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

 The details for the EVE Online Alliance Tournament VIII have emerged on the official site. The blog post goes over some of the rules changes since Tournament VII. Read more below:

Along with this blog release comes the latest update to the Alliance Tournament section of the site. Cast your eyes a little bit to the left, and a little bit downwards; almost…almost…there we go! Both the rules and the format sections have been updated, so I’d like to explain some of the thought processes behind these updates.

 

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.

CCP Games has published a new developer blog describing recent updates to its sci-fi MMO, EVE Online. The post details changes to capital ships in recent months as well as those introduced in the recently released Dominion version 1.1 update.

Motherships -> Supercarriers
The biggest news is that Supercarriers will make their long-awaited debut on Tranquility. Intended to be the heavy hitters of capital ship PvP, Supercarriers will feature the following changes from their previous incarnations:

• Fighter Bombers: the only entities capable of firing the advanced new compact citadel torpedoes, a full wing of these little monsters is capable of doing twice the damage of a sieged Dreadnought. With max skills, 20 Fighter Bombers will do 8000 DPS; 10000 DPS with the Nyx. They cannot be delegated like normal Fighters so you’ll have to stay on grid to keep them on target.



• Hit Point boost: ‘Super’ capitals they shall now be. There’s no point dishing out the punishment if you can’t take it.
• Jump Range increase: advances in quantum flux hyper-spatial mechanics n’ stuff now allows these ships to travel along the same jump routes as Dreadnoughts.

CCP Games has posted a new developer blog describing recent updates to its sci-fi MMO, EVE Online. The post offers an in-depth look at effort required to revamp the visual look of planets and moons, including the new Plasma planet type added with the Dominion expansion.

Clouds
We soon realized that the clouds are the most noticeable feature of a planet and they needed to look very good. These textures are the biggest textures used by the planets, 2048×2048 pixels when your client is set to ‘High’ texture quality.

The shader starts by adding a shadow underneath the clouds to give them some depth. We have the direction to the sun in texture space so we simply make a new lookup into the cloud texture but shift it by a certain amount. We then perform a regular texture lookup into the cloud texture and add it on top.

The cloud maps each have a corresponding pole texture mapped using the pole coordinates. Where these overlap with the belly texture we combine them using a max() function. 

Light Scattering
Physical accuracy was important for us to make a believable atmosphere. Scattering controls the color of the atmosphere as well as making the light terminator creep further into the dark side of the planet, since the light is bouncing inside the atmosphere. We started by calculating the atmospheric scattering in real time, but ended on a pre-baked solution. Scattering is view dependant so we created a lookup texture where the view dependant factor is on one axis and the light direction dependant factor was on the other.

The atmosphere on the horizon was treated differently. There we have separate geometry and calculate the bulk of the scattering equations in the vertex shader, but feed the result to the pixel shader and complete the calculations there. This gives us the nice effect that light behind the planet will still scatter towards the camera.

Let there be city lights
Some of the Temperate planets are inhabited and their cities can be seen from space. We use one texture covered in UV texture coordinate patches, spherical mapped, to provide surrogate texture coordinates. The texture coordinates fetched are used to look up into a texture atlas. We then mask the fringes of these patches with a separate grayscale texture. The UV patch textures were baked in Maya.

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.

EVE Online: Dominion

CCP Games

Patch Notes:

FIXES

Skills

• Partially trained skills will now be reported correctly through the EVE API.

Player Owned Structures, Outposts, and Stations

• Fixed the description of the Sovereignty Blockade Units to reflect the correct onlining time of three, not six, hours.

Agents & Missions

• Quitting a mission from Karde Romu would sometimes cause the journal to cease functioning. This has been fixed.
• Completing an epic arc now properly gives faction standings reward.

 EVE Online Dominion is now live. One of the major new features included is the client repair tool. Devs recently took some time to talk about the many ways in which the tool is used. Check it out!

 

 

With EVE Online: Dominion about to be released, and most of the features covered in blogs and forum threads, one of the new upcoming Engineering improvements we’re including is the awesome Client Repair Tool.

It does what it says on the tin; it repairs your client.