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Xwing vs TieFighter style combat in an MMO context where you can upgrade your ship.

Welcome to EVE Online.

Read the history and current mythology of the Caldari State in Eve-Online. It is where we are headed. Here

please correct me if i'm wrong and provide an example of how an ATC system could be used 'at home'

One word: gaming.

And while we're on the subject, I'm absolutely certain that an open-source trig library like the phenomenal one that must be present in EVE Online would be a fantastic addition to the free (as in liberty) gaming community.

he genre's usability kings, EVE Online and World of Warcraft

You've got to be shitting me. Surely you mean World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online, instead.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a bigger fan of EVE than World of Warcraft. But the EVE GUI has been shit since inception. And Customer UI suggestions go completely ignored for literally years , and that's just one thread that was alive for years with no sign of improvement.

EVE is wonderfully good at many things (nowhere else will you hear the term "pvp shakes"), and I've been in battles of over 1000 players with the game completely playable, but the UI?! That's their biggest failing.

But that's just it... what makes an MMO any more "adult" than Cowboys & Indians in the first place?

As an avid EVE player, I see plenty of adult activities ingame. I see managers getting bossed around by a 20 year old who's still in school, drill sergeants taking orders from housewives, etc. People invest serious time and effort into achieving certain goals, with the very real possibility of another group of people then showing up and turning the first group's accomplishment into a bunch of shiny pixels depicting an explosion.

Is it all a big waste of time? Perhaps, but then again so is sitting in front of a tv several hours every evening. And it's a lot more fun to sit around chatting, playing and sharing interests with people from the other side of the globe. Playing cowboys and indians is a lot more fun if the other guy is an actual indian. Now if only we could get the whole thing with those damn timezones sorted out :/

I agree with what you said. I think the real problem is that not all changes are innovations. For example, I've played Eve Online, a massive multiplayer internet spaceships game. They produce "expansions" every 3-6 months which add substantial new content, UI changes, and boosts and nerfs. They have a serious problem with QA. It is common for new UI changes to be broken in some easy to see way. For example, some time ago they introduced a feature to resize windows. The problem was that the window would sometimes automatically resize itself in an unpredictable way when new windows were opened. In the worst case, with a lot of windows open, I'd see all my windows shuffle and resize themselves when I open a single window. It would undo several minutes of work, getting the windows just right. Even now, new windows will resize themselves from the default for no apparent reason. A couple of QA people could have found this behavior in about 15-30 minutes of work. There's no excuse for it.

Another example was the way Eve Online handled "missions" (their version of quests in MUDs and related games). Recently a new change resulted in significantly more work and waiting for the user. When it first came out, the change also cluttered the mission journal with extraneous missions and mail with extraneous agents complaining that you weren't doing their missions. Some good QA (quality analysis) would have caught that as well. Now, they've pulled back some of those changes, but the new interface is less useful than the old interface. I have no idea what they thought they were doing here. Note that neither of these changes actually furthers the game play. The users didn't need or want resizing windows, they didn't need a new, clumsier user interface for missions.

Finally, Eve Online has the cynical habit of overnerfing various technologies and styles of play. Unlike many games, players can switch between styles of play fairly fluidly. There's no rigid class structure forcing players to be or do just one thing. Still there's numerous cases where they've radically changed game balance. I believe this is so that they can feed some action to the industry players in the game. Every time, game play changes, there's a massive shuffling in the industrial base to produce the relevant goods.

So to summarize, there are changes that could be innovations, if only the Eve Online developers had their act together such as the UI changes I mentioned. But there appears to be little consideration of why to implement these changes nor much in the way of QA. This resulted in a worsening of the game experience and hence would not be an innovation. Second, there are changes that seem rather pointless at first glance, namely the endless and game imbalancing nerfing and boosting, but that actually has a positive effect due to the activity it injects into the game. I'm not sure whether to call those innovations.

Anyway, this brings me up to my point. Namely, when people oppose "innovation" in games, I think they're really opposing change that harms game play. In other words, not all change is innovation.

Mrr, all this talk of naval warfare sort of makes me want to play EVE.

