Please note that these changes will be reverted when fuel block consumption is enabled on January 24. Towers left with their fuel bays in an “overloaded” state as a result of this change should continue to function as normal.

Also notice that it is currently not possible to place the new fuel blocks into the fuel bays of control towers; this is a bug and will be fixed in the next few days. Please refer to this thread for further information and discussions.

For more information about the latest EVE Online expansion, please visit the Crucible feature page. Full patch notes are available here. An Issues thread is available here and you can give general feedback on Crucible by clicking this link.

Please note that you will be offered a client update once you patch which fixes several issues discovered during deployment.

You might have seen the recent news item about the free implants coming to EVE this winter with Crucible. The first of these implants, the Genolution CA-1 is inbound very shortly. Everyone with an active paid account on Nov29th through Dec 2^nd will get one to redeem for their character. Pilots on trial accounts will not receive an implant, but are of course welcome to join the party before the giveaway ends.

This implant is the first of two in a set, with the second one arriving in December. You’ll notice they have both an attribute bonus and a skill hardwiring one, so don’t miss out. They’ll come in handy when you‘re obliterating your foes with your brand new Tier 3 Battlecruiser.

The modestly titled “Core Augmentation” implant set was developed by Genolution with the assistance of implantation specialists and other leaders in the field of neural augmentation, some of whom have long been rumored to be SoCT alumni.

The CA-1 is a rarity in the often hyper-specialized industry of neural augmentation. It provides a dual function; tapping into both the occipital lobe for a perception boost, and also the neocortex, for improving the brain’s handling of a ship’s energy and capacitor needs. Like the infamous pirate implant sets found on capsuleer markets, each implant is also designed to work at higher levels when integrated into a neural implant network.

Though many in the augmentation industry initially questioned the agenda behind Genolution’s entry into the implantation field, fears eventually subsided as the implant was shown to be one of the safest on record. Genolution went one step further to assuage fears however and vowed never to release the implant to open markets, providing only a single-run issue to capsuleers as a
demonstration of the technology.

Technical specifications:

Hardwiring – Genolution Core Augmentation CA-1

• Slot 1
• Boosts perception by 3
• Provides +1.5% powergrid bonus
• Provides +1.5% capacitor amount bonus
• Implant set bonus: 50%

As with all item giveaways, we intend these items to be a nice bonus for people actively playing EVE. Therefore, we will be vigilant in monitoring creative attempts to farm these items, and take action on a case to case basis.

Within EVE’s eternal crucible of warfare, politics and industry, even the most passionate and skilled are tested. EVE Online: Crucible pumps the bellows, turning up the heat on the space combat experience in EVE Online. In the factional shipyards, new ships have been forged to expand the reach of war and evolve the tactics of space engagement while existing vessels have been reimagined, bringing greater balance and diversity to large and small scale conflicts. This winter, Crucible evolves the graphics, interface and game mechanics with over three dozen updated and improved features based on feedback and challenges put forth by its players. This is EVE re-forged.

For more information about the latest EVE Online expansion, please visit the Crucible feature page. Patch notes are available here.

We would encourage players to provide feedback in this thread.

“Isn’t localization just about translating words into another language?” I hear you say. And quite frankly, a large portion of localization is indeed translation and translation management with a few functional aspects tossed in for good measure.

However, once we include a concept like Internationalization/Localizability, which can be loosely defined as “Designing software so that it can be properly localized into any locale and language without any compromise to its functionality or look and feel”, we are passing the gates of Cerberus, at which point things get a whole lot more interesting, starting with updating our existing translations and adding Japanese, as well as expanding to include even more localized clients in the future.

But let’s start with some history

In 2006 the German EVE client was launched, followed by the Russian in 2009. Those languages have experienced a rocky history of crowd sourcing and finding the right provider with frankly mixed success.  (Next time you meet a German player, ask what the translation of “Doomsday Devices” is in-game.)  Over the years we have managed to improve those initial translations, and have received increasingly useful feedback over time.

However, neither the EVE code nor our tools and processes had been designed to support localization very well.  Attempts were made to localize EVE into Japanese and French starting in 2007, but both had to be abandoned in part due to those technical limitations.  It became clear that porting EVE into any new languages in the future would require replacing our localization system with something more sophisticated.

