What? Launcher?

The EVE Online Launcher is a new little program that makes sure your EVE client is up to date and is always ready for flying into space. You might think that the Launcher is just supposed to launch EVE Online, but that’s just one piece of the puzzle. Its primary function (not counting launching the game) is to update EVE Online on your computer whenever we put out a release, patch or fix. It’s the first step in a big overhaul of our updating and patching process which enables us to get smaller updates out to you faster. The Launcher also gives you something to read over while your client is being updated by showing you the latest news and dev blogs. CCP Topknot wrote a blog about the Launcher explaining this point some time ago and you can read it here.

Ah! So when is it coming?

The release date of the EVE Online Launcher is moving ever closer. We are hoping to move completely over to using the new Launcher as the update mechanism for the EVE Online around the middle of March.

Being careful is the primary concern when we do the release of the Launcher, which is why you don’t have it already, as it changes some fundamental and ancient things that have not been touched in quite some time, such as the update mechanism of the EVE client. After all, we don’t want players to end up with a broken client (in which case, not that it ever happens at all ever , you can run the repair tool).

To sum up what the EVE Online Launcher does: The EVE Online Launcher uses sophisticated lines of computer code crafted from the bones of Pterodactyls and varnished with the tears of a three-legged octopus to update EVE Online on your computer … and to launch it. If you are into sophisticated things like opera and hamburgers and want to try the Launcher out ASAP, you can try it out on Singularity right now. We welcome your feedbackwith open arms.

This is the current version of The Launcher on Singularity

This is closer to the complete look of The Launcher when it goes live for Tranquility

What about the future, man?

The Launcher also allows us to create a platform for us to build upon; we’re currently investigating options such as a staged installation process, allowing new users to get into the game faster, as well as integrating peer-to-peer technology for downloads, rather than relying solely upon our content delivery network.

In addition to the above, another idea we’ve been tossing around,is to allow you to log-in with your character in the Launcher itself, perhaps giving you limited gameplay (such as corporate forum access, chat channel interfaces and similar) within the Launcher while it is running upates. Nothing concrete yet but it gives you an idea of the potential for the launcher.

All of this really just hides the primary goal of the Launcher; to overhaul the patching and update mechanism to allow us to deliver smaller updates, more often, reducing the burden and impact of major releases. With an easier deployment pipeline for us and a simpler update process for you, updates can be rolled out in much more granularity than is possible at present, allowing important fixes to propagate to the client in a much more timely fashion.

First thing’s first, though. For now, the dreams can wait. In this initial release of the EVE Online Launcher, the intent is to keep things simple. No flashy stuff, thank you very much. Just a Launcher that updates and launches EVE Online and does that well.

Improving quality. How’d it get burned? How’d it get burned? HOW’D IT GET BURNED?

Another thing we are introducing in the Launcher is the automatic detection and reporting of errors. You might have seen CCP Redundancy’s blog  where he describes a system for automatic crash reporting. We have a similar thing in the Launcher, where we catch errors happening inside the Launcher code and report those back to our office. This is so that we can be quicker to detect and resolve issues that come up. You of course have the option to opt out of this by unticking the checkbox under settings in the Launcher. But why would you not want to help out by improving the Launcher together with us?

Those interested can see what is being sent by reviewing the contents of launcher.log in the launcher\cache\ folder.

More explanations, but with dots:

• Earlier versions of the EVE Online Launcher did not download data into a neat, compartmentalized patch file. This made players who wanted to be able to download a patch once, then use that same patch on multiple clients very unhappy. These same players have absolutely no reason at all to not be happy! They can now easily download and then move patches between EVE client folders or even between computers using a USB stick or by other more sophisticated means, like via a locally hosted FTP file server.
• If you want to connect to a different server you just use your /server:87.237.38.50 (for Singularity). Double click the icon and you will get patched up to Singularity! It is however highly recommended that you don’t do this to your Tranquility install and that you only do this to a copy of your EVE directory.
• You can chose to only show the Launcher if there is an update to the game.
• One reason for using a Launcher for doing updates is we can get away from having to start EVE Online client up, then shut it down while the update is being applied and then starting EVE Online back up. It’s wasteful, and a little bit confusing, to have to spend time on starting up the game, in order to detect we need a patch and to download it, then to shut it down immediately afterwards so that the patch can be applied. With the Launcher, updates are applied to the EVE Online client before it is ever started up, thus reducing the overall time spend patching by just a little bit.
• It has a built-in download manager, ie. downloads using multiple connections to the internet in order to maximize bandwidth usage and resumes previously incomplete downloads automatically without giving you lip.
• Is incredibly fashionable, enough so to be graced with the ability to run on Mac OS X. Yes, that’s right, Mac users!

