C’s Blog

On March 10 2009, M10 in the EVE community, the new version of the EVE Online  game will go live. Currently registered users are able to Beta test the version on Sissy, even the Mac OSX users. For some time the EVE-Mac community was worried; the new EVE-Mac client was announced, then delayed, announce again and then….. silence all around for weeks….

Many EVE-Mac users, if not all, got worried every day, counting down to M10, some predicting doom on the Mac OSX client and desperately installing bootcamp. This would be the first ‘Premium’ client (as in Premium graphics) for the EVE-Mac users, and even the old ‘Classic’ client caused lots of bugs, performance issues and grief. But then, suddenly out of the blue (or black, since universe space tends to be black instead of blue), with less than 5 days till M10, a link to the EVE-Mac client was posted by CCP (employee) Casqade.

I installed the Beta client and ran it on my 24 inch Aluminum iMac in Mac OS X Leopard (10.5). Boy was I surprised. The client performed very well, giving me about the same performance as the old Classic client, but now with all the new eye candy like enhanced textures, shadows, Bloom, etc.

But not only the new eye candy surprised me: The (old) Classic EVE client used to spam the OS X Console with lots, and I really mean LOTS of error messages. Somehow CCP, and Transgaming, didn’t manage to get all these bugs solved during the past year. And now with the new Premium EVE client, complete silence in the OS X console….

Even large fleet battle tests on Sissy, which tends to stress every EVE client to it’s max, went pretty well. The client only crashed twice on me. The first crash I did a screen resolution change during a system jump, which is asking for problems. The second in a fleet battle with over 300 ships around me, but I didn’t completely restart after the first crash, so there might have been some wrong bits left in memory. Every other large battle I tested afterwards, didn’t cause additional client crashes.

However, this is all still Beta, and on the Singularity (Sissy) test server. Every EVE Online pilot knows that Tranquility (TQ) is a complete other story. The complexness and massive usage of the TQ server, causing lag spike and desyncs in some situations, can cause several unforseen problems with the clients.

So, I can’t wait to see what M10 brings the EVE-Mac community in the end, but the first impressions are promising….

(For those of you who don’t know EVE Online, but got interested: http://www.eveonline.com/apocrypha/)