EVE Online fans will be pleased to note that the latest EVE novel, The Burning Life by Hjalti Danielsson is now on UK shelves and will hit the US market on March 30th. Grab a preview of the book below:

“You died not when you expired, but when your life was neatly packed away.”

 

That’s at the start of the novel. Actually, a lot of people die very soon after, and not very neatly, either.

The EVE Online team has announced an alpha stress test of EVE Gate, which will be introduced with Singularity. Grab the details of the event below:

On March 23, we will announce access to a public stress test version of EVE Gate which will be connected to Singularity for all of you to log into and look around. What is critical for everyone to understand is that the intent of this test is to stress the underlying hardware and key architectural components. This will allow us to identify and address bottlenecks and weaknesses well before launch and to make sure we have adequate hardware in place for all the pounding you folks will put on it once you are all browsing EVE Gate routinely from work (when your boss isn’t looking). We will be watching your comments closely for feedback as well as closely logging and monitoring the behavior of the software and hardware under load. You can help us out greatly just by logging in, browsing around and trying the application out.

 The latest EVE Online developer blog is a great treatise about upcoming changes in the works for the Tyrannis expansion to allow players to have interaction with -all- planets in game. Keep reading!

 

 

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

EVE Online developers have posted a new blog related to recent complaints of fleet lag since the last update. First off, devs want players to know, “We hear you!”. Find out more below:

Following the release of the Dominion expansion we started to get reports from players about an increase in “fleet lag.” Before we go any further, I would like to assure everyone that a taskforce of developers has been working on this continuously, but tracking down the source has proven a very difficult task.

 

So, what is the problem?

“Lag” is an ambiguous term and can refer to many things. The graphics in the client might be slowing it down, the network might be congested or a host of other issues may be coming into play. We have spent a long time trying to reproduce the issue on the test servers as well as monitoring fights as they have been unfolding on Tranquility, where we have received help from the players in the form of testing and bug reports. You might see names like “CCP Atlas”, “CCP GingerDude” and “CCP Warlock” poking about in Local. Don’t be alarmed, we are simply monitoring the node, looking for glitches. There are senior software engineers spending their evenings and weekends on Tranquility monitoring and measuring since we have not been able to see issues when testing because the sheer number of people required to trigger the problems and the specific ‘usage pattern’ of the game systems in question are outside what can currently be tested in the lab (although this is something that is being worked on).

What we are looking at now specifically is the fact that the performance of the sol nodes (the computers in the clusters handling the solar systems) appears to be worse than before. Even though CPU across the cluster has not increased with the Dominion expansion, each reinforced node is no longer able to handle the same number of people fighting as gracefully as it did before.

EVE Online players are spoiled by a dedicated development team. The bunch charged with making *cues Godlike voice* AWESOME planets is no exception. Find out how it’s done! 

 

The scrum team responsible for the updated planet graphics in Dominion was Team Oli Dan. Here we will explain how the planets came into existence; but the team also redid the star field background, created sovereignty structures, fighter bombers, and factional ships.

We have several types of planets in EVE: Gas giants, Temperate (Earthlike), Barren, Ocean, Storm, Ice and Lava. In addition we have moons, which from a programmer’s perspective are also planets. A new type was added in Dominion, the mysterious Plasma planets.

In order to make an omelet you have to break some eggs

Height maps

Almost all the shaders use a height map at its base and this texture determines much of the surface features. It is generated by blending two textures together to get variations. The textures are grayscale and square, but they are combined with different scale and position. Our artists created different types of height maps for the different worlds we were creating. For instance, the Ice planet textures are very cracked and craggy, while the Temperate planet textures are based on height maps of Earth.

 

And here’s what makes it unique: It has it’s own special probe launcher (for wormholes) and Sleeper NPC’s won’t shoot it in the same way that all NPCs won’t shoot pods. While flying the Zephyr is as easy as a shuttle, using the launcher will require some core probes and training of the skill Astrometrics to level 1. You can find both on the market or get the Astrometrics skill book by doing EVE Online: Dominion’s new exploration tutorial.

Beginning Dec 18th 2009, you will find the ability to redeem it on your account login screen. You can then assign it to a particular character and the Intaki Syndicate will deliver it to your hangar bay. You will be able to redeem the holiday ship once per active (not trial) account and will no longer be available after Jan 6th 2010, so make sure you log in to receive yours.

Read more about the Zephyr at the link above.