I’ve read in the past that the auctions in WoW could be considered a form of player-driven questing (“bring me three gems and I’ll give you three gold coins”), I’ve also imagined a reversed system where the crafters don’t just have an unified marketplace, but where the buyers post orders directly (the consignment system) that then the crafters can take and fulfill. It would be a system more driven by the demand than the offer and that I think would be more usable.

One of the main features of Kali (Eve’s next expansion that will be delivered in smaller chunks along the next months) is a “Contract System” that seems to unify some of those ideas.

But let’s go in order. In the last weeks the devs have been quite prolific with their blogging and have released more details about what they are working on. I’m going to parse the interesting bits.

To begin with, the first Kali “chunk” should be still on track for a September release. It is unsure if it will include even some updates to the graphic engine that are almost ready or if they’ll deliver them all at once at a later date.

Before this first patch that is going to add some significant new features there will be another one that, I suppose, should be out for mid/end of July. Its content wasn’t really specified:

One of the first thing we’re considering to do is release our Dragon code branch to Tranquility. Currently you are in the Red Moon Rising/Blood code branch. Dragon is the branch which has the localization and translation framework, tons of improvements, optimizations and a couple of minor features. This is the code branch currently running on Serenity in China and is approaching a release state.

The reasons to release it are numerous. We want to seperate it from the first Kali release to minimize risk. The Dragon branch contains a lot of refactoring and rewriting of code and we don’t want to be troubleshooting that at the same time as the new big features in Kali 1. The second is that it contains previously mentioned optimizations. These are general improvements rather than any specific thing. It also allows us to concentrate our testing efforts on current core functionality.

So they split the patch in two even here. A first part to be delivered within the next few weeks with general tweaks and improvements and another one still slated for September that will plug in the game some of the new features planned for “Kali”.

What are these new features?

In the recent dev blogs they have written about Combat Boosters, System Scanning, Invention & Reverse Engineering, Salvaging & Ship Rigging and the Contract System.

The “Combat Boosters” are supposed to be something tailored for experienced PvP players that have access to high-end resources. Even if there will be different kinds of boosters, more or less accessible, I believe that even the simplest version isn’t something that will be simple to obtain.

From their description they will be temporary bonuses (think about potions) that may trigger negative side-effects if you are unlucky (random dice rolls). The goal is: “Ideally, they would not be so powerful that everyone wants to have them to PvP but good enough so they are worth manufacturing”.

From a design point of view I’m not sure how adding an higher degree of randomness can add to the fun (not having control is frustrating), but these combat boosters are supposed to be occasional and slightly situational, so they may still fill a role in combat that is appropriate instead of disruptive. Though they also say that the effects should last “hours”, which would lead to another frustrating mechanic if a player is unlucky and triggers some nasty negative effects without any way to purge them. One thing is about using them *during combat*, with the effect lasting some minutes. Another is having them as an incentive to min/maxing BEFORE combat, trying to get the optimal result and only then move out to look for the action. So I really do hope they change this part of the design to make these boosters more situational.

If you think about it, this could lead to similar issues of buffbotting, where players never move out to fight till they are all full buffed and ready. The real point is about designing these booster to be in-combat items instead of preemptive out-of-combat setups. And this can only happen if the duration expires in the arc of a few minutes at max.

As I said it doesn’t look like these items will be easily available for all players. To manufacture even the simple booster you need to be in 0.0 space (open PvP area) and have access to a player-driven starbase with the modules to create boosters active. Plus ingredients that are again only available in 0.0 special regions (COSMOS).

System Scanning will lead to changes to the UI and changes to the gameplay. There should be a new “seamless” map that allows you to zoom out of the whole universe and in till inside a solar system.

The new feature about the System Scanning is also related to the addition of new things to discover (they call this “exploration”). To scan a solar system for these new “objects” you’ll need to deploy probes. Before you needed three of them: “three probes to create a pizza-alike triangle to find objects within”. With the new system each probe will work as a “singleton”, with two statistics: scan radius, scan strength. With a possibility of mistakes (inaccuracy) depending on the stats of the probe and the stats of the object to find.