And thus Cerberus was born

Last year, Team Cerberus from our Atlanta office began work on creating a new, modern localization system within CCP’s Carbon framework. This new technology was integrated into EVE’s main development branch this past summer. Since then, Teams Stonehenge and Cerberus have been working together on migrating all the text in EVE to this new system. Note that this is not a simple port of all text from one system to another. The UI text in all systems has undergone a substantial overhaul, taking advantage of the new localization features, which will improve the experience of EVE both in English and other languages.

Alright, but what is it?

The new localization system in EVE introduces technology which will, in the future, vastly improve upon our ability to deliver a quality localized EVE experience to our current German, Russian and Chinese-speaking players, in addition to improving our ability to introduce new languages – starting with Japanese but with plans already underway to include other languages as well. Even the original English text will benefit from the introduction of this new system, as we’ll see shortly.

While most of the improvements to our localization system affect the development backend of EVE, making life easier for programmers and designers, there will also be improvements to the text that you will see in-game. Previously, our ability to use variables (essentially names of people, places and things) was limited to simple string replacement. A programmer or designer would create a string, and have the ability to insert another string into it. The first string did not otherwise know anything about what was being inserted and would always show the same text, no matter whether you were talking about a character, an alliance, or a shiny rock. The new system brings two concepts to EVE that allow us to improve on this: entity metadata and conditional statements.

Entity metadata (and by entity, I’m referring to characters, types and locations) allows the localization system to store characteristics of EVE entities. For characters, the localization system will now have access to a character’s gender. For types and locations, the localization system will now have access to things like indefinite article (in English), gender (in German) and pronunciation (in Japanese, used for sorting). Conditional statements then allow us to use variable values or metadata to actually change a string based on these inputs. Personal pronouns, for example, can be changed depending on whether the character in question is male or female. In non-English languages, adjectives can also be changed based on a character’s (or an item’s) gender.

One of many examples of improvements we are introducing with Cerberus is that conditions on numeric types will allow us to specify plural forms when necessary. “You own 1 share of that corporation stock” and “you own 5 shares of that corporation stock” will now be just one string in the backend, and will use the right form of the noun based on the number input. The usage of plurals can vary greatly in languages.  In Russian, for example, which uses two plural forms, our translators will be providing all three forms of the noun so that the correct one can be chosen based on input.  In both English and German, there is one singular and one plural form.  And in Japanese, plurals are not used at all.  So in the “number of shares” example, English, German, Russian and Japanese are all handled in quite different methods:

And of course the system is flexible enough for us to localize the EVE Client to other languages relatively easily, and that is definitely our plan.

The short term effects

The good: As mentioned above, the new localization system is a vital part of the EVE Japan release and our plans of further localization to other languages. As part of the Crucible release, a preview version of the Japanese translation will be available to players on Tranquility. Please note that this is a preview version and is neither complete nor fully validated. Work on EVE Japan will be continuing into next year, but we felt that it was important to provide this preview of the Japanese translation as we continue to iterate upon it. If you play with the Russian or German client you will also see some improvements where we have already given the translation an overhaul to utilize this new technology.

The bad: As part of this migration we had to re-translate the entire UI, Notifications and Messages in-game. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, a small part of the UI as well as content that has been developed by the feature teams for this release will be in English for the German and Russian client on the initial launch date. We did not take the decision to release with a partially un-localized client lightly and are not happy with this situation. In the end we decided though that given the choice, our German and Russian players were likely to prefer being able to use the fantastic features and changes that have been developed for the Crucible expansion at the end of November, as opposed to delaying the entire release for all players until the translations were ready. We are working hard on getting the remaining areas localized though and are aiming at delivering a fully localized client over the next few weeks.

The ugly: Due to this re-translation, you may also see some changes to the way text has been translated or even some migration-related issues like variables displaying in-game. We have teams of professional translators working on resolving this. However, we also realize the potential that arises from this particular situation and the migration and re-translation in general. So without further ado, allow me to present:

A Thousand Little Loc Things

It used to be the case that we were at times hesitant to make specific changes to the in-game text for German and Russian, since that text had been in use for a very long time and people were used to it. We were also aware that the players had started to use their own version of terms that had been translated with variations or in an unpopular way. Additionally, we have seen from the comments in the last localization survey that there are areas that need more attention than we had thought, while other areas we had considered important were hardly mentioned. So bearing all this in mind, we would like to use this opportunity to get in touch with our player base more closely and start a wish list of fixes and features in a similar way as the 1000 Little Things list, but this time for localization specific changes and features. We are going to put up three separate threads – one each in the German and Russian forums, so players can comment in their own languages, and one in the Issues, Workarounds & Localization section for those who want to comment in English.

