... that the standings system only does about half of the stuff we need to do.

As a result, we've decided to make some changes to how standings work between player entities. Standings from NPC entities will be untouched; support for standings to NPC entities will likely be dropped as they're essentially non-functional.

Here is another work-in-progress half-a-sprint UI prototype of the new contacts section of P&P:

This window is the frontend for contacts management in the next expansion. It merges the functionality of the address book and the personal standings list, and adds a few cherries on top. Things that you will likely notice:

·         You can still filter by online/offline

·         The "watch list" is essentially the old address book's primary functionality - contacts who are added to the watch list will show up in here and give logon/logoff notifications and green/red squares

·         The "blocked" list is now managed here too

·         A lot of the words may seem out of place - this is because they're not final yet! We're still deciding on final terminology.

·         There are now only five levels of standings

 This last thing is probably what you noticed first, and it's worth repeating in a more obvious way, I think: there will only be five levels of standings in the new system.

Currently there are ~200 settings you can choose, which in the vast majority of cases is overkill. Indeed, in the majority of cases there are only five states that you care about: dark blue plus, light blue plus, nothing, orange minus, red minus. These five correspond to the five options you see here, in a fairly obvious way.

There are three situations we've located where this represents an in-practice reduction of functionality:

·         Diplomatic book-keeping. For entities managing large numbers of standings with a wide range of nuanced diplomatic states, the old system was useful in ensuring that everyone knows exactly what the relationship with a given entity is. With this new system, we feel that the advantages of a simpler system outweigh any disadvantages in this respect - and we're pretty confident that our players are more than smart enough to find their own alternate solutions here.

·         Starbase forcefield access. The reduction of granularity here degrades the functionality somewhat, but we're hoping that it won't cause widespread issues. Nobody here at CCP will deny that, as with several other aspects of starbases, this whole area of functionality could do with an overhaul, but that is unfortunately out of scope for this release.

·         Player-owned station charges. The current system uses a fairly arcane formula for calculating various pricing options, the most significant of which we think is the refine tax rate. Again there's some degradation of some functionality here - assuming you're only letting friendlies dock, you're essentially limited to two settings now, which may be slightly restrictive for some alliances.

We're anticipating a range of player opinions on these issues, which is why we're discussing this so early in the development cycle. We'll be paying attention to the feedback thread, and taking any well-reasoned arguments into account going forward. Also, see the final paragraph of this blog for bonus info on these systems.

Other things you should know:

On that subject, there are two other changes we're considering that we'd appreciate feedback on.

Firstly, the way standings are calculated for color tags in the overview and so on. Currently the code goes down the list of tags, checks if a pilot (or whatever) meets the criteria for each in turn, and as soon as it finds a match it uses that tag. When it comes to standings, it checks to see if any standings (personal, corp or alliance) that apply meet the criteria. This means that, in the default setup with the blues first, it's essentially "highest standing counts". (If you flip the tag ordering, you can force it to do "lowest standing counts" instead, I believe.)

The change we'd like to make here, at least as far as it relates to in-space tags, is to make alliance standings override corp standings, and corp standings override personal standings. (It would go alliance-alliance, alliance-corp, alliance-personal, corp-alliance and so on.) This means that you can have friendly personal relationships with people in enemy alliances (which is relevant to EVE Gate functionality), but have them still show up red in space.

Secondly, corporate membership lists (for player corps). Currently you can see this in two places: in your P&P, and in the corp interface. We'd like to remove it from P&P, because it doesn't really belong there, and we've been discussing adding it to the corp's "show info" instead. The question then is whether the corp member list should be globally viewable, or just viewable to corporate members. This becomes more complicated when you add EVE Gate to the picture, because if you have the same publically viewable information there as in show info, it's considerably easier to build a corp membership database by simply pulling all the pages and associating names with corporations. The info is obviously already available through the client in principle, but compiling it is a non-trivial exercise; a web version simplifies it considerably. Opinion is still divided here on whether this is a serious issue or not.

We welcome feedback on both these issues!

Some other cool things

In making these changes, we're probably going to have to make some changes to corporate and alliance standings management. We can't make any promises about the eventual functionality, but at the very least it's unlikely that we'll discover a way to make these windows any harder to use...

There's also a little story I'd like to tell about Alliances. See... Alliances don't really exist - not in the same way that corporations exist, anyway. That's why, for example, there's no such thing as "alliance roles" - the thing that you attach corp roles to doesn't exist for Alliances (at least, this is what I understand when the programmers try to explain it to me). It's also at least part of the reason why Alliance "standings" are currently a bit... odd.