Except that EVE is pretty terrible at doing any kind of tactical combat (the best description I've read is that EVE is basically paper-rock-scissors in space).

Could somebody please paste the artical in here for the benefit of us poor sods working behind work proxy filters? :)

Here you go! http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=626

The eve forums are pretty good at providing help.

One other commenter to your post mentioned the eve wiki available through the In Game Browser (IGB). It's not my favorite, but it does have the eve-online database behind it. Other wikis include www.eve-wiki.net (my favorite), as well as one run through wikia (eve.wikia.com). Each of these provides links to yet more eve resource sites.

The advantage of the wikis, of course, is that when you find your answer through other means, you can add that information to the wiki for the next poor lost soul looking for help.

!!!JUST SO EVERYONE GETS IT CLEAR!!!

GoonSwarm did NOT infiltrate Band of Brothers or the Holding Corporation, what happened was Haargoth Agamar, the man who disbanded it, had joined a Alt Account into a goonswarm Corporation, but was kicked as a spy. he then revealed that he was a Director in the Black Nova Corp, and he gave The Mittani(GoonSwarm spy) login details to the forums. he let Haargoth stay, and then he revealed that he had a director alt in Tin Foil, the holding corp.

Before Haargoth Agamar left Black Nova Corp, he emptied the wallet (about 15 Billion dollars worth of ISK) stole their capital fleet (about 15 fully fitted and rigged Dreadnoughts) and stole several other various items, like POS Fuel and Strontium Clathrates(Dreadnought "Siege" Fuel) before kicking whoever he could from Black Nova Corp, and closing the Alliance. Haargoth and his alt, who he originally intended to join Igneous Auctorita, are now in GoonFleet.

with Band of Brothers disbanded, the Sovreignty they once held is gone, and they have reformed under the flag of "KenZoku" which from what im told means "Sword Family" or "Brotherhood of the Sword". KenZoku has recalled all friendly forces in the Greater BOB Community, or GBC, to defend their space, which has been invaded by everyone in EVE, from Morsus Mihi, Razor Alliance, Legion of xXDEATHXx, Red Alliance, GoonSwarm, Pandemic Legion, and everyone who wanted space and has enough money to lay down a POS.

the forces defending bob are doing a rather stoic job in my opinion (im neutral in this, so dont accuse me of being biased) and the Forces defending Delve, Querious, and parts of Period Basis are: Executive Outcomes, KenZoku, Southern Cross Alliance, Axiom Empire, x13, G00DFELLA's, Skunk-Works, Beach Boys, and other small alliances.

chat logs can be found here
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=991219

-TerranRaida (i forgot my password and cant retrieve it right now..)

Considering how they have trouble getting stuff right in general, no big surprizes.
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=975896

What made Ultima Online successful? It was not your run of the mill RPG. It had near total character freedom. You could be a warrior one day, mage the next.

This is one of the reasons I enjoy Eve Online. Any character can, in time, learn to do anything in the game. You're not stuck in a certain linear path of progression. I have been playing this game for a year and a half so far, and there are still tons of things that I haven't done. This, after vowing never to pay a monthly fee to play a game. (o;

Your illegitimate isk sales numbers are nonsensical. The legal means of buying isk is cheaper. Why would you pay $35 for 450m and risk getting banned when you can pay $35 for 600m and _zero_ risk of a ban?

Python is absolutely unusable on real world projects (any project where you aren't the sole developer) due to that indentation crap.

Would you mind repeating that? I don't think the guys developing the following projects heard you:

• A good chunk of Google
• EVE Online
• The majority of YouTube
• Freevo
• A bunch of KDE Software

I could go on... but you get the point.

If your software team is having problems with the significance of white spaces in Python, my bet would be that, no offense, the team was to blame.

The trick is to coordinate the "white space rules" between members of the team. If it can't pull that one off, I wouldn't trust them to write code for a production system anyways.

