Eve Online NewsEve Online Isk and News

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

Source: www.eveonline.com

MMOs: Just a Matter of Time? - Gamasutra
Today's blog is inspired by the Game Design Challenge about time-limited MMO design . The challenge focuses on the issue of MMO addictiveness and people spending too much time playing online games, challenging
Source: www.gamasutra.com

Considering that SM3 has been out for well over a year, and you can easily get a compatible SM3 card for around $100 right now, no body really has any right to complain.
And that's in the winter anyway. There is no reason why somebody would not be able to get such a simple upgrade by then. Well, you'll have to get a pcie 2.0 mobo, too, but it's not like those are something new either.

Some people like to use older machines dedicated for MMO's. I use a Laptop. All I run is MMO's. It only has Shader Model 2 on the graphics.

Now. The other reason is that a MMO Dev wants to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Get more people playing

Source: eve.warcry.com

BREAKING NEWS: ATLAS and WHITE NOISE. Clash in C-J6MT

C-J6MT, Insmother - At 10:36 112.07.26, reports of violent clashes between WHITE NOISE. and ATLAS alliance have been received from the C-J6MT solar system.

Informations flowing from the region indicate at least 1100 pilots from both alliances have joined the fray.

Several pilots reported ATLAS forces entering C-J6MT through the use of a cynosural field. Several titans and a fleet comprised of about twenty other supercapital vessels have been reported entering the area.

Fleets have been sighted engaging at the 88A-RA gate in C-J6MT. Heavy spatial distortions are affecting both sides and it is unclear which alliance is prevailing on the battleground at this time.

According to WHITE NOISE. representatives, military operations started 24 hours ago and assets belonging to ATLAS and allies have been attacked in a bid to draw them into war.

Interstellar Correspondents will monitor the ongoing battle and report as more news becomes available.

Are you affected by the events in this article? Do you have information regarding another event in New Eden? If so, please contact us with any information that you may have.

Want to become a news correspondent with IC? We are recruiting.

Source: www.eveonline.com

BREAKING NEWS: Heavy Spatial Distortion Interrupts Fight in C-J6MT

C-J6MT, Insmother - At 23:40 of 112.07.26, the violent clashes between WHITE NOISE., ATLAS and allies came to an abrupt halt after severe spatial distortions appeared on the battlefield.

According to pilots flying in the area, the severe disturbance rendered it impossible to coordinate fleets during the fight. As a result, the fight between ATLAS, Against All Authorities and their allies battling against White Noise, Red Alliance, XiX and Pandemic Legion, was interrupted.

About 20 supercapital vessels and 5 titans were present in close proximity of the 78-0R6 gate in C-J6MT.

Many veteran capsuleers blame the presence of such huge vessels in confined quarters as the cause of the severe disturbance.

"Both sides had pretty even numbers, and it should have been a great fight, but no one could really shoot anything by the end," said Jean Dessaut of ATLAS.

The fight for C-J6MT will likely continue in the near future. It is the second time in a short period that ATLAS was forced to defend the system, which is regarded as a sort of "motherland" by several other alliances.

Are you affected by the events in this article? Do you have information regarding another event in New Eden? If so, please contact us with any information that you may have.

Want to become a news correspondent with IC? We are recruiting.

Source: www.eveonline.com

Core Tech - the beginning

Of course, just creating and deploying new or existing technology, even if it is ‘battletested', is only part of the story. The CTG also spends a significant portion of its time re-working, re-writing and re-engineering parts of our codebase in a continuous effort to keep it up to date as technology advances. This also allows us to prepare the codebase to accept new technologies into the Carbon framework, allowing us to keep pushing the boundaries of what EVE Online can be.

Who is in the Core Technology Group?

Well, the CTG started, as mentioned earlier, with a few graphics programmers working under the direction of our Chief Technology Officer to produce the next generation of the EVE graphics engine. From that small beginning, we have been hiring new people into CCP in order to fill a number of teams. The CTG is a separate group within CCP, it is not part of EVE. We do not count as part of the EVE headcount and we have a separate budget and hiring plan. However, in reality we work very closely with EVE although Core does not work on game features. We provide the reprocessed minerals that the game teams then use to, in the case of EVE, build your serious internet spaceships.