For those of you who've never poked around in the politics tab of an Alliance, you "set standings" by selecting options for what are essentially +10, +5, -5 and -10 from a dropdown. It works, but in a bit of a non-standard way - which is why you can't use alliance standings for useful things like configuring outposts, or stopping your starbases from arbitrarily deciding to kill all your friends.

Well, in the process of implementing the new standings system, it has been determined that it's easier to rewrite Alliance standings than make the old system play nice with the new Contacts system. As a convenient side-effect of this, Alliance standings will now be used whenever stations or starbases make a standings check. This, we hope, should make managing these things much easier in most scenarios.

The PLEX Aid for Haiti charity drive has been a wonderful success with the EVE community donating 2398 PLEX in 997 contracts (33 for EURO or 1.4%), and 3 billion ISK has been donated to purchase additional PLEX. The charity drive will end on March 3, 2010, so if you've not yet donated, do so today! Learn how you can donate by reading CCP Hellmar's PLEX Aid for Haiti blog.

Well then, first blog, so where to start? ...Oh yes, we're changing the Scorpion:

Trinity was an awesome expansion, which brought with it what was then called Premium content - the shiny new graphics with updated ship models and textures. Since then support for the classic client has ended and the "Premium" graphics has become the standard, with reduced settings for older graphics cards that can't handle all the shiny goodness.

Most of the art in EVE weathered the change over to the improved graphics quite well, but there are those pieces that we were never quite happy with. The new textures were also less forgiving on blemishes and flaws that previously looked like an interesting design element if left up to the imagination, now became a glaring eyesore begging to be fixed. Well, to artists anyway.

This was the case with the renovated Scorpion. What worked before, didn't really work anymore, so the art director felt that he'd want to see the ship redesigned, in the new style for Caldari introduced by the Tech 3 ships during Apocrypha. He also felt that the current design lacked the feeling of weight that a battleship needed, that it felt rather flimsy. So the goal was to make a beefier, more aggressive-looking
Scorpion. And a chance to redesign and possibly improve on one of the most iconic ships in the EVE universe was not something I was going to pass up.

Since improvements are the order of the day, and this brings me to the title of this blog, one of my other tasks during the first Sprint of our Summer 2010 release was research into the way we pack our textures into the combined dds file types used in the client. For anyone not interested in graphics, this will likely be dry reading, but you might find it informative if you have no idea how game graphics work.

The tl:dr version though: Made stuff look better.
Pics or it didn't happen: See below.

During Apocrypha we introduced new shaders on the Tech 3 ships that allowed us to manipulate the color of the reflections of a given material. These shaders were also of a triple-material variety, which we hadn't done before. The triple-shader type required an additional mask map to denote where the 3^rd material would show up on a ship, and the addition of this new map meant that the current packing convention was not going to be very efficient. Below you will find details listing the gains of changing from the current system, called the NGS file system, to the PGS file system. It does get rather technical, so there are pictures to help :).

The major benefit to the triple-shaders is that we can use a single shader to denote material types on a model, rather than cutting up the geometry into different areas with multiple simpler shader types. Having geometry defining area breaks is not as precise as using a texture to do it, it doesn't look as good was with a texture as the definition line is VERY clear and often doesn't match the texture being placed on top of it , and of course the Art Department likes to control as much as we can. :)

The second big benefit of the triple-shaders is that we can more easily create factional variants of assets.
Now the problem with the NGS system is that it doesn't play as well as we would like with the triple-shaders with regards to number of packed texture files. With the addition of the sub-mask, we have run out of channels to pack it into (as current double and single shaders only use 2 packed textures - a Diffuse, and a NGS texture), thus a new _P (paint) texture map was created to store the extra data.

To make factional variants of assets we would like to change the "paint-job" in some instances, and not just change the colors in the shader settings(Which often leads to a "washed"-look that the art director isn't very fond of. The way the NGS textures are packed would mean we would have to generate a new NGS and P texture of every factional variant. If we repack textures in the PGS way, we would only need to generate a new P texture for every factional variant, thus reducing client size, as we'll be reducing the number of textures needed. You'll notice that the different files and their sizes change, but in the end we end up with two 1024x1024 textures and one 512x512 texture, so the PGS system should be very similar in per-file size. As an example, the texture sizes on the example ship below are:

NGS - 3 files (3 MB)
PGS - 3 files (2.83 MB)

The third benefit, and the cherry-on-top, is that the PGS system also gives us an improvement in quality of the textures over that of the NGS system. Below you will find screenshots of the new scorpion using both NGS and the PGS textures and you can see the results yourself.