With the new seamless map you’ll also be able to monitor the probes radiuses. And they also merged the types of objects to scan into only five categories. So, concretely, usability changes and some new content added.

Invention & Reverse Engineering. Reverse Engineering won’t be in the September patch, while Invention will. The two should still be somewhat related.

They are quite original ways to toy with the crafting process. New interesting and definitely appropriate (for the setting) patterns. Reverse Engineering will let you “break” an item to study it, with the possibility to figure out its recipe. While “Invention” is a type of research made through new skills and modules that lets you discover higher quality recipes by studying basic modules (from T1 to T2 tech).

Even here it is unsure how much they will be accessible. “Invention” will depend on a side-profession that is only available in special systems (COSMOS), while the other component should be simpler to get since it is acquired by running research missions (then it depends on the level of the mission, I guess).

Salvaging & Ship Rigging. Even here the system is curious because inspired directly to Diablo’s socketed items/jewelcrafring that will also be one main feature of WoW’s first expansion. Each ship will have some free slots: “T1 ships will be given 2 slots for ship modification and T2 ships get 3 slots”. Then you can plug “rigs”/jewels into these slots, that will be permanent and won’t be removed anymore. To craft “rigs”/jewels you’ll need a new skill/profession (“salvaging”) that will be used on the “wrecks” of the enemy ships you destroy to extract those materials that you’ll need in the manufacturing process.

The other interesting part of this new feature is that the ships won’t leave anymore just a loot container when they explode, but a more realistic “wreck”. Quoting:

This feature has me pretty excited because it addresses one thing that’s always bugged me about EVE. When your ship blows up a pristine can floats in space with some modules inside it. This immersion breaking feature will be no more when Kali1 hits. When your ship blows up a smoldering wreck will be left behind. The wreck will have a few modules intact of course but will also have other items of value only extractable by a skilled salvager.

Due to technical / architectural constraints on the client and server, most of the ways that you could do individual wreck models for each ship type would be bad (inability to preload in warp / type spam in the DB / increased disk access / extra CPU load ).

It’s likely that we’ll see something like a wreck type per race and class, ie. “Amarr Cruisers”. It’s a fact of life that we have to evaluate everything not just by how neat an idea it is, but also by the practicality of implementation (in game design, typically a wider self-critical analysis as well) in ways that can be inscrutable from the outside – lots of nice ideas return from that fight somewhat worse for wear.

And finally the “Contract System”. This one will have a significant role when the Factional Warfare will arrive in the game next year, since it will be the backbone of the new, “automated”, mission system. But already this September it should have a relevant impact on the organization of players’ corporations and the interaction outside, toward other players.

The latest news is what I’ve anticipated above, they will integrate the new mission system with a type of orders that look exactly like WoW’s Auction House. See this image. You have “Current Bid”, “Buyout Price”, owner of the order and a vague “Time Left” definition as in WoW. The only two differences I notice aren’t so small, though. The first is that in your auction you can bundle different items together instead of just one (or stacks of the same type) as in WoW, the second is that the AH in WoW is an unified place and items are delivered right into your mailbox, just a few meters away. In Eve the “Auction House” should be just an interface, always accessible (in WoW you have to walk to it), but where you need then to travel to the system where the item is located if you want it, instead of have it delivered to you (time for automated NPC transport systems?).

My first worry is that this could overlap with Eve’s complex market structure. I’m not sure how this new Auction House fits with the way the current market works and which role it will take. So I see this as a risk and CCP should be careful to implement such a thing.

Despite the possible problems it is quite interesting to see the devs taking ideas from a game so different from Eve. We have potions, jewelcrafting and the Auction House, all perfectly adapted and integrated that they may finish to feel more appropriate in Eve than in WoW. As I said there’s a risk about the AH, but the rest looks like solid design and not just a mess that contradicts the premises of the game, trying to steer it in a direction that doesn’t belong to it.