Actually the EVE-Online community, including devs are really gonna try to make AI happen in NPC encounters: http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=917074

I think the current apex of cooperative games has to be Eve Online (genre: massively multiplayer internet spaceships game) At first glance, it doesn't seem that suitable. It's pvp-oriented, with nonconsensual pvp even in the supposedly safest parts of the game (well once you're flying in space, technically anyone can attack you though there are consequences in the securer regions, namely dying in 10-20 seconds due to massive law enforcement retaliation). Scams are allowed and the game admins will not compensate you unless the loss in question can be shown to be due to a game failing. The secure regions are known collectively as "empire" and there are some repercussions to attacking other players in these regions which can range from certain death to security rating penalties (which collectively govern where you can go in Empire without getting shot at). The game can have tens of thousands of users on at a time. All those users play in the same world.

Massive corporations (what a guild is in Eve) and alliances (groups of corporations) can compete both in the relatively safe Empire regions and the completely unfettered "0.0" regions. In the 0.0 regions the largest cooperative efforts, of any game I know of on the internet, exist. Thousands of players work together to hold territory and exploit the bounty contained therein. This is also the zone of primary violence with battles of dozens or hundreds of players being common.

However those fighters need a lot of logistics in order to function well. This leads to numerous roles for the less violently inclined either supporting these fighters directly or making products elsewhere for use in these wars. The paradox of the game is that while scams, random violence, piracy, theft, and other forms of complete noncooperation are commonplace, cooperation is amply rewarded and a vital part of the game.

Further the game has an interesting and very sophisticated manufacture and trade aspect. Industry is quite contrived as to materials. You take fantasy elements and minerals and turn them into fantasy spaceships and other gear. However, one interesting feature is that a considerable portion of the equipment in the game is made directly by the players, including most spaceships. Further, the economics model is amazing. More than any other game I've seen, investment makes sense. One has player capital, assets that can be used to produce income even when the player is not online. Industrialists often construct and maintain elaborate supply chains to produce highly valued goods. The market system is very sophisticated and the best effort I've seen.

So this is a violent, often fustrating game, but it is remarkable for the degree of cooperation and competition present. The annoying non-cooperative aspects spice up it up and I doubt there is any online game (outside of some bizarre niche games like nomic) where one sees such a wide range of legal noncooperative behaviors to overcome. Who to trust and how far to trust them is an integral challenge of the game.

Apparently the recent upgrades have helped with fleet lag considerably - http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=918868.

600 ship fight, no lag :o

The thing that made me quit Eve after years of playing was this: ships are big and their graphics have window-like bright spots on them....

Really? This is what made you quit?

I've been playing for a while now. There definitely -are- reasons to stop playing. I've taken breaks (one or two months) because there weren't many fleet ops going on and I've seen others leave entirely for numerous reasons (getting blown up in a ship they'd spent weeks saving up for). But...

Seriously? If the lack of storyline verbage really bothered you that much, why didn't you just go read EVE Chronicles?

If you take a look at this thread you might appreciate what I am talking about.
It's not just related to speed nerfs, blaster specialists have also been hit very hard, just so that the speed issue could be "re-balanced". There is a multitude of well though out suggestions in this thread which are superior to CCPs solution.

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=831524

WARNING! it may take you a few days to read the 4275 comments.

Another 5406 comments on an unrelated issue can also be found here.

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=896318

I include it as a demonstration of CCPs unwillingness to listen to player feedback. They seem to have forgotten that in a player-defined universe, the players opinions are as important as the developers.

If you take a look at this thread you might appreciate what I am talking about.
It's not just related to speed nerfs, blaster specialists have also been hit very hard, just so that the speed issue could be "re-balanced". There is a multitude of well though out suggestions in this thread which are superior to CCPs solution.

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=831524

WARNING! it may take you a few days to read the 4275 comments.

Another 5406 comments on an unrelated issue can also be found here.

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=896318

I include it as a demonstration of CCPs unwillingness to listen to player feedback. They seem to have forgotten that in a player-defined universe, the players opinions are as important as the developers.