Give us your feedback

As always, we very much appreciate your feedback, so please log on Singularity and try it out. Tell us what you think, what you want improved, what future features you’d like to see and how we can make it better than it is! Any bugs or issues you find, please submit bug reports or write about them in this thread.

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.

Following the reorganization that recently occurred within EVE, we decided to scale down development of avatar based gameplay and focus the bulk of our feature teams on spaceships. However, we still believe in the vision to bring your characters fully into the world of EVE, it will simply take longer than we expected at first. To achieve that, avatars need to be making a meaningful contribution to the EVE universe. So we put one team on a “slow burn” addressing those issues. There are other core duties as well, like UI fixes and things that take priority, such as outstanding defects on Tranquility.

Team Avatar is responsible for two things:

• Defining the future vision of avatar based gameplay based on our experiences
• Maintaining current avatar related gameplay in EVE, including the character creator and the Captain’s Quarters.

Doing minor fixes and thinking about sleeve tattoos

In regards to the character creator, right now we are focused on doing minor fixes here and there. We’re improving the way you use the four temporary portrait save slots in the posing mode, allowing you to click a portrait to smoothly transition back to it. You can even use the F1-F4 keys to do it. We take no responsibility for what happens if you press F9 to hide the UI and jam on F1-F4 to make some awesome machinima with saved poses. We also did a small fix to the way you tuck your shoes and shirts, that used to be hard to see. We are also thinking about more tattoos!

Do you often dream of a big tattoo but worry what mom will think?

Let‘s take another look at that plan

After giving you access to your own Captains Quarters we had been planning to roll out corporation owned and run establishments with contraband trading, group boosters and gambling minigames. That got put on hold due to our changed focus. Rather than stubbornly keeping to that plan, we have decided to go back to the drawing board and examine better: what delivers a meaningful experience? What provides replayability, fits into existing paradigms already established in the game, provides opportunity for collaboration and/or violent griefing, and feels like proper sandbox EVE?

Identify gameplay and prototype

First off, we are identifying a few core ideas that have actually been bounced around for quite a while, but fell by the wayside due to scoping and our strong focus on providing a proving ground for our technology.   We will then create playable gameplay prototypes of gameplay features and try them out within the team, and within the company. These prototypes are likely to be too raw to share with the greater player base but we will keep you updated with our progress and will share things we think are appropriate. The purpose of all this prototyping is to make sure we provide a strong vision for avatar gameplay, have a good demonstrable idea of why it is engaging and better understand the technology we will need to create in order to make it a reality.

When will it be ready?

You mean avatars in EVE? In a way, we’re not going to wait until it’s all perfect and the interior of every ship, station, structure and city in the entire EVE Universe has been modeled, but rather when we have a feature that is its own functional ecosystem of gameplay then hooks into the greater ecosystem of EVE as a whole, and it provides good replayability. There have to be ways to get better at it, ways to profit from it but also ways to take risks and lose. Once we have that, then we have something we can start sharing. It’s a different approach than before. It means you won’t get it as early, but what you will get will be more ready. But it won’t be “done” in the sense that we’re done with it, because with any online game, it’s never really done. When you first ship it, that’s when you begin, and then follows the conversation with you, the players, on how we can improve and iterate on it.

Your Feedback matters

In identifying our future path, we are very keen on hearing your ideas and concerns on the issue. We have been following discussion on the forums, like this thread and also look forward to discussions at the roundtable on the topic at our upcoming fanfest. In the end, it’s your usage and enjoyment of the feature that matters the most.  Everything else comes second (or third).