We are open to any and all localization specific suggestions, but of course there is a caveat or two: We are not promising that we will be able to make everything posted there happen or that we will be able to reply to every post, but we do promise that we will be reading and considering everything. Some things might also happen sooner, while others will be something we would like to do, but that will not be possible right away. Lastly, we would like to suggest that very small, specific issues (think “there is a spelling mistake in mission x”) be put into a bug report rather than the 1000 Little Loc Things, since that way turnaround will be faster. (While we are on the topic of bug reports, I would also like to mention that the ISD Bughunter division is also eager to get more Russian and German speakers on board!)

The long term effects

Between the Cerberus technology, our internal efforts and emphasis on localization and any contributions that you, the players, will be able to make – be it in form of suggestions or working as Bughunters – I foresee a considerably brighter future for our localization than it has been over the past years. We don’t want to go into detail just yet, but there are various small and big plans in progress which we will be talking about over the next year. Personally, this makes us very happy grammar nerds.

Figure 1: Trails in Empyrean Age (click to enlarge)

Figure 2: Trails in Empyrean Age (click to enlarge)

So last summer, when the office was really quiet and I had some time, I started thinking about trails in EVE again: why they were removed a while ago in Apocrypha, how I could bring them back, and most important…how to make them look better and render faster.

My initial plan was to get them done during summer. Turned out I was a little bit too optimistic. Actually way too optimistic…

Splines to the rescue!

From the beginning it was pretty clear we should use splines for the new trails. They give you some nice smooth curves and are positioned only by a couple of control points and normals. And their math is simple enough to be done in a vertex shader, so no need to update a vertexbuffer every single frame for every single ship in the scene. By the way, that was how the old trails did it.

See for yourself how simple cubic hermite splines are:

Now I knew how to generate a smooth curve, but certainly not what actual geometry would be bent by it. Single billboards? Star-shaped planes? Or a chain of particles? To be honest I had no idea and I think I pretty much tried it all. Here are some of the more promising looking results:

Figure 3: Planes facing the camera (click to enlarge)

Figure 4: 3 star-shaped planes (click to enlarge)

As you can see: not very beautiful. Definitely they render faster than the old ones, but they look like you would want to immediately turn them off in the options menu.

Raytracing

So obviously any form of solid geometry will break or look ugly if bent and viewed from certain angles. So now I knew how not to do it. At that point you usually should take a big step back and start thinking about what it is you want to achieve: drawing a smoothly bent cylinder, (because that’s what a trail basically is) a glowing cylinder. And then I had an idea: why not solve it with ray tracing in the pixel shader? At first this sounds a little bit crazy, but when you look at the math it’s not that difficult. Intersecting a ray with a finite cylinder is certainly doable in a shader and given a fairly high number of those finite cylinders per trail the result is going to be a smoothly bent cylinder.

The math for intersecting a view ray with an infinite cylinder:

Click to enlarge

Now we need to turn this infinite cylinder into a finite one by solving two more intersections: the eye ray with both of the capping planes:

Click to enlarge

This will eventually get us the entry and exit point of the eye ray at the finite cylinder, resulting in the length of this ray inside the whole trail. It is easy to derive some color value based on that:

Figure 5: Ray traced finite cylinders (click to enlarge)

Figure 6: finite cylinders form trails (click to enlarge)

The rest is easy: close the gaps, apply some fading and let the art director play around with size, length and color:

Figure 7: Looking nice and polished… (click to enlarge)

Ignore the EVE server

Now I knew how to render the trails, but I still had to figure out where the actual positions of all the spline control points would come from.

(Btw, the summer was long gone now…)

One reason why the old trails would sometimes get all messed up was that they relied on the exact ship’s position as dictated by the server. All MMO players know this can lead to some strange behavior of your ship’s movement, especially in lag situations. So for positioning the trails I had to ignore the absolute positions of the ship, instead relied on the smooth movement info interpolated in the client (for example the speed you see in the HUD, it never changes abruptly). If your ship is suddenly repositioned by the server, the trails now just “jump” with it! You will hardly notice. Finally, the spline control points are merely the position offsets from your ship to where it has been before. Thus, the faster the ship, the longer the trails.