Hope there isn't any Veldspar in them thar rocks!

http://www.eve-online.com/

Eve has real problems with RMTs (Real Money Traders) but is combating this well. I am not sure what the WoW status is for RMTs as I have neverbothered to play the game. It bewilders me why you would want to play a game of such immature graphical rendering. I love to fly through space in my cruiser http://www.eve-online.com/itemdatabase/EN/ships/cruisers/gallente/627.asp

Nothing pleases me more :)

There's one big sci-fi MMO you're missing out and that's EVE Online, though it differs significantly from the run-of-the-mill MMOs for much, much more than simply being set in a sci-fi universe and doesn't seem to be what you're looking for.

Right right right right right... and wrong.

Great post, but I have one qualm. Microthreading/tasklet models are not explicitly incompatible with SMP systems. Theres nothing inherent to microthreads that would prevent, say, eight separate hardware threads all working in tandem to run a single solar system & its batch of microthreads.

Classical concurrency coordination mechanisms like mutexes and locks are not ideal for microthreading environments, so perhaps scaling out with these concurrency primitives might make abandoning stackless a logical step. Something like an actor model or a message passing scheme may however work extremely well in a stackless environment. Particularly if all you are doing is processing messages, you still want that ability to context switch extremely quickly.

My understanding is the main hold-back for concurrent Eve servers is things like guns firing at a ship thats already blown up, but the local thread doesnt know the ships blown up (not possible in their present non-concurrent environment). You can deal with this either by holding mutexes on the target, or you can use message passing and simply have the blown up ship send a message back saying "sorry, you cant shoot me, i already asploded," and then deal with that failure message in an async fashion.

If I were CCP I know what path I'd be taking. But thus far, CCP has focused largely on platform wins like asynch IO (although given the CPU usage their IO USED to be taking up perhaps that was in order) and proxy servers. They've systematically been ignoring the question of real concurrency.

Absolutely, the larger problem is the Python interpreter itself (CPython) and something called the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). This lock prevents the real threading from having an actual impact and is the reason that CCP has not persued a OS threading.

CCP Lingorm

Actually this [one thread per system] is a limit of Python. Currently Python is bound to a Single Core (this is called the GIL, Global Interpreter Lock) and it is the centre of a large amount of heated discussion in the Python Community about removing it or keeping it.

IronPython has removed it but has no support for stackless at this point so we would still have to completely rewrite the threading system.

We are continuing to look into options to enable us to span multiple CPU cores and thus 'grow' our architecture. I am hoping to get some more details on this for posting Soon(TM).

Want that kind of challenge? Play Eve Online: http://eve-online.com/

You "die"? You lose your ship and have to return to the wreck if you want to get back about half of the items you had on you (rest are destroyed). Didn't have an up-to-date clone? (this costs money): you lose skill points for good and will have to wait real-world time to retrain them.

Full time, all the time PvP and one world for all players. Usually more than 20,000 accounts logged in, peeks much higher on weekends. Leave the "safer" zones protected by NPC cops and anyone can and will kill you, sometimes just for the LOLZ.

Sound harsh? It is. I play it and love it but sometimes you need something a little softer - like Warhammer Online, which I also play.

Sounds like you want EVE-Online then. One single, massive server and a vibrant player industry/market.

Astronauts don't play WoW silly, they play Eve Online

No wonder. White Wolf was acquired by CCP, makers of EVE Online.

I think an Escape Velocity MMO would be cool. Easy to do...

Nevermind

It's called Eve Online. http://www.eve-online.com/

What about the "EVE a video card killer" thread on the eve forums: http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=731606
I'm willing to bet that this is actually this "high nvidia card failure rate" issue, with a tiny number of people with other cards suffering from ordinary failures.

Maybe you should try EVE Online then?

... c. Make a PvP Game ONLY. (Already done, Play Eve-Online (http://www.eve-online.com/ Warning: You will have to "work" to do anything in game. Little to no free-be's. (...)

The end result is that you can't have a fully persistant world, have PvE and PvP, have Full economies etc etc. all in one game since it's almost the same as putting 5 holy men of different religions into a room and asking them to decide which is better. (...)

EVE is not a pure PVP game. At least half, possibly more of the population is just grinding the (boring) PVE content in "hi sec" space (where PVP is restricted to war declarations and suicide ganking). Funnily enough, the EVE forums are full of debates about whether there should be more or less protection to "carebears" (non-PVPers) in "hi sec" space or not, people are asking for nerfs left and right (yes, even the PVPers cannot agree on one rule set, so the problem you describe is just as present at a different level of detail).

