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.

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.

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 3rd 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 1024×1024 textures and one 512×512 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

Hi there.

It‘s that time of year again. CCP‘s developers have finished planning and preparing and have started work on the next expansion for EVE Online. The exact release date will be announced later, but let‘s say that it will happen before the summer solstice.

What‘s in the package?
For a long time we have had people asking us for more options to build up their own infrastructure. It‘s something that comes up frequently at Fanfest, in past CSMs and during casual conversations with players. There seems to be some deep Freudian desire to erect something monumental. To make stuff. To create something new. At last Fanfest we announced our plans to allow you, the pod-pilots of New Eden, to shift your foci away from the heavens for a moment, onto the planets. In Dominion, we gave the planets a facelift, updating the graphics with beautiful landscapes, awe inspiring deserts, peaceful Ewok-friendly green worlds and violent burning lava fields. But that was just eye candy, right? Well, not quite. In our upcoming expansion, Tyrannis, ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS.

OMG did you say all of the planets!?
That‘s right, you will finally be able to survey for juicy deposits of minerals and other goodies, build infrastructure to harvest them, store them, process them and launch them into space. Build complex networks of facilities and fine tune them for optimal production. All in a very massive single shard sandboxy way as only EVE can provide. And it‘s not just the terran planets. It‘s ALL OF THEM. The gas giants, the lava planets, the ice worlds, the water worlds and even the elusive plasma planets. Each type with their unique properties. Maintaining facilities on gruesomely hostile planets will be tougher and more demanding, but the rewards may be so much more “onturning.”

More will be revealed in upcoming blogs and on our test server, Singularity. Make note however that Singularity is a test server, primarily intended for testing of code in development and nothing is final until it hits Tranquility. All graphics, UI, balancing and mechanics are subject to change, iteration and polish…

Is there combat on planets?
No, not in this expansion. This expansion is about exploration and industry. When something goes bad or breaks it is because of the owner‘s mismanagement, and when things are awesome and perfect, it is because of skill and hard labor on part of the player that runs the facilities.

In future expansions you will be able to project military force for attack and defense of planetary installations. That will be where DUST 514 will connect with EVE. But DUST 514 will not be coming out at the same time as Tyrannis, so that is at a later date.

EVE Gate
In September last year, a devblog by CCP Caedmon introduced our new Web Frontend into EVE Communication codenamed COSMOS. It was later branded “New Eden”. In the agile spirit of CCP, we have since renamed it and decided on the final name which is EVE Gate, which makes sense because it is your gate into EVE. Clever, eh?

EVE Mail, Calendar and Contacts
EVE Gate will allow you to interact with EVE through a regular web browser. At first, we are giving you communication and collaboration tools. You will be able to access your EVE Mail through a browser, we are adding a calendar both in-game and out of game and are upgrading and streamlining our contacts and standings system. There is also a system for posting updates for players, corporations and alliances. More details on those changes will follow in blogs to be released in the coming weeks. EVE Gate is a foundation which we are architecting in a way that allows us to build deeper interaction with the game itself in future iterations.

Overall improvements
We are working on other optimizations and improvements throughout the game, as usual with our expansions. A task force is working on reducing fleet fight lag, often working deep into the night chasing action around on TQ, while another team is developing an advanced simulation environment for load testing on our local servers.

There is a sense of excitement in the air here at CCP. Today our development teams finished the first of their three week sprints, ending in a demo where we saw parts of the both the planetary feature and EVE Gate already running, with mocked up UI and graphics. Our engineers, artists and designers are deeply committed to continue to deliver a compelling EVE experience to all of our players, deepening the game with exciting new functionality while iterating, polishing and improving existing systems and code. We truly look forward to delivering Tyrannis to you. Soon.

The Singularity test server has been returned to service, and we will be conducting our next mass test on Saturday, February 20, 2010 at 20:00 UTC for both fleet fight and session changes. Medium and large-sized Alliances are welcome to take part in this testing. More information can be found in this thread.