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

Hello again everyone. It’s time to to look back at the last few months and then take a quick peak into the near future for the pilots of EVE Online. Last November’s release of Crucible was a key moment for us. Not only did it herald a shift in focus in what types of releases we were going to deliver to you, it also coincided with significant changes in how we, CCP, go about making the game we all love. There is plenty of detail about all of this in this dev Blog from CCP Zulu and in the December CSM minutes. In short, we are focusing the majority of our efforts on the “core” game of EVE whilst taking some time to give some TLC to our own internal structure, processes and tools.

The good thing is that the first big mountain of work on our reorganization has been completed, although there will be more change for us ahead. After the initial disruption that an effort like this always creates, all our developers are back in the serious business of making EVE better and better. You have already seen some of the results of this with January’s 1.1 point release for Crucible which brought balancing changes for Assault Frigates, Neocom improvements, Factional Warfare increments and a host of other changes all designed around making it a better experience to play EVE. Time Dilation has brought a level playing field in super-populated server situations and Team Gridlock have now turned their attention to performance improvements for the client, having recently released some of their work in Crucible 1.2.

A picture from a recent Time Dilated fleet fight courtesy of Deathcrow (click to enlarge)

You will also have noticed an increase in the pace of small targeted patches and hotfixes, many in response to the reports we are getting in from new back-end systems we put in place to help us react to issues faster.

In addition to the many small fixes and improvements we’ve deployed, we have also released a completely revamped eveonline.com website, designed to lead new pilots into the wonders that await them in the game. Poke around with it if you haven’t yet. It’s complemented by a simultaneous release of an ever improving community website for those who have been in the game for a while longer.

That’s actually quite a bit when you consider it has only been two and a half months since Crucible launched. However, it is time to look to the future and see what it brings.

EVE’s developers are really getting into their stride for our upcoming releases. I recently emerged from many demos where the teams have been showing off their progress from their second sprint (short development cycle). I have to say that even at this early stage I think we have some great features, content and improvements for you coming up over the next 4-5 months. We are hoping to have a number of small releases as we go through February, March and April culminating in our major, war-themed release coming just before the summer, EVE Online: Inferno

The next few months will be spent reinvigorating Concord-sanctioned warfare, giving tools and a framework to groups who wish to take advantage of these conflicts both directly and indirectly. We are also looking to introduce many new things which will mix up all forms of combat in a way not seen for a long time. Factional Warfare will also be seeing changes to make it much more relevant and fun by giving real reasons to fight for your faction.

As we continue development there will also be smaller changes, improvements and usability fixes, and we will not forsake our game performance focus. We will be making some changes and additions to our avatar technology and many other parts of the game. The websites will continue their metamorphoses and there may even be sight of more developer events on TQ.

Finally, we will revealing more concrete steps in the link between EVE and DUST 514, bringing an unprecedented level of collaboration, conflict and purpose to both games living in the same EVE Universe.

Am I playing my cards close to my chest? Of course. I’m keeping details light right now as it is still early on in the development process. I’d also much rather let the people putting all the hard work into making these features a reality have the chance to unveil things. Expect dev blogs, forum posts, interviews and video blogs packed full of information in the coming weeks and months.

Of course, if you want to witness the next big reveal of plans for EVE Online: Inferno, then you can hear it in person by coming to Fanfest in March. There you will be able to get quite cozy with your favorite devs and find out the real lowdown on EVE. This year Fanfest will be at a bigger, better venue right in the social epicenter of downtown Reykjavik, allowing us to bring MOAR EVE to Fanfest than ever before as well as some sneak previews of DUST 514, including the first-ever hands-on demo.. I can’t wait for the event and I hope to talk spaceships with a lot of you in person.

Time to sum up what has become a giant tease of a blog. A lot of work was put into YourEVE by everyone at CCP over the last few months and we all hope to continue momentum into what is shaping up to be the best year ever for EVE Online. The changes we painfully  undertook appear to already be paying dividends via the Crucible releases.. More importantly though, I hope each one of you is experiencing benefits from our recent releases and that our plan going forward will bring even more of the same.  I thank you for being here with us as we co-develop EVE with you, the greatest gaming community ever assembled. I trust that, come EVE Online: Inferno, you will be having the grandest time blowing each other up and/or profiting from it.

