Category: dev blog

Everyone likes money, right? CCP thinks you do, so they’re giving you some ability to make a bit more by developing third-party applications and services for EVE.

At this year’s Fanfest CCP hosted the first Dev Track in what we hope will be a regular event. To kick off the event I gave an exciting announcement about monetization, which has up to this point been a sore point for EVE Online 3rd party software development, since it has been against the ToS to charge for applications or services which use the EVE Online Intellectual Property.

Starting this summer you will be able to charge people for usage of your applications, websites and services for EVE Online.

CCP will license 3rd party developers to create commercial applications and services created using the EVE API, In-Game Browser, Static Data Export, Image Export and Eve Image server.

You as a developer will basically be signing up, and paying for, a license that will allow you to be all commercial-like while powering your product with EVE goo. Non-commercial folks will need to grab a non-commercial license, that will cost them nothing. Well almost, because since this is a license both options will, at minimum, cost you YOUR SOUL.

There is currently a rant/comments thread happening on the forums about this, and the original dev blog is being updated with some responses to the concerns of folks.

To be honest, I’m a bit concerned myself. While WDA is not a commercial venture at all, licenses like this have the possibility of being more like gags. Now note, there isn’t the full text of the licenses yet available for the masses to look at, but as a site which primarily deals with opinions on the game I will have to say that the concept of a forced-upon-me agreement is hilarious.

This apparently came from CCP’s business development group. Great for them, maybe they forgot about that part of EVE called community development, which is solely responsible for EVE being a functioning game since 2003. Is this step indicative that one of those things is more important than the other?

It will be interesting to see when more information becomes available.

Sources:

• Dev Blog: Monetizing your Apps and Services

EVE’s marketing has, in the past, outpaced the game by huge strides when it comes to overall presentation. That’s not a bad thing really; it is precisely what marketing is supposed to do in order to sell the game to a new audience. Occasionally there are aspects which current players look at and salivate over to see in the game.

Remember that really cool part in the Tyrannis trailer where the ships had fitting windows and other user interfaces hovering around the ships in space? If not, click here. Lots of people were wondering if this was possible with EVE, and the latest dev blog from CCP Snorlax seems to indicate that the groundwork for this kind of stuff is coming in the next Incursion patch.

CarbonUI is an evolution of the existing UI framework, with a completely new rendering layer.  We’ve strived to change as little as we can in the high-level interface, so the UI programmer, working in Python doesn’t see much change – and more importantly, those ~200K lines of UI related code continue to work.

The full feature list of available UI options is in the blog itself for you to read, but includes such fun things like sticking 2D UI on a 3D object. If you’ve played any recent games like Crysis 2 or Dead Space you’ll know how these kinds of UI options can really add an immersion factor to a game.

When EVE was launched some 8 years ago, the UI looked pretty much on par with other games. Times have changed, but our UI hasn’t really. Even though projects such as CarbonUI are difficult to pull through, they are absolutely essential if we ever want to move beyond what the current technology allows for. Even though players won’t see much visual difference once we launch CarbonUI on to TQ, we can promise you that our UI designers are already hearing a lot more of “sure, no problem” when they deliver their regular batch of crazy ideas to their fellow programmers, ultimately resulting in UI that’s fittingly awesome for our lovely little space game.

Sounds awesome.

Ok, so your Abaddon won’t be firing a giant blue ball of fleet melting death plasma anytime soon, but at least you’ll soon be able to browse your in-game underwear drawer in true Minority Report style.

Sources:

• Dev Blog: CarbonUI and Eve Online: Incursion 1.6

CCP Zulu throws another “Incarna is coming” promise onto the pile, with a new dev blog about the upcoming captains quarters feature.

On June 21st we will open up the interiors of space stations for players to start exploring EVE Online in a completely new way. Pioneering our first steps into Incarna will be your new Captain’s Quarters –a station-bound seat of power that provides a refuge from the dangers of space and a powerful command platform placing precious information at your fingertips.

Wait… was that a date? CCP actually committing to a date for an Incarna-related feature? They can’t be serious, I mean– no wait they are, they even included a damn video of the feature in action:

Ok, in all seriousness, the feature’s already available for folks to test on the Duality server. Some instructions for how to try this thing out yourself are available in the dev blog itself.

When you dock your ship, your Captain’s Quarters will replace the current hangar view with a multifunctional room from which you can perform all the actions you previously could in the hangar view as well as manage your planetary infrastructures, explore new opportunities with a redesigned agent finder, use the corporation recruitment interface to find new allegiances, and watch streaming data, fed live from the vibrant universe of EVE.

Of course it’s worth noting that none of this is going to make your guns track faster, or your torpedoes blow up titans in a single volley. This is pure immersion in EVE universe, something which I always welcome more of.

So now we have something else to celebrate June 21st for other than being the day the WNBA debuted.

Sources:

• Dev Blog: Incarna, Welcome Your Future

CCP Molock has posted a new dev blog about upcoming changes to EVE with regards to agents. There’s some fairly significant stuff here, but lets hit the bullet points.

So now, we’ve taken these divisions and amalgamated them into four simple divisions, each of which now gives out only one type of mission, meaning you won’t have to decline that occasional mining or courier mission when all you want to do is blow up some Angels.

Personally I didn’t mind the occasional courier mission here and there, but this at least makes it so if we want to do them we can explicitly do so. Presumably, the reverse of the above is true for those who like to only grind courier tasks, they won’t suddenly get a combat mission.