Oh, and don’t forget the BattleGrounds, that should become a reality the next year, with the arrive of the Factional Warfare.

Again CCP seems committed to let the game develop as it needs, focusing all their resources and reinvesting on it. Doing a very good work in particular with that seventh commandment that is so important for these kind of games and that CCP respected better than everyone else in the mmorpg space till today.

While a menacing cloud appears on the horizon:

As long as there are players playing EVE, we’ll be there evolving it, but we also have plans for world domination, like all respectable game developers have (right?) so there will be other titles.

Please don’t be so stupid. Do not ruin the recipe for success that you used till now. Don’t throw everything away like that. Don’t start to sound exactly like every other, clueless mmorpg producer.

I fear the success they are currently having will ruin things in the end.

And you know, I would love to write these kinds of comments about a bunch of juicy features every few weeks even for other mmorpgs, but it looks like CCP has no competition on this front. Everyone else is asleep.

From Eve-Online’s dev blog:

While we’re in the technical design stages, I get to write crazy things about wanting to completely rewrite the turret system and do stuff like make turret animations miss.

While you are at it, what about scaling the “shake” effect on a missle hit with a % calculation on the damage done to the ship?

Crazy things, indeed.

P.S.
And physical missle launchers. So that missles come out of the launchers instead of spawning in the air. Maybe with pwetty missle-shooting animation/effect?

And better graphic representation of the damage states.

Even Eve-Online has its own Battleplan. You can read it in the dev blog feed I’ve set up (scroll down).

Oveur is probably the most competent mmorpg producer currently in this industry but the recent announces didn’t please me much (the delay to the Factional Warfare and the support for voice chat, for the most part). With this battleplan he goes in great detail to explain what are the reasons behind those choices and I think I’ll be back already in September if everything goes as they are planning (I expect delays). They haven’t lost the ambition, even if I don’t share some of their choices.

Most of what’s written in the Battleplan is what they already announced at the E3, but there are a few relevant changes about their schedule.

Actually, from the forum posts I read, the main point of Kali’s delay isn’t such a bad thing. TQ is doing well and a good stable Kali release is the best thing for everyone. However, Factional Warfare seems to be the main object of frustration. While it’s great to see such enthusiasm for a single feature within EVE, there is a boatload of reasons for the segmented release.

Yes, there’s another delay. Initially the DirectX 9 engine upgrade was planned to be released around September, with the first segment of the Kali patch scheduled for a late June/early July release and Factional Warfare not sooner than next year.

The new plan pushes back the engine upgrade to April 07, if not later, even if Oveur says that it may arrive sooner. While the first segment of the Kali patch won’t arrive before September and with the Factional Warfare that should be ready before the end of the year.

The reason of these delays, in particular about the first Kali patch, is the launch in China:

China is a very big project. We realized that it would be big, but never this big! The China release was not supposed to have any effect on Tranquility – and to try and ensure that, we doubled the number of developers here at CCP. We’re now up to 96 people.

Still, because of EVE’s complexity, there is a need for a lot of the talent to work on the China release at some point in time, which has caused a cascade of resource shifts. With the expectations of the China market and the nature of the MMO industry over there, you only get one chance (the China MMO market alone is bigger than its entire western counterpart).

We therefore switched the focus points of a number of core developers to make sure we would be successful. And I’m sure you would ask why; how can EVE China be in a position to cause delays for Tranquility projects?

It’s really simple at its core. If EVE is successful in China, the revenue which would become available to fuel the evolution of EVE would skyrocket.

—
We tried to prevent EVE China from affecting the Tranquility release schedule and diverted considerable sums of our revenue into trying to ensure that. However, it still happened. Fortunately, EVE China will get launched over the next month and the effects of a successful EVE China will bring EVE to new station-dancing, planet-bombing, asteroid-bursting heights.

So the launch is planned for June and they seem to have high expectations about it. I hope everything goes as planned but launching a product in a bigger market doesn’t mean that it will automatically scale with it. We have already plenty of examples of mmorpgs launched in different zones and with much different results.