As a person playing RPG's for 18+ years.. and MMO's for about 12+ years, I can confidently say that this would fail. It's nice on paper, but would fail badly if set into motion when 20,000+ people are playing. Here is an example:

1. World of Warcraft. Horde vs Alliance. Alliance in some servers when i last played was almost 2 to 1. With double the alliance, the alliance would get bored because there would be a line to "destroy the town" (or insert any other 2 sided quest here) because it would take so long for a Horde group to finish all of the stuff to "rebuild" it.

2. Give the Horde (one specific side) better equipment? Let me re-introduce to you the bane of all MMORPG's ... The NERF-STICK of +480328423. Suddenly, in PVP, Horde is better than Alliance since equipment is better. OR because equipment works better with certain stats.. Or because (insert one of many of reasons why nerfing happens). Sadly, PvP and PvE don't work well together, and things get horribly nerfed because of it, so this negates giving better equipment to one side.

3. The next problem that is added in (which partly relates to my #1) is what you mention about sides taking control of maps = organized raids. Organized raids = time. Time = complaining that "Oh but I have a job in real life, I don't want to work in a game", or "I don't have 6 hours to play" or "My class isn't needed for this raid?? WTF? LFG!! (Looking For Group)" ... Basically, now you have all the casual gamers complaining that only 13 year olds are doing this since only 13 year olds (or rich spoiled kids, or fat slobs in their underwear in their parents basement) have the time, unless it's the weekend, in which case the "teams" will be HUGE and lag will kill things. =/

4. Server Populations. The other problem is that as server populations change, or as the game has been out a while.. slowly the average level changes. A System that involves needing others to effect things suddenly creates issues if there is no one going to that town anymore (new towns from expansions? Level 10 town out of 80 levels when the game has been out for 2+ years?). Suddenly no one does those quests any more since it takes forever for the "other side" to do their part.

Please understand, I LIKE the ideas and LIKE how you are thinking about it, the problem here is that too many people are going to complain about this or that.

Here is MY answer to the problem:

a. Make a PvE game ONLY.
b. Make a Grinding game ONLY.
c. Make a PvP Game ONLY. (Already done, Play Eve-Online (http://www.eve-online.com/ Warning: You will have to "work" to do anything in game. Little to no free-be's.
d. Make an Instance game ONLY where it's really easy and no one has to play the "Massive Multi-Player"... with any other players (hmm.. weird eh?)

The end result is that you can't have a fully persistant world, have PvE and PvP, have Full economies etc etc. all in one game since it's almost the same as putting 5 holy men of different religions into a room and asking them to decide which is better. All will agree that there is something bigger than them, but none will agree on the "perfect method" to find / get to / understand that greater being. (sorry for the religious reference, it was just an easy example to stress how many different sides there are). In the end, making smaller games to individually target those groups I listed above (instead of making ONE game.. most likely badly ... with all aspects in there) would fix a lot of issues. After that we can work on trying to make things persistent. (Like EVE which has some good persistent aspects already!)

EVE? http://www.eve-online.com/

So does CCP. They run EVE Online, the world's largest online game, which they developed in Stackless Python.

I'm not a huge fan of Python as a programmer. I'm primarily a Perl guy myself. That's just personal taste and is entirely subjective. Despite my dislike of its syntax and that it mostly fills a niche I've already covered with more than one other language I've considered giving it a go just because of the projects for which I've seen it used.

There are many wonderful things being done with Python, and they range from small things to huge things. Anyone who underestimates what Python and its community are capable of getting done do so at their own peril. From Google and EVE down to my favorite solitaire game (PySol), it's a language and group of developers worthy of respect.

...for the same guys who caused a global outage of Eve Online for several days around June 20th. Maybe they learned from past mistakes?

2-3% of the market is a lot of money at $15 a month.

