C’s Blog

On March 10, 2009 the complete EVE Online communitie held it’s breath. The new EVE expansion, EVE: Apocrypha, should find it’s way to the live server farm, called Tranquility.

Around 16:00 EVE Time (which is UTC/GMT time for the people that are on planet Earth) the patch was ready on the server side, and downloading a whopping 2.2 gig of upgraded game code was started. Although some people seemed to have problems with the download speeds, for me personally it went well, and I started to install the new Mac OSX version of EVE. This _should_ bring me the long awaited ‘Premium Content’ client for Mac OSX, together with the needed patches to gain more speed in the OSX platform, as well as solving serious memory leak and other bugs.

And it did bring me the Premium client. And more