Lineage didn’t go anywhere in the western market, WoW was extremely successful in the eastern market and EQ2 didn’t even manage to successfully launch. It’s extremely hard to find a pattern. Summary: unreliable results.

It will be interesting to see how the eastern market will react to a completely different product like Eve, but at the same time I would keep the expectations realistic. It’s extremely hard to predict how this launch will go and how it will affect the future of Eve.

About the delay to the “Factional Warfare” (announced for next year at the E3) it seems I wasn’t the only one deluded:

Prioritize, dammit! Factional Warfare is God!

As much as I agree with this point, it’s also the most risky project we have done for a while. We don’t want a situation where 120.000 subscribers start doing Factional Warfare only. (Remember level 4 agent missions?)

Likewise, there are a number of core features that need to be in place for us to be in a position to release Factional Warfare. Better Combat Organization is one, the Contract system is another. This simply needs to be taken in steps.

The main frustration comes from the timeline, since the path to Kali spans the next year from now and Factional Warfare would be at the end of that. Well, this isn’t exactly how it is today, but plans tend to change.

“Plans tend to change” and here is the new planned “best effort” schedule:

Kali One Release – September 2006

This is what we’re aiming to release in Kali One. The list is created from a number of criteria, the main factors being a “Prerequisite for future release”, “low risk, short development, big bang” or “we really need to get this done” project.

* Contracts
This is the most extensive addition in this release, something which will affect players of all ages. Gives you the ability to manage corporations offline and create “missions” for players and corporations alike.
* Combat Organization
The new seamless map with new system scanning, new gang features and better facilities for situational awareness.
* Exploration
Rewarding exploration of space, utilizing new system scanning and the new seamless view (see above), enabling you to discover escalating paths. This is a prerequisite for Next-Gen R&D, which will be used for gathering a plethora of R&D items.
* Next-gen Research & Development
We’re opening up this aspect of EVE with Reverse Engineering and Invention, enabling you to create Tech II blueprint copies by gathering knowledge and technology through various means, such as exploration.
* Combat Boosters
Creates regional uniqueness for 8 regions, from 0.0 COSMOS constellations with unique resources to mini-professions and specialized starbase structures. A whole value chain will be created around these items, enabling players of all “ages” to be part of the bigger process.
* Ship Upgrades & Salvaging of Shipwrecks
This instantly creates content throughout the whole EVE universe. By making all destroyed ships – player and NPC alike – drop new ingredients, which are salvageable with the right profession skills and tools, we create a massive market for ingredients and ship upgrades, which the average EVE player can now utilize to further upgrade his own ship.
* Tier-3 Battleships
The third battleship will be added to all races. Battleships are one of the most frequently used ship classes in-game and the class has only had 2 ships for each race. It’s time for the third Tier.
* Tier-2 BattleCruisers
This popular ship class receives its second battlecruiser to all races.
* Eight New Regions
We’ll be opening up the eight existing but closed regions in the “top right” section of the universe (No, not Jove, just below them). They won’t be owned by any NPC faction and there will be no conquerable stations, only ore and stuff. This is done to make room for more players. It will include various rogue NPC entities.

This is our goal for September. Some of this will in all likelihood not make it, but now you have an idea of our intentions and what we want to achieve.

Kali Two Release – December 2006

Factional Warfare. Nothing else.

Kali Three Release – April 2007

Our final graphics engine upgrades and a similar feature set to Kali One.

The “contract system” is probably the most interest feature they are going to add and that I commented along with the Factional Warfare as they are strictly connected (it’s the backbone of the mission system that will be used dynamically by the NPC factions to assign tasks to the players). But I don’t think it will have a so huge impact on the game during this first stage.

The other features aren’t so clear but there will be more dev blogs coming in the next weeks with exactly the goal to go in great detail about each change. In the meantime there’s this older post with some more details. The most important point is to understand how they’ll be integrated with the game and made accessible to the players. They say that some of those features will have an impact on everyone, we’ll see if this is true and how the players will react.