All this came together just in time to be released in Crucible, so I really hope that you will enjoy the new trails. I know I do, because now they are as good as I remember them.

Figure 8: Wolf with trails (click to enlarge)

Figure 9: Trails from the Punisher (click to enlarge)

Future improvements

Of course there is always more. Some animation on the trails, adding light absorption, refraction, etc. I would like to spend more time on the trails, so if you guys  appreciate the new trails I might get the time I need to do all of this…

As a UI Programmer my focus was on usability issues and general UI weirdness in EVE. One huge thing I tackled was the consistency of drag-and-drop functionality in the Market window. After the Winter Expansion, any icon you see in the market can be dragged to the quickbar or chat. You’ll also notice that all of the previewable items in the market can be clicked to generate a 3D preview just like in the info window. I gave some love to the quickbar as well so you can more easily add and organize items, as well as being able to drag those items to link in chat. The last market update was adding the ability to drag fittings into the quickbar (automatically creating subgroups) so you can more easily shop for the modules you need for a specific fit:

Click to enlarge

Next, I added the ability to drag-select items in inventory containers. REVOLUTIONARY right?! Gone are the days when you’d have to shift- or ctrl-click the items you wanted to select. Now just drag over the items you want much like your favorite operating system and voila!

The last thing I’ll mention here is the ability to rearrange targeted items to your liking. Now you logistics minded pilots can group all of the bad guys together for ‘shooties’ and good guys together for ‘reppies’ regardless of the order they were targeted in.

Hi, I’m CCP Space Cadet. 

I updated the Orbit & Keep-At-Range buttons to save their settings per ship-type.  So, your favorite battleship can orbit at 40km, and with the same button, your favorite interceptor will orbit at 3km.  I also updated the right click sub-menu for Keep-At-Range to have more sensible options, matching the Orbit options.

Also, have you ever been flying along, and your camera randomly rotates to something random off in the distance?  You probably hovered over a target icon by accident.  That feature is gone now.  No more random auto-panning to targets.

Finally, with the assistance of CCP Booster, We made it so if you are piloting a ship with multiple kinds of bays, like ore, fuel, ship maintenance, and corp hangars, ALL of those windows will stay open when you dock and Undock.

OH HAI. CCP Booster here. 

So as part of Team Papercuts’ effort to make every EVE player’s life a little better, I was tasked with making it easier to retrieve goodies from wrecks or floating cans.  So, uhm, I made a button…. and uh, you can click it….and it LOOTS ALL THE THINGS!!!!  This has the exact same behavior as it would if you were to select all the contents of the container and drag them, but faster and easier.

Hey all. I’m CCP Soulblighter, and I’ve been working on a few fun little features you might be interested in.

First up is a convenience feature for Corp CEOs and Directors. Previously, you had to be in station in order to use the ‘Unrent Office’ button found on the Corp Hangar window. You will now find that you have the option to unrent offices remotely via a right click menu in the corporation details tab.

Next, cloaked ships will no longer count as occupying anomalies, signatures, incursions or other deadspace complexes allowing them to properly respawn. This fix was to address a “feature” of the deadspace complex system that allowed passive economic warfare by preventing the exploration sites in an enemy’s home systems from respawning by sitting in them cloaked all day.

Lastly, under the solar system map, you’ll find a new option on the Lines tab, which allows you to display Jump Bridges belonging to your alliance. “Alliance Jump Bridge Routes” will show up as sexy, animated, curved lines on the map.

Click to enlarge

We also added an improved Jump command so that it behaved more like the Dock command. Currently, when you hit Dock, it will warp to or, approach the station you’re docking at, before finally docking to once you’re in the appropriate range. The same idea now applies to Jump, where you will Warp (or Approach) if you’re too far away to interact with the gate, and then jump through once you get there. The task asked for the same functionality for Acceleration Gates and Wormholes. Being a player myself, I instantly noticed the next logical step for a feature of this type… so I just kind of… did it. In addition to Dock, Jump, Activate Acceleration Gate, and Enter Wormhole you can also now request to Open Cargo, Scoop to Drone Bay, Scoop to Cargo Bay, Scoop to Ship Maintenance Bay and you’ll attempt to get to the correct range and do the action.