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.

Apart from the obvious fact that the Impairor, the Velator, the Ibis and the Reaper hold great importance being the first ships any new pilot is granted upon being born into the EVE Universe, they hold a special place in all our hearts.

The rookie ships are being re-designed and given a long overdue makeover. This is part of our ongoing effort to continously update the art assets in EVE Online and making sure it remains the most beautiful MMO out there.

We wanted to show you the new rookie ships, and use the opportunity to give you a little insight into the process behind adding new assets to the game. Enjoy!

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.

We proudly present the latest work from our video team, The Awakening.

EVE is a very unique game and it enables players to have a lot of fun even if they have never touched some game mechanics. We want to give new players the best possible experience from the very beginning and lay the groundwork for an enjoyable time in New Eden.  As you can see in the below scientific graph, EVE rewards those who accumulate “EVE knowledge” in a way other games do not.

This Player Experience team will focus on making EVE more accessible to players without dumbing down the game. So the main area for us is naturally the tutorial and everything around it, but we will also be focusing on what happens before a player logs in and after the player completes the tutorials and wishes to explore the universe during their first few months in New Eden.

We want to give the new players a smooth and consistent online gaming experience, where they are comfortable with the game mechanics and know what they wish to be in New Eden. We aim to teach new players how to play EVE in a way which is gripping, exciting, clear and most importantly FUN. We want players to have increased social interaction with the community and corporations in the beginning. We wish to give new players more direction and the understanding of what they can become, and guide them towards that goal. We want to give the players a chance to experience the coolness of EVE even in the beginning and make them understand all the potential within the game. In short, we want to make the first days, weeks and months in EVE enjoyable and not just something ‘you have to plough through in order to get to the good stuff’.  Having said that, we have no intention to make the game easier in any way, we are not looking into simplifying EVE Online, nor do we want to tell the players exactly what they should do or give them a step by step guide for wormhole mining for example. Rather, the approach we are taking is to make it easier for new players to learn and understand the different mechanics and features of EVE.

To begin with the Player Experience team will do research to identify where and why people lose interest in EVE. We will look at a wide range of statistics, player and trial surveys, conduct focus group tests and we would also really like to hear ideas from within the EVE community as well. Some problems are very obvious whilst other factors are more subtle. In the short term we might be able to do small changes to the current new player experience, but long term we are aiming to overhaul and redesign the whole experience.

We invite you to pour your heart (or guts) out and tell us what you think is good or bad with the current new player experience and what you think could be done about the problems. Both small and big ideas are welcome, especially if you have your first weeks freshly in mind. What small things do you think could be done to the current tutorial or do you think it should be binned and a new one built from the ground up? What would your ideal EVE tutorial look like? Let us know what you think.

Once we have a solid plan together we will be sharing them with you for more feedback. Till then, fly safe and go easy on the new guys.

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.

CCP Veritas here from the BRAND NEW Team Gridlock.  I know, I know, it was just a couple days ago when I was here blogging about Time Dilation which is a thing that the old Team Gridlock did, but there was a period where there wasn’t one but now there is again and let me tell ya we’ve been busy, folks.  We’ve got a couple new faces – CCP Snorlax and CCP Colgate, both experienced veterans when it comes to all things client. The servers are doing much better these days, so the performance target has moved over to that little piece of tech you all use to fly spaceships around with, making them excellent additions to the crew.

CCP Masheen posted up a blog asking for ideas on how we can make the client better, which has given us some fantastic targets to go after.  But while that was going on, we were already busy hacking at some overgrown forests in the UI and the results are coming out in Crucible 1.2.  Highlights include:

MORE CONSISTENT UI PERFORMANCE!

If you’re a fan of having a helluva lot of windows open, man is this patch going to own for you.  Using something akin to magic, we’ve made it so setups like this have about the same load as only having a couple windows open:

BETTER FONT PROCESSING AND RENDERING!