I just wish they took some time to add formations (I’m waiting them since they were promised in beta) and a better combat representation. Those are still my pet peeves along with some smaller bugs and inconsistences that are in the game since forever.

The delay to the Factional Warfare is unsurprising and expected. As Oveur explains it depends on many other systems and it could easily become the most radical change in the game since release. The potential is HUGE and I really hope they get it right. My disappointment about the delay was mostly because this is a system so complicated and rich that it will become more a “thread” for all the future updates than just a system that is being added and then left behind. I see it as a whole new direction for Eve. A new beginning that should become an overall structure where every other part of the current game will be relocated and reorganized. So it was better to start this as soon as possible because I saw it as an ongoing project that will absolutely need to be segmented by itself. There’s a first step and then all the rest to add more “juice” to it (professions, new missions, new relationships, careers and so on).

Probably the biggest challenge is about putting player corporations and NPC corporations in the exact same condition and potential, so that the overall Factional Warfare structure will include both seamlessly and without discriminations (in the sense that the “logic” of this system won’t make any difference between a player corp and an NPC corp). If this happens it will be easier to integrate the current corp activities in the new overall scheme without disrupting them. This is how I would plan to solve the problem outlined by Oveur, instead of nerfing the impact and potential of the whole system:

We don’t want a situation where 120.000 subscribers start doing Factional Warfare only.

Instead I think they should. But continuing to do what they are doing already WITHIN the context of the Factional Warfare. I see this system as an overall organization. A “motivation”. Rules and possibilities that will apply in particular to the corps that are already active in the game.

I don’t mind the delay by itself, but I think that the accessibility of the game should have the priority and I hope that the Factional Warfare won’t be limited to just a weak attempt without fulfilling its true potential or really starting to move the game in that new direction. It’s both evolutionary and revolutionary. It’s important that it won’t be rushed out, but at the same time it is important that it can become an overall structure for the game, and not just a sidetrack.

Before it was wishful thinking. With the added resources and the growing playerbase this is becoming a necessity for the game. It needs to evolve to support what will come next.

After having said all this, I’m going to criticize what Oveur says about the voice chat. In particular about the implicit accessibility issues:

Sure, not everyone wants it. That’s one of the main reasons why only those that do want it will have to pay for it. It’s optional. There will be opportunities for a corp to enable it for all its members, which is really our main target group.

Nobody is forcing you to use it.

Well, this is far from reality. Voice chat can discriminate and when you are not alone like in a mmorpg you are never really free. You’ll have to adapt. If you can.

Simply put: some can and want to use it, some cannot. This will become another selective process and it will become another barrier. Who is in and who is left out.

The optional support for the voice chat WILL create reasons for a discrimination and WILL divide. This is never good for a mmorpg, whose main purpose should always be about integration.

As I wrote, selective processes are THE WORST OF THE WORST for a mmorpg.

Quoting Darniaq again:

What actually matters is the rules players set. You can mock and sneer all you want, but if 39 people use Voicechat for Raiding or PvP or just dicking around at the Auction House, the 40th person is going to use Voicechat too.

Players make the rules. Everyone else decides to follow them or gets excluded.

From a post I snagged from F13, some interesting features that will land with the first segment of the Kali patch:

* Kali in 2 months.

Big new stuff:
* Solar System view. 3-D view replacing the Scanner that lets you see stuff around the solar system you’re currently in. Improved and more usable scanning. Blob size apparently influences how easily you can be detected. Also, there’s a spore-like ‘seamless’ transition from ship view to solarsystem view to galaxy (map) view. Scanprobes will be changed and improved. They will now be 3-D aware and not a giant pain to use. No details on what that actually means.

* Along with the SS view will be more hidden complexes and hidden asteroid belts with goodies in them. This is to “enhance the exploration aspect”.

* When ships explode, they no longer blow up into cargo cans. They will now leave a hulk that you must ‘scavenge’ for loot, parts and stuff. Scavenging will have skills associated with it. Hulks will last longer than current cargo cans, “a few hours”.