And yes, this does mean that we will have to update every ship in the game, but it is a process that will be done over multiple expansions, starting with the Summer 2010 expansion.

And since this is an Art blog, I'll leave you with a shot of the Scorpion dressed in the various Caldari factional colors. Not all of these variations will be included in the Summer 2010 expansion, as there is still much work to be done regarding the different factions of the four major races in EVE. But previews are always nice.  :)

For those interested, the factions colors are:
Front row (from left to right): Civilian, Navy Issue, Rattlesnake (Guristas), Ishukone Fleet
Second Row: Widow (Kaalakiota), LaiDai Protection Service, Mordus Legion , NOH Internal Security
Back Row: State Issue, Wiyrkomi Peace Corps


- Salvo

The circle has been completed - The Fourth Quarter, Economic Newsletter for 2009 is now available. 

This issue follows the same format as previous ones, with sections on demographics, price levels, an in-depth section and finally market snapshots.

In 2010 the QEN team will be focused on improving the publication, so please feel free to comment on this issue and the year overall. We are open to all suggestions on how it can be changed to better serve your craving for numbers, graphs and pretty tables.

Enjoy,

The QEN team.

Tibus Heth sits in his doctor's office, waiting and reading reports about recent Gallente political machinations and the results of his "blind auction" of contested Gallente areas. What will his constant sifting through the sediment of a seemingly clever conspiracy result in?

"The Slow Disease" is a new EVE Chronicle written by CCP Big Dumb Object. Published every other Monday, Chronicles are intended to examine the various aspects of life in New Eden. The entire list is contained here, and a comment thread for this particular story may be found here.

Mara - A multi-billion ISK shipment of electronic components was destroyed by a large Guristas force in Mara, after jumping from the Okunda constellation.

Striking shortly after 1100 EST today, a significant Guristas force held up and destroyed two Wiyrkomi freighters, along with their escorts from the Wiyrkomi Peace Corps. The engagement lasted almost thirty minutes, and a number of independent pilots attempted to assist the freighters, who broadcast distress signals on all available frequencies. The Gurista pirates made off with an estimated twelve billion ISK worth of cargo that survived the explosion, according to CONCORD records of the engagement.

Although there was a large Corporate Police Force presence in Passari, they failed to respond to the Guristas attack and aid the stricken vessels, citing "communications breakdown" as the reason for their inaction.

The Wiyrkomi freighters were beginning a long trip to Khanid Prime, carrying navigational equipment as part of their mid-life upgrade contract with Khanid Transport.

Pimebeka - Manufacturing companies large and small have begun making aggressive plans to increase their output, with companies like Khanid Works and Carthum Conglomerate leading the charge. The driver behind this anticipated growth is the steadily increasing volume of high-end minerals entering Amarr space from the nearby regions of Delve and Querious.

Wracked by constant warfare between capsuleer alliances for the past two years, the regions have once again lapsed into relative tranquility. Doul Guribi, a manager for Carthum Conglomerate, explained, "When the Band of Brothers and their vassals held unchallenged sway over the regions, valuable high-end minerals flowed into our factories like water. With the coming of the 'Great War' in the south, that flow slowed to a trickle." Guribi posited that this reduction stemmed from capsuleer alliances' hoarding of the minerals for their own war production, as well as the disruption of mining operations due to constant inter-alliance raiding.

Khanid Works spokeswoman Urgiza Falant echoed this analysis. "As one side or the other needed a quick infusion of capital we'd see the sale of large mineral stocks, but that was an irregular occurrence." Ms. Falant pointed out that the situation is fertile ground for large-scale market manipulation, and that fluctuations in prices and volumes sold could swing wildly until things settle into a new equilibrium.

Now under the unified rule of GoonSwarm, Querious and Delve are once again poised to play a major role in supplying minerals to Amarr manufacturers. With key transport infrastructure only a few jumps from several high-security market and manufacturing hubs, GoonSwarm appears to be positioning itself to take advantage of this synergy.

Not all Amarr industrialists are pleased by this development, however. In particular, GoonSwarm's tendency to target miners with suicide attacks has drawn the ire of Ducia Foundry, a corporation extensively invested in mining operations throughout New Eden. "Without the distraction of a major war, we fear that these attacks will only grow more common," said Ducia spokesman Agadath Hejoul.