Principles of Industry in EVE Online

This is not a feature blog, but rather a view of the bigger picture, of what we're up to and what you can expect out of it.

Coming into this industry work, we had two main goals. Firstly, industry should be easy to understand. Once you've decided what you want to do, it should be obvious how you do it. The UI should be easier for you to read and easier for you to use, and it should be simple for you to understand the consequences of your actions. If you want to do an invention job, for example, you select a blueprint, see what materials you need, what skills are affecting the outcomes, and what your chances of success are, and then just click the "OK, invent me this" button so you can get on with your next job. The math is simpler, the factors affecting each job are clear and consistently presented, and every click represents an actual decision to be made.

Secondly, industry should be interesting and skillful. You should feel that *you* are "good at industry", rather than just that your character is. You're good at industry because you make good decisions, you outsmart your competitors, you've invested in the right places and you're ahead of the market. You invest in the long term, and those investments pay off, and you stay involved because there's always something new to do, some new market to conquer, some new tricks to learn, some new process to master.

EVE industry generally treads a different path to comparable professions in other games. You're not crafting that one perfect weapon, trying to work out the perfect ratios of rare ingredients, because you're not a master craftsman, you're a master industrialist, and you work at /scale/. And in the new system, that's where your challenges will be: how to scale up, how to spread out, where to settle and when to move.

Your sums will drift over time, as the activities of other players around you affect your costs and your outputs, and you'll have to figure out who to team up with and who to compete against. Maybe you'll find a quiet backwater system and hire mercenaries to keep others out and your costs down. Maybe you'll cut a deal with some fledgling nullsec group, trading arms for facility access. Or maybe you'll pick a high-value system and form a local industrial cartel to control the system and outbid those heathens in Jita for the best manufacturing teams. And you'll always be asking "am I working in the right place?", but the answer will only rarely be "no, I should move" - because industry works on a slower cycle, and because in teams and player interactions you have the tools to change the answer if you don't like it.

This is the world we're trying to create, the industry that New Eden deserves: one where you're in charge, where you're facing a new challenge every day, and where you have all the freedom in the world to decide how to solve it.

Crius will be the first step in this process that you'll experience, laying the groundwork for future development. You'll see further improvements to invention and reverse engineering in follow-up releases, along with tweaks and enhancements to the Crius release, and possibly a few extra surprises - all aligned around giving you more control and more options, making the work easier and the decisions harder.

This blog is a bit of an experiment, to see if this kind of blog is a useful addition to our usual feature-heavy ones. If it goes down well, we’ll probably do more, and if you think there are ways we can do it better, please let us know in the comments and we’ll tune future iterations accordingly!

Build safe,
-Greyscale

 

 

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Testing EVE Online’s graphics with ‘EVE Probe’

Greetings!

Team RnB is hard at work on EVE Probe – a standalone application that uses Trinity, the graphics engine from EVE, and will act as our test bed for optimizations and new features. CCP Snorlax had a presentation on this at Fanfest this year (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apyD43WQjQ4) – if you missed it there you can follow the link or read all about it here.

Know how sometimes you get crashes that we can´t reproduce? It may be a full crash to desktop, or it could be the display driver becoming unresponsive and recovering after some time.

We hate that as much as you do!

Part of the problem is that computer games, as opposed to console games, don’t really run on a fixed platform. EVE runs under Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 – the graphics hardware from Nvidia, AMD and Intel comes in a wide variety, and their drivers are updated frequently. Then let us not forget about the Mac, where we even have the added complexity of running under an emulation layer. We’ve counted 855 different GPUs in use by EVE players.

We simply cannot test all these configurations. Even if we had the hardware/software setup to cover a sizeable portion of these setups, we wouldn’t have the manpower to manually test every release on all of them.

This is where EVE Probe comes in.

EVE Probe plays back animated scenes using the very same graphics engine as the EVE client, but everything is deterministic and not dependent on player input. When it is ready, we will offer it for download so you can run it on your machine – with your graphics hardware and your exact configuration. EVE Probe then gathers performance data, such as frame times and memory usage and sends that back to our server, along with your machine specs and display settings. This gives us valuable feedback on the performance of our engine on a much wider variety of computer configurations than we could ever hope to cover in-house.

Note that this data is sent anonymously and we don’t collect any data that could be used to identify any individuals – all we care about are the machine specs.

Moving forward, we will release new features and optimizations through EVE Probe first, before they are ever used in the EVE client itself. With your cooperation, we can get much better test coverage of new features and optimizations, on a wider variety of graphics hardware and software configurations. This will result in a more stable and better performing EVE client.

EVE Probe will use the same crash handling mechanism as we’ve built into the EVE client. The crash dumps we get back from EVE clients are useful in helping us fix crash bugs, but often they are hard to decipher without some context – we don’t know what was going on when it crashed, we don’t have logs to give us some background and don’t know how to reproduce it. If EVE Probe crashes we will have this context, as the playback is deterministic. This will help us greatly in reducing crashes in the graphics engine.

When will it ship? When it’s ready! We feel it’s too soon to commit to a date, but it will be this summer. We’ve started using EVE Probe internally for automated tests, and are using it to make our lives easier when doing more detailed performance measurements. We’ve just started handing it out to select people outside the team for feedback and will do a full internal release in the upcoming weeks. Once we’ve ensured that the user experience is smooth and our backend infrastructure for gathering data is solid we’ll start rolling EVE Probe out to a wider audience.

 

 

 

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