* Booster system, where you take drugs to confer temporary bonuses at the expense of temporary drawbacks (e.g. +5% turret rate of fire, -2% velocity). Tolerance, so if you shoot up a lot, the bonuses won’t last as long as the drawbacks, thus simulating addiction. This second bit is not finalized.

* Gas clouds and gas cloud mining, which are used in booster manufacturing. Gas clouds are all in 0.0.

* Reverse Engineering. Basically, using parts found in complexes or salvaged off of the hulks of your enemies, you use reverse engineering to fix them up and then ‘assemble them’. The game mechanic way of describing it is that you ‘put parts in a box’ and seal it; this locks in a set of advantages and disadvantages. You can then drop the box into your ship (“like implants for ships”), conferring those bonuses and drawbacks to that one ship. The ‘box’ will be destroyed when your ship explodes. Skills associated with all of this, naturally.

All interesting features to enhance the game, but not really adding anything in a meaningful way, honestly.

In the meantime, after my earlier E3 report by proxy, I decided to cancel my account.

The biggest reason why I was interested in Eve and to support it was about seeing it move past its limits and really achieve its potential. This objective was made concrete through the “Factional Warfare” plan that I had extensively described and commented. That’s where I wanted to see CCP’s resources being spent.

With the announce that this part has been delayed to the next year, I’ve decided that I’m not going to support their choices and I’ll be back only when they decide to make the accessibility of their game their first priority, instead of the last.

All the latest announces were already in the air. Beside the bad news.

Condensed news:

– Kali is going to be broken in different patches that should start in Q2 06 and will end in 2007.
– Factional Warfare won’t happen this year.
– Voice chat support in-game through “premium service option”. (Vivox)

The E3 video is quite impressing, showing some of the huge ships that were added in the recent patches. Still, most of the scenes are obviously scripted and even the flight of the ships was manipulated and not really reflecting what you see (and play) in the game. I think some of the models are the also the new ones that will be added with the engines upgrade. Overall it’s still a great video. I just wish the game could move steps in the direction of what is shown (I always repeat how the combat is graphically poor and abstracted in Eve).

Beside this I’m really deluded. I had high expecations for Kali (the upcoming patch) and now they announce that the most significant feature of it won’t arrive before the next year:

The upcoming expansion to EVE Online—codenamed Kali—will introduce an innovative Advanced Reactive Content System (ARCS), in which the political landscape and physical borders of nation-states within the game can be altered dynamically through the collective outcome of player actions, thus directly controlling the game universe destiny and resulting storyline.

“Games either provide active content, in which the player reacts to artificial changes in the game universe, or they provide reactive content, in which the entire game universe reacts to the actions that players decide for themselves,” said Magnus Bergsson, CMO of CCP Games. “CCP believes strongly that the players should be the center focus of the storyline and control the evolution of the game universe. The Path to Kali will lead EVE Online to great heights in reactive content and further establish EVE Online as the premium free-form MMOG on the market today.”

The final component of Kali will be factional warfare, in which players will have the option to align themselves with an NPC faction. Also included in the Path to Kali will be the opening of new regions in the game universe, the addition of significant exploration content, next-generation player R&D that includes reverse engineering capabilities, additional ship upgrades and player professions, the introduction of combat boosters, and the addition of new warships.

The Path to Kali will begin in Q2 2006 with the first release, and end in 2007 with the factional warfare implementation.

Knowing CCP and how the patches gets always delayed I guess I cannot expect the “factional warfare” anytime soon. Just for comparison Kali was planned to be released this past December. Then they decided to split it in two, with the first part becoming the “Blood Moon Rising” patch and the second planned for June. And now it gets even more fragmented to go on for at least another full year. Blah.

Following this, there’s the announce of the two new engines in the work, one for DirectX 9 that should be out this year and the other for Windows Vista.