So now we have three new skills in place of the former seven, these ones aptly named “Distribution Connections,” “Mining Connections,” and “Security Connections”; each grants a 10% bonus to LP gain per level for its namesake division. These new skills are all rank 2, as opposed to the old rank 1 skills (meaning these new ones take twice as long to train), since there are roughly half as many to train now.

Thankfully they’ll be refunding SPs as needed. To be honest, I always felt these skills and their implementation in the game were needlessly complicated for what they did for you.

Now, all agents in the game will have an effective quality of both -20 and +20: That is, in terms of calculating access to an agent based on your standings with his or her corporation, the system will assume that all agents are quality -20, making them (in some cases, considerably) easier to access; and at the same time, every agent will pay out rewards as if he or she had a quality of +20, meaning all agents of the same level within the same system security level (e.g., 0.6) will pay out the same amount for similar missions – and in most cases, they will pay out somewhat more than they used to.

I don’t know about this one. Sure, grinding for a high quality agent wasn’t always fun, but getting that quality and maintaining it was always somewhat of an accomplishment to do. Then again, if my agents suddenly pay out more than they used to, then this change is just fantastic. :D

There’s more about this in the link below, but suffice to say this is a pretty huge change that could affect a lot of other aspects of the game. Chances are good that agents and their missions are responsible for a lot of the ISK sloshing around in your wallet, thus this change could have amusing repercussions on the greater EVE economy.

Since this change is sitting on Singularity right now, it’s probably best to get in there and try things out a bit, and provide the devs with as much constructive feedback as we can.

Also, holy crap, it’s a been a while since anything WDA has hit the web, I know.  I’m sorry for that.  In brief, expect more from WDA in the coming days, including some special secret stuff. :)

Sources:

• Dev Blog: Agents Made Easy

I sure hope you didn’t have any serious attachments to your Learning skillbooks, because very very very shortly they will be disappearing from EVE…. foreverrrrrr…

CCP Greyscale (see what I did there, with the picture? whee..) brings us the news in his latest epic dev blog. Here are some highlights:

• As of downtime today, all NPC sell orders for the eleven skills in the Learning group (hereafter referred to as “learning skills”) have been CANCELLED. They’re really not much use in the long run, we don’t want to complicate later steps with unusual inflows of skillbooks, and it might go some way towards limiting the amount of scams that we know you’re going to be running. Please, think of the children newbies.

FURTHERMORE, as of a patch which should arrive on (or about) the 14th of December:

• ALL LEARNING SKILLS WILL DISAPPEAR. We’re not kidding. In your head, in your hangar or in your anything else, they’re gone. Vamoosh. Deleted. Sent to the big recycle bin in the sky. Etc etc.
• All skillpoints invested in learning skills will be reimbursed, including all the fiddly corner cases. If you have 2,012,692 SP in learning, you will find yourself down those skills, but with 2,012,692 skillpoints to redistribute.
• All skillbooks not currently injected into people’s heads will be reimbursed at the old NPC sell price. The money will go to whichever character or corporation owns the container that the skillbooks are in. For example, things in cans you’ve anchored for yourself will be reimbursed to you, things in corporate hangar arrays or the “deliveries” bin will be reimbursed to the owning corporation.
• This will also involve cancelling any and all market orders containing these skills. Contracts containing learning skills will have those skillbooks substituted for copies of the Pax Amarria.
• All new and existing characters will have an extra 12 base points (ie, non-remappable) in each attribute.
• The 100% training speed bonus up to 1.6m SP will no longer be available. People partway through this bonus will lose the remaining bonus amount. They will of course gain a huge attribute bonus to make up for it.

Obviously it’s not all doom and gloom, the 12 extra base points will help a lot and you’ll have all that extra skillpoint stuff to remap as you see fit. Assuming the big brains at CCP have done their math correctly, all of this will even out skill training for people, and those of us who’ve been around forever won’t really need to care.

The change seems a bit rushed, and even the blog admits that in more than one place, but we’ll just have to wait and see how this all pans out.

Sources:

• Dev Blog: Learning Skills are Going Away

CCP Omen brings us a dev blog on PI, somehow managing both overstatement and understatement in a single sentence.

Planetary Interaction is good, but it isn’t excellent.

Oh yeah, we know. PI is one of those features which CCP have used to drive the point home about iterative development. The real question is: what’s the next iteration of PI going to do to improve things? Well, Omen tells us.

Here’s some stuff you can expect in Incursion.

• Upgradable Command Centers will allow players to increase and decrease the CPU/Power capabilities of their colony without having to tear it all down (existing undeployed command centers will be migrated to the new system).
• Only the first Command Center must be bought and hauled in space, after that there is no longer a need to haul command centers in order to upgrade
• Surveying has been radically revamped and will allow players to create extraction programs that span anything from an hour to 14 days!
• Extractors can now be moved when in program creation mode

If you’ve fiddled at all with Planetary Interaction you’ll understand how each and every one of these points is a drastic and much-needed improvement over what is currently in place.

What’s more, these changes have been inspired by input from our very own CSM representatives who proposed several excellent improvements to CCP. This only serves to prove once more that CSM is not only an endless source of entertainment, but also a functioning communications pipeline for improvements to EVE.

Sources:

• Dev Blog: Planetary Interaction and the Future
• Planetary Interaction Omnibus Proposal