Skill queues are coming to EVE, so we can all check off that one long-asked for item from the long list.

We´re developing a skill queue. I´m expecting that the bearer of good news is praised and flattered. The CSM was happy to hear we were developing a skill queue, but their songs of praise were rather short. I expect haikus.  You may want to read on and make yourself familiar with how the queue works and the early UI mock-up.

As with everything there is a catch, and that catch is the length of time the skill training takes.

The skill training system we came up with allows you to queue skills that will start training in the next 24 hours. You can enter in up to 50 skills in a queue, as long as they all start training within 24 hours. This leaves room to start a skill that will take 6 hours, followed with one that takes 12 to complete. With only 18 hours of training prepared, the queue still has room to start another skill.

Sounds good to me, so if you want the full story with picture you can click the link below.  But first, Eris demands haiku, and I shall deliver.

the masses have asked
and this looks really gorgeous
eris is so cute

<3 blinky

Source:  Dev Blog

CCP have come alive again recently, with a couple of new writups on their website.

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EVE’s all about democracy these days.  First it was voting for your favorites in CSM2, now you can have a say in the Third E-ON Awards.

For those that don’t know, the awards, administered by EON magazine, are to celebrate the efforts of the EVE community during 2008. Thousands of players voted last year, with Chribba and GoonSwarm deserving of their multiple laser-etched trophies, but will they be victorious again, or will new champions emerge?

Click here to start voting!

Source: Third E-ON Awards Thread

Looks like the Classic client is going the way of Tabula Rasa.

To accommodate older PCs and those who prefer to run twenty clients of EVE while they run SETI@Home and ray trace while compressing HD movies, we will deliver what we refer to as “Premium Lite.” Premium Lite will only require ShaderModel 2.0 hardware, and far less texture memory than the current Premium, ensuring good framerates on older hardware.

It’ll be interesting to see how this streamlining of the low end client works with older hardware, but if they’re successful with this then it’ll be a great advantage to CCP to not have to support two completely different client architectures.

Source: Dev Blog

Looks like Mac users are finally getting some premium graphics love from CCP!

This is the culmination of over a year of effort on the part of development teams at both CCP and Transgaming and we are extremely happy to see EVE running in all its splendor on the Mac OS.

I don’t use my dusty old G4 iMac anymore, but for those with more current hardware this should be a welcome update.  It’s a beta test still, but give it a whirl and let them know how it works for you.

Source: Dev Thread

Thanks to Asestorian on Scrapheap Challenge, details are out about Tech 3 ships.  Some of the details provided by his post (some editing by me for brevity):

• 12,500 possible configurations.
• Five ship components needed. Propulsion, three mid sections (offense, defense, power core) and a sensor array (bridge type thing).
• Each section determines separate abilities. Propulsion for speed, probably offense module for weaponry, etc, etc. Not been fully decided at time of writing.
• The combination of the modules decides the overall stats of the ship.
• Each section requires different skills.
• It would appear that the power core decides what other hull modules you can fit, so you can’t have a nano-ewar ship with a billion guns. I might be reading that wrong though.
• Alternatively CCP might introduce some kind of “heat” that allows you to overload the structure of your ships to get this kind of power from one, but only for a very limited time (might just be wild imaginings of the writer though).
• You can disassemble an assembled Tech III ship.
• Rigs: Probably only one, and will make it harder to disassemble the ship because obviously the rig will break. No mention of actual Tech III rigs so far though.
• There is an implication that disassembling a ship might make it lose something. Talk about crew members or a ship being ‘sentient’ and thus maybe gaining ‘experience’ or somesuch that is lost when it’s broken down. Whatever it is, it’s talk of a ship learning and becoming better through some system. Not confirmed and at this point probably going to remain on the drawing board because of balance issues. It could stay there, or it could come in later.
• You won’t be able to tell a ships role/subsystems from scanner results.
• Only cruiser sized Tech III ships.

Check out the thread for some more speculation and details.  I’m not sure I’ll be jumping into these day one.  Well, especially since there will no doubt be a ridiculous amount of training required to get into these.

Source: Scrapheap Thread

CCP Ghostrider is beta testing Windows 7, and has decided to make some themes for the OS available to the EVE community.

Being a Windows 7 beta tester I have taken it upon myself to create a few EVE Online themepacks for Windows 7. If any of you are so brave as to be running the Windows 7 beta (or will be tomorrow when the public beta is released), feel free to download these themepacks and simply doubleclick them for your viewing pleasure.

For those that are not sure what themepacks are, it is a new customization feature in Windows 7. Simply put, a themepack is a pre-packaged set of desktop backgrounds, window colors, sounds and a screen saver. Windows 7 has added the ability to select multiple files as a desktop background and can automatically transition between them at set intervals.

They’re not official but they look pretty sweet.  Check them out at the link below, and nice job Ghostrider.

Source: Forum Thread