CCP will also release a newer version of the current award-winning graphics engine for EVE Online, which will take advantage of the latest DirectX 9 features to produce superior imagery and detail than the existing client. This Herculean effort requires that the game’s three hundred plus starships—each of which is composed of millions of triangles—be remodeled in ultra-high resolution. Players will then see these ships rendered by the power of per-pixel lighting, HDR, and soft-self shadowing.

Parallel development of an entirely new graphics engine called “EVE Vista” is also underway. The new graphics engine—named “Trinity II”—will take full advantage of the new features and optimizations offered by DirectX 10, which will ship with the new Windows Vista OS. The highly anticipated graphics API will give Trinity II the ability to render far greater detail by leveraging the fully programmable shader pipeline and utilizing the API’s built-in instancing support. The combined technologies will allow CCP to continue building dynamic environments with visual effects that will surpass the already stunning graphical presentation of the game.

I already wrote about the two engines since they were already announced. On the first link above there are screenshots from both version. The DirectX 10 – Vista stuff looks promising but, as Foton would say: “I’m not much interested in what I might be able to buy some day. Tell me what I can buy NOW.”

The last announce is about the voice chat integration that I also anticipated (same link about the graphic engine). CCP partners with Vivox and it looks like this service will require a special subscriptions considering that they talk of “premium service option”.

I’m glad, at least it could reveal to be an utter failure. Surely I won’t pay for it. There are bigger than expected design implications about the integration of voice chat and I still think it severely damage the community. From the press release it looks like CCP has a different opinion:

CCP Games and Vivox today announced that subscribers of the massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) EVE Online will soon have real-time, in-game voice communication as the result of a technology integration agreement between the two companies. Vivox will provide CCP with game-embedded voice communication services customized for and integrated into EVE.

EVE players will be able to speak with each other in-game, create audio conference channels for their gang, corporation or alliance, and start, leave or rejoin voice conversations during game play without impacting game performance. On-screen indicators will show the gamer which channels are monitoring audio communications and which player within a channel is speaking. Players will also have moderator privileges to kick, mute, ban and un-ban other players, all synchronized with the rights of existing EVE moderator and user roles.

“Players of EVE are attracted by its unique role playing and space simulation features,” said Hilmar V. Petursson, CEO of CCP. “But when players unite to form corporations and alliances, the game’s dynamic, immersive experience really comes alive. Now users will be able to talk, strategize, plot and negotiate naturally with each other. To deliver this functionality to our subscribers, we wanted a partner with expertise in delivering voice communications with a simple, scalable and high quality solution so that we could focus on our core expertise of building game content.”

Unlike other MMOGs, the entire EVE player base shares the same server cluster. With Vivox providing the in-game voice services and managing the required infrastructure, there are no resource implications that could impact game server performance. This new feature will be a premium service option for game subscribers and, because of itts tight integration into the game, ease of use, and massive scalability, presents a tremendous improvement over burdening gamers with maintainings their own voice servers with third party applications, as some EVE player corporations and alliances currently do.

“With its concurrent users numbering in the tens of thousands, and the game’s distinct depth and challenges, EVE is a stellar stage for our voice technology,” said Vivox CEO Rob Seaver. “Adding real-time voice to a game like EVE makes for an MMOG experience that grabs users and immerses them in game play that’s challenging and entertaining, and creates a sense of community and camaraderie. It’s this kind of technology that’s going to keep gamers heavily-invested in EVE and excited about the future of MMOGs.”

It’s the opposite, voice chat selects and segregates, it doesn’t integrate anything.

I have the suspect Mythic will do the same announce for DAoC this summer.

Maybe it’s just me. But this E3 sucks.

There’s an interesting new dev blog (that you can read here) with the details about the new graphic features that CCP is planning to implement in Eve later this year. We had already various rumors about a graphic upgrade that was in the work, now we know that there are two distinct, parallel projects: one is to implement new features such as HDR, self-shadowing and normal maps in the current engine while also making some optimizations, the other is to rewrite a new graphic engine from scratch to take advantage of the unique features of the DirectX 10 and Windows Vista.