So yeah, there’s a lot of text in a lot of places.  It’ll process and render faster now, which is like a fine glazing of winsauce over everything.

MORE RESPONSIVE OVERVIEW!

This beasty had a big target painted on its back and we’re not very sporting so we kicked this thing around a lot.  The overview is now much less of a performance hog, so folks doing large fights and such should see a respectable boost to their FPS.  And in case you’re feeling left out ‘cause you’re not into blobs and stuff, we upped the overview’s target refresh rate from .4hz to 1hz – that’s from once every 2.5 seconds to once per second for you non-hertz-aware types.  It’s a hell of a lot less spiky too, which makes being around lots of things a lot less like being punched in the face repeatedly.  It feels pretty good bro, you’ll see.

Allow me to use the communication form of my people: the graph.  This here is a raw frame-time clock in millisecondsbefore and after our improvements– lower meaning faster:

These charts come from a laboratory-style setup where there’s just a few hundred random ships sitting about with no special overview settings at all. The improvements are even more noticeable when the ships around you have pilots in them with relationships to you causing various colors to be splatted all over your screen like a Pollock painting.

With the increased update rate, we made one super tiny functional change which you’ll probably notice and hopefully like – the sorting of the overview will lock when you hover over it.  Previously it would freeze if you held your lock button, but with things moving around quicker it felt better to lock sooner than that.

BONUS GOODNESS:

Since the overview and brackets share a lot of code, we made them a bit faster by accident.  I hope you don’t mind.

All this is headed your way very soon. Like, really soon. Okay fine it’s Thursday the 16th of February, 2012. Stay tuned for more coming from us as we march our way towards a smoother more gooder client that shows you information faster.

Fly Fast,

~CCP Veritas

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.

Planetary Interaction

There was an average of 64,840 planetary export transactions per day, or 2,701 per hour. Of that, 26,693 were in high sec, 6,936 in low sec, 15,844 in null sec and 15,366 in wormhole space. An average of 64,627 characters exported goods from a planet each month, with the annual total being 195,449 different characters.

The top five systems in empire space for planetary interaction and the average number of export transactions per day were:

Barren class planets were unsurprisingly the most utilised. Average number of export transactions per day per planet type:

Production

A lot was built! Just under 62 billion missiles. That’s an average of 7.08 million an hour. I’m pretty certain that’s more missiles than the Persians had arrows. 13.2 million ships, too – an hourly average of 1,506.

Average production per hour by hull size and tech level:

Average production per hour by hull size and race. This excludes any ships not belonging to the four main races, hence the lower totals:

Production of ships per hour by sec group:

The top 15 ships built in 2011 and their total, excluding shuttles and frigates:

Also, our congratulations to the mighty Dreddit corporation for producing more Rifters than anyone else in 2011! 7,829 of them to be precise.

People blowing each other up

In 2011, 5,381,636 kill reports were generated; that’s an average of 14,744 per day or one every 5.86 seconds. 65% of these kill reports were caused by damage inflicted by a player, whilst non-player controlled entities (from Serpentis to CONCORD) were responsible for the remaining 35%.

Average destruction rate in PVP of the various hull sizes:

By tech level:

By race, excluding rookie ships and capsules:

Overall, 576,860 different characters lost ships to non-players in 2011, and 422,801 lost ships in PVP scenarios. 155,087 characters scored at least one final blow, too!

The Market

To finish this blog off – If there’s one big thing in EVE, it would have to be the market. In total in 2011, 348,483,735 market transactions were performed with a total combined trade value of 2,692,367,631,609,430 ISK. That’s a lot. To break that down, 2011 on average:

Here’s hoping for an even more productive and explosive 2012! If stats like these interest you, don’t forget to follow my twitter account and the comments thread of this blog. I’ll try to answer as many of the questions that come up as I can.

At the same time the new website will be revealed, the resources and information which players have sought on the EVE Online site, will be made available on a new community website which should prove to be quite an improvement in terms of browsing and locating what you need.

We look forward to showing you the two websites and wish you all a great weekend!