We currently have 5 teams within the CTG, although we do use carefully chosen 3^rd parties when needed. Futuremark is a good example where we are working with them on a new part of the graphics rendering engine. It must be noted that whilst the CTG teams all work on Carbon, some parts of Carbon are not maintained by the CTG. These are usually specialist areas which can be managed by the team which has that expertise. Animation is a prime example. The animation team is based in Atlanta and the work they are doing will be part of Carbon.

The 5 Core Technology Group teams consist of the following…

2 x Core Graphics Teams (12 people):

These teams are those working in the bowels of Trinity2, making it perform better, provide sexier visuals and use more up-to-date technology. The Carbon Character Technology video from earlier in this blog demonstrates a small portion of their work-in-progress. As you can see, this team has been working on the graphics technology for avatars and the environments they will inhabit. For EVE that's Incarna. These guys also develop and maintain our in-house tools system, ‘Jessica', which is used by pretty much every developer in CCP and contains the Trinity2 rendering engine. As requests for improvements, new functionality or bug fixes come in from the EVE developers, the Core Graphics guys get on the case and deliver. Jessica is also used by the EVE video team in making all of our trailers, allowing them serious time-saving shortcuts in staging assets for dramatic narrative effect.

Core EVE Graphics Team (3 people):

This team consists of three Core Graphics developers who are 100% assigned to EVE, working as part of a nine person EVE development scrum. Due to the demands of working in a cross-project, multinational company, parts of the CTG must occasionally shift its focus onto a particular project on a temporary basis. When this concentration is not on EVE (currently it is), the Core EVE Graphics team provides the link and continuity of Core involvement in the graphics side of EVE. By staying 100% laser focused, they make sure EVE continues to get the Core graphics programmer support it needs. You may have seen the recent Dev Blog by CCP Blaze about Tyrannis Performance Improvements who is on this team. These guys are instrumental in working closely with the EVE Art team to bring you new ships, planets and other graphical wonders.

Core Infrastructure Team (4 people):

This team is really at the heart of everything we are able to put out to our customers at CCP. These guys have created a common set of Productivity software, tools and technology which allows us to build more efficiently EVE and its patches from the source code, significantly reducing the time it takes to make EVE. This team has also built the repair tool which CCP Mandrake blogged about recently. In addition, this team has been working for a long time on delivering a way for our developers to be able to stress test EVE when they are developing new features or investigating and fixing bugs. We are now rolling this out and you can read more in the Dev Blog from CCP Atropos about the Thin Clients. I believe this is a significant step forward in how we are able to build and maintain EVE, allowing us to deliver a virtual world that we are much more confident is able to operate as we intend when we have record numbers of players hammering our servers and software.

Core Cluster Team (7 people)

What is one of the cornerstones of EVE? Lots of people interacting in a single universe without sharding. Obviously, EVE has scaled to dizzying heights over the last 7+ years and we now have more players than ever immersed in New Eden. However, we know that there are problems and we know we have to be constantly fighting to help the EVE cluster scale well beyond where it is now. This important task rests on many people all across CCP, from operations and virtual world staff to the EVE software developers to the EVE game designers and beyond. A key element in the fight to improve how we scale and reduce ‘Lag' in the game is the work of the Core Cluster team. This team has the high level goal of developing our cluster technology to allow EVE to scale well into the future, even as we put more demands on it with more pilots inhabiting a more dynamic and developed EVE universe. This is no overnight fix and there have been some great discussions (as well as some painful ones) on EVE-O and other forums. Many of these threads have a good grasp, if not of the specifics, then of the general idea that we are trying to solve some of the hardest problems in a number of very complex disciplines. CCP Warlock works as the Distributed Systems Architect for CCP and the Core Cluster team and recently released an excellent blog on some of the challenges we are facing.