Some quotes:

If you’re not an EON subscriber, or you haven’t received your copy yet, you may not be aware we’ve announced that we’re working on a number of graphics upgrades to Eve, including a client with a completely new graphics engine designed for DX10 and Windows Vista. The real announcement of all of this is going to happen at E3 but we released a preview, and some pictures of the related remodelling of ships, in EON #3.

Development of the DX10 / Vista graphics engine, is development for the future and it will not stop us from continuing to make improvements on, fixes to and support of the current graphics engine.

I’ve recently been working on reducing the amount of lag caused by warp-in (on all clients). We determined that a significant factor in the lag created when warping into something like a fleet battle was the disk access for loading the ships. The solution I’ve been working on is to finally add preloading in warp and threaded disk IO to Eve. The changes required to do this mean many server and client modules have been altered or extended slightly, which makes it a higher risk change, and means that it’s likely to be slated for the Kali release to ensure it gets adequate testing.

Indeed, most of the work currently is going into making the DX9 Trinity engine support new graphics features that will also be part of the DX10 engine. These features will be optional where they place requirements on hardware above our current requirements. The key distinction being that the current engine is being extended with optional features, while the DX10 version will be a ‘new’ engine designed to take full advantage of the DX10 spec.

The rewrite that we’re doing for DX10 is a huge shift in the basic architecture of the engine, and we need a solid platform to do it on. The current Trinity can and will be optimized and extended, but as a 5 year old engine it’s reaching the end of its lifespan. After all, there is a limit to what you can do with an engine fundamentally plugged into DX8 level functionality. Looking forward, we need an engine that we can push the envelope with for the next 6 or so years, and it needs to be built around the key features of where the technology is going. As far as the features that we’ll be putting in exclusively for Eve Vista, it’s far too early to tell.

For sure they are planning in advance for the longer term and they are completely dedicated to Eve instead of splitting on multiple projects as the majority of the mmorpg companies are doing. My belief is that this attitude will pay back. Eve-Online has a huge potential and I already commented some outstanding features that are planned for Kali and that could bring the game to a new level.

On the new features of the graphic engine I’m still quite skeptical, though. The game looks already amazing and the new textures and HDR could make it even better, but I also hope that they focus on the real problems, like the flickering textures on most of the space stations due to the limits of the z-buffer. It kind of ruins completely the prettiness. Beside this, more than fanciful new graphic features the graphic engine would need a redesign of the *concepts*. See my critiques to the combat system, so that what you see on the screen would resemble more closely to what actually happens in the game.

The graphic isn’t just a dress, it should be more directly tied with the mechanics. Making something pretty is good but the priority should go to make it usable, so that what you see isn’t just a pretty screenshot but a more complete interface with the game world. A vehicle for the interaction. Material that you use instead than just observe passively. In Eve-Online there is already a gap between the 3d world and the interface you use to play and, as I wrote, the two need to be brought together.

Anyway, for now this is the only image released:

To compare with the version currently in the game.

I also noticed that Cosmik mentions at the end of a long post that there is a new company (Vivox) that is planning to offer voice chat support to the current mmorpgs, through some kind of middleware, I guess. Well, Eve-Online could be one of the first games trying this. I remember to have read some rumors about this (but it’s really just about speculations).

As I wrote for DAoC I’m never happy when a mmorpg announces official support for voice chat because it makes it become mandatory as a consequence. Voice chat encourages player’s segregation and is never good for a game, it becomes another accessibility barrier and Eve definitely doesn’t need another. It breaks up the community and discourages the casual play. That said, in Eve the voice chat could even fit prefectly with the setting. Think for example if you got a pop-up while flying in a system saying “incoming transmission”, then by accepting it you would have a dynamic voice channel opened with the guy who wanted to send the message. It could be cool and immersive. Well, at least till the pretty girl you see in the image doesn’t get the voice of a guy.

Wow, just wow.

Eve-Online just reached 26.665 accounts logged in at the same time. No crashes nor complaints about the lag on the forums.

Impressive. This game is flourishing.