You’ll also find a couple of drone improvements on the way. Nothing is worse than warping off to find that you’ve forgotten your precious drones. Well, fret no more! You can now reconnect to lost or abandoned drones that have been left behind as long as you’re still in the ship that launched them. Right clicking on your ships right-click menu, you’ll now find a command to Reconnect to Lost Drones. Alternately, if you like keyboard shortcuts, you can map a key to this as well. In order to prevent this from being completely abused and used for evil, you’ll only be able to reconnect once a minute (this time is subject to change) and if you have more drones around than you have the ability to control at once, you get no say over which ones will come back under your control… so when you’re attempting to reconnect, make it count!

You’ll also find that when your ship is forced to make an emergency warp, your drones will attempt to return to the drone bay before you take off. Hopefully this can save you a few drones when your cat walks across the power strip.

And finally, one of my pet peeves for years now has been that missile launchers don’t show their range when you mouse over them when using the tactical overlay, so I’ve gone ahead and fixed that for you too. And while I was at it, I did some extra credit and made it so bomb launchers show the explosion radius centered where the bomb is going to land ~30km in front of your ship.

Hopefully some of these changes are things everybody can get excited about, because I’m totally stoked about them!

As a group we had a great time working on this stuff and we can’t wait for everyone to get their hands on it (though from the Test Server feedback we can see you are well on your way to enjoying it). This is just a taste of the things we did for you guys, check out the release notes for the full list. We all hope to be able to do something like this again in the not too distant future, both as developers and players.

I’m CCP Choloepus, one of the code monkeys in the Core Graphics team, and I’d like to talk about the turrets which adorn your wonderful space vessels. As some of you may have noticed on Singularity, the effects from these turrets will soon visibly fail to hit your target when the server decides that the shot went astray.

Click to enlarge

This feature has been a long time coming. It provides immediate and easily digested feedback on how combat is going, especially in larger fights when your combat log is scrolling at a furious pace, and I hope you find that it looks both exciting and visually interesting whilst doing so.

That said, we’re keeping the scope of this feature small for now. Here’s the rundown on what it doesn’t do:

• The first shot when you start your turrets cycling will always appear to hit. We’re aware that this is a silly exception to the behaviour, but it makes the feature more robust in the face of latency and there are some oddities in turret effect timing I bumped into whilst attempting a fix. We’ll definitely be working on improving this.
• Shots which miss are picking a point to aim at based on the bounding sphere of the target, which means misses might look a little too regular and vary quite a lot in how widely they miss the model. Again, this is a case where we are working towards better solutions and we hope for relatively simple but effective improvements.
• Missiles aren’t affected. The mechanics of (and code for) missile combat is very much a different kettle of squamous betentacled beasties.
• Only shots fired by or at your ship will get this treatment. The larger fleet battle around you will look like the current situation on TQ.

Click to enlarge

That last one is a biggy, and unfortunately we won’t have a better solution in place for the Winter expansion. The reason for it is pretty simple: we’re only using information that the server is already sending to your client to adjust the turret effects. This problem is hard to solve in a manner we’re really happy with.

We could make any shots which do not involve your ship miss or hit on the flip of a coin, but if it’s completely random this conveys no information. Worse, it pretends to be useful whilst actually providing misinformation, so we’re not keen on that.

We could send information about every shot to everyone in a fleet battle, but this would be a huge increase to server load and communication bandwidth to the point where Team Gridlock would (quite rightly) fire me into the sun for even suggesting it.

We could do some rough simulation of approximate miss chance client-side, but there are so many factors that could affect how your turrets perform: skills, relative velocity, hull bonuses, signature radius/resolution, turret type, ammunition/lenses, tracking enhancers/computers, tracking links, tracking scripts, rigs, implants, boosters, target painters, wormhole environmental effects… you get the idea. Some of these are known to your client, others are not and should not be available. This is probably the best avenue for continued development of the feature, but it will involve a lot more investigation to make sure we’re doing something that is reasonable, useful, and light on the client.

With these constraints in mind, this winter we aim to deliver a solid lack-of-hits for your own ship and targets, and we hope that you enjoy this.

Click to enlarge

An early version is live on the test server at the moment if you’d like to see for yourselves, or you can wait for the expansion to bring this to TQ. But in either case please leave any feedback, suggestions, and lamentation about the state of missiles in the comment thread!

May your targets always aim poorly