However, please, do realize that games are typically sold for 6 months and supported for 1 year and 99% on a single platform (Win/XBox). Very few things are developed as cross-platform - and it is NOT because of OpenGL, more like commercial realities (cross-platform development is hard and doesn't make a lot of sense for ~2-3% of the market, especially for an app that will be sold for one season).

Except today's big money hauling games are sub-scription based, +5 year supported commercial platforms. This doesn't eliminate shrink wrapped abandonware any more than Linux killed the proprietary operating system. These games restort to emulation of Direct X to get multi-platform support instead of using OpenGL.

I am developing OpenGL applications for a decade now and all are still running and being used.
How many 10 year old games can you actually get working today?

I'm glad you spent the time to maintain all that code.

All the software I developed "with OpenGL" either uses a graphics engine that switches to DirectX on Windows or is so out of date that finding compilable libraries old enough to match the non-OpenGL pieces is an exercise in futility. I have plenty of 1.2 OpenGL code that is essentially dead.

will they go for EM resistant coating or thermal?

will they go for EM resistant coating or thermal?

Eve Online may scratch that itch.

Wrong.
http://www.eve-online.com/download/linux.asp
They provide .rpm, .deb and .tgz downloads.
Technically it's built with Transgaming's "cider" windows api for linux (based on wine).

Sounds like you're asking about Eve Online.

Already been done. check out the player created 'Clear Skies' video. Plenty of mirrors listed. http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=783871&page=2

The most common implication I've seen tossed about is the whole "WoW has dumbed down MMO's forever, and oh, how I long for the EQ/UO good old days." There is something to that; certainly WoW showed MMO publishers how to make a product that's friendly to the masses. In this case, it's "defer all the annoying repetitive grind until the endgame", rather than forcing you to do it during the leveling process.

The most common implication I've seen tossed about is the whole "WoW has dumbed down MMO's forever, and oh, how I long for the EQ/UO good old days." There is something to that; certainly WoW showed MMO publishers how to make a product that's friendly to the masses. In this case, it's "defer all the annoying repetitive grind until the endgame", rather than forcing you to do it during the leveling process.

Linux Games..

http://savage2.s2games.com/main.php
http://www.eve-online.com/
http://www.wesnoth.org/
http://www.flightgear.org/
http://www.freeciv.org/
http://www.sauerbraten.org/
http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/
http://wz2100.net/
http://www.cubeengine.com/
http://lincity-ng.berlios.de/
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/
http://www.wormux.org/
http://www.secretmaryo.org/
http://www.ufoai.net/
http://www.bzflag.org/
http://tremulous.net/
http://www.eternal-lands.com/
http://www.enemyterritory.com/

Perhaps you could stop with the "No games for Linux" BS already as you obviously have your head up your ass.

A lot of the server code is written in Python as well. They use a Python variant called Stackless Python.

How about charging the way you charge for normal utilities like electricity? You get a charge like,

    $10 - base charge (infrastructure maintenance, etc.)
    $2/GB - first 10GB
    $1/GB - next 100GB
    $0.75/GB - anything over 110GB usage

There ya go. Cheap for people using low bandwidth. Not exuberant for people using lots of bandwidth. Adjust prices accordingly per region and then don't bitch (either customer or ISP) that they don't have money for bandwidth.

Going back on topic, BBC *pays* for the use of bandwidth on their side. If ISP "can't cope with demand", it is not BBC's problem. And BBC should post blacklisting messages for customers connecting from ISPs that throttle their service, and suggest ones that do not. But then UK has one of the crappiest service from what I can read on forums like for EVE Online. Like people wanting to play a low bandwidth game like EVE can't connect because Tiscani choses to shaft them - http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=553090

For those who haven't heard of eve-online, it's a space based sandbox MMO where you "level up" in real time regardless of whether you are playing or not. Because of it's sandbox nature the entire game is essentially PvP. Even if you avoid combat pvp you're still combating against others through the player-driven economy. The content is basically all player driven and eve-online is the only MMO that I know of that has consistently improved since release.

It's hard for me to not talk about all the good things eve does, but I'll stop and let someone else pimp it if they want. Also anyone with an active eve account can give unlimited 14day free trials to people.