As recent blogs have started to describe, we are doing things right now to attack lag. We have people looking at specific bugs and issues which have been plaguing fleet fights. We are well aware that there are lag issues around large fleet fights (and some not so large ones) which are reducing your enjoyment of this part of EVE. We know because you have been telling us about your experiences regarding things like module lag, jump in lag and blackscreens to name just a few. We also know because we, as players ourselves (long time lurker, first time poster checking in after 5 years playing) experience these issues. I will leave the specifics of our progress against these problems to the actual developers working on "lag" who can get low down and dirty with some real techy blogs.

Genuine progress on these issues is being made thanks to the tools being produced by Core Infrastructure that are being used by the Core Cluster and EVE development teams. The nature of the lag problem means that it takes time to diagnose and address the problems, but we have invested significantly in getting the right tools and people to help us identify and improve the situation as fast as possible. Once fixes have been deployed to TQ and we have real evidence that they are making a positive difference to your playing experience, you will see more Dev Blogs detailing the processes and fixes.

So in terms of teams and what we work on, that is the Core Technology Group as it stands right now. You can find some more information here. We will continue to grow proportionately to CCP's development teams and the growing scope of the Carbon framework. We are actively recruiting into the CTG and if you are interested, you can apply at the usual place, the CCP jobs page.

Now that you hopefully have a bit more clarity on how CCPs Core teams are structured, it is important that you, the EVE players, know that the focus of the Core Technology Group is on supporting EVE and the experience of playing it. Through our Carbon strategy we make sure that all future product development at CCP feeds back into Eve, as they all integrate back to Carbon. We also make sure that CCP has a robust battletested core framework to win our war against the impossible.

Source: www.eveonline.com

Need for MOAR Speed

Pilots of New Eden,

We have a series of blogs coming out to give a better insight into the technical side of CCP and progress in our long battle on lag. We know this issue is important to you, and there's plenty of room for further explanation, so we hope you tune in here in the coming weeks and months to follow our efforts.

We call this the long battle on lag because there's not a single issue that creates lag or removes it. It's a constant, slow battle that has many possible warriors standing against us on the opposing side. You may also remember some of our more focused initatives, like Need For Speed which we started 2006. It has been a priority within CCP since then as we've taken a holistic approach to EVE's growing population and the emergent behavior of its pilots. In EVE's long history, we've made continual progress towards the promised land of minimal lag, sometimes in incremental steps and sometimes punctuated by large leaps such as StacklessIO and EVE64.

Shortly after Dominion, as we've all noticed, things began reverting. This has been a problem, as we know how powerful and unique an experience a 1000+ player fleet fight can truly be. While this is all relative, as we're dealing with an exceptional gaming situation where the universe is large and un-sharded and allows for freedom of movement in the gamespace that is rarely seen elsewhere, CCP's goal is to return you to those epic space battles and then well beyond.

In the past we've tried to give the right mix of information for the general EVE audience, which has led us a bit away from uber-technical blogs. However, the more technical blogs we have put out have been well-received and since we're talking lag, the blogs following this will follow suit.

In the coming series…

Topic: Singularity Mass Testing Report, CCP Tanis

This is a report from some of the findings of the lass mass testing on Singularity and includes some of the work and investigations being done as a result. These kinds of scenarios can seldom be created on Tranquility with the amount of logging, probing and debugging in place, so this should show why each test is of great importance to us and why the brave, patient players joining us on Sisi are integral to help us tackle lag.

Topic: The Long Lag and MMO Scaling, CCP Warlock

This blog is about distributed applications (of which EVE is one of the more complex) designing them and how CCP scales them to give you not only the best possible performance across the cluster as a whole, but also for specific activities like fleet fights. This comes from Warlock's presentation at Para 2010, which was presented to the CSM 5 during a break in deliberations and requested in this EVE-O post. This should give another angle of understanding of the behind-the-scenes efforts we've been taking.

Topic: "Thin Clients" and Automated Testing from CCP Atropos

This is an explanation of an effort to rework the guts of the EVE client to slim it down as much as possible so we can undertake controlled, large scale tests in a more automated way. This new testing tool will benefit both quality and scalability moving forwards and can help us simulate fleet-fights "on demand". We aren't to the point where we can imitate player behavior though, so this goes alongside mass-testing as one of our investigative tools.

Topic: Carbon, CCP's Core Technology , CCP Unifex

CCP has a Core Technology Group which creates and maintains all of the core functionality of what runs EVE and will run our future games. These are groups of superspecialists which helped to produce things like StacklessIO and the Trinity2 graphics engine. This blog will help clarify the overall approach we take to making games and more parts of CCP's organizational structure which contribute directly to the development of EVE Online than just the dedicated EVE Dev Team.

In conclusion, we've been a bit too heads-down on this anti-lag effort and realize the importance of our progress within the EVE player base. You can expect us to update you more frequently on our anti-lag efforts as well as the work of teams developing our core technology. We thank you for your patience, which has been quite long lasting, and hope you realize we will be throwing every last thing we've got at the terrible, multi-ship fleet known as lag.

Source: www.eveonline.com

As long as changes are made and the game is still fun it will last forever.

I seriously doubt it. Eventually a game will come along that offers something new, not necessarily better, and people will migrate. I doubt there'd be any game that would last for 50 years.

Source: eve.warcry.com

Tabula Rasa: 500 Bet a Keys To Give Away

Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa is the latest MMO from NCSoft Austin and aims to change the way people think about the genre. Garriott has created a game that combines fast action tactical combat with RPG mechanics and character development in a world full of stories that have moral consequences. This is your chance to win one of 500 open beta keys in advance of the game's fall launch.

For more information on Tabula Rasa, please visit Tabula Rasa WarCry.

Click below to enter.

Comment | View Article

Source: www.warcry.com

The Eve Online 14 Day Trial Experiment: Days 1 to 3 - Associated Content
On my second day in Eve Online, I finished up the Business tutorial quest line and then did all of the Military tutorial quest line. To upgrade into a much better ship for mining, I needed to train skills that
Source: www.associatedcontent.com

CDC Corporation Reports Improved Adjusted EBITDA of $9.6 Million in the Second Quarter of 2010 - Yahoo Finance
ATLANTA & HONG KONG–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CDC Corporation (NASDAQ: CHINA - News ), a leading China-based value-added operator of, and growth investor in, hybrid (SaaS/On-Premise) enterprise software, IT Services, and New
Source: biz.yahoo.com

Infinite Space: An Argument for Single-Sharded Architecture in MMOs - Gamasutra
[In this much-referenced technical piece originally published in Game Developer magazine, the team behind idiosyncratic MMO success EVE Online discusses precisely why sharing a single world between all of its players
Source: www.gamasutra.com

The Eve Online 14 Day Trial Experiment: Days 4 and 5 - Disaster Strikes! - Associated Content
I spent the next couple of hours trying in vain to retrieve anything I could from my wrecked ship, only to be killed in about 10 seconds every time by the same enemies. This gave me flashbacks to doing corpse
Source: www.associatedcontent.com

As long as changes are made and the game is still fun it will last forever.

I seriously doubt it. Eventually a game will come along that offers something new, not necessarily better, and people will migrate. I doubt there'd be any game that would last for 50 years.

Source: eve.warcry.com

Tyrannis 1.0.3 Patch is In
EVE Online Tyrannis 1.0.3 has been deployed successfully and here are the patch notes.FIXESThe autopilot was mistakenly providing the shortest route…
Source: evevault.ign.com

Apocrypha 1.5 is 3 Days Away
CCP has announced that the Apocrypha 1.5 update will be going live on August 20, 2009.The update brings new content to New Eden including four new…
Source: evevault.ign.com

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Source: www.eveonline.com

CSM 5 Summit meeting minutes now available

The meeting minutes for the first CSM 5 summit at the CCP headquarters in Reykjavik are now available. Click here to take a look!

Source: www.eveonline.com

Web Site Downtime Thursday, August 12

On Thursday, August 12, 2010 our Web sites will be offline while we perform firmware upgrades. The downtime will begin at 08:00 UTC, and sites will be returned to service at 10:00 UTC. The affected sites include eveonline.com, secure.eveonline.com (account management services), support.eveonline.com, API.eveonline.com, play.eveonline.com, EVE Gate and the CCP Games Web site. Tranquility will not be affected by this outage and will have its normally scheduled downtime at 11:00 UTC.

Source: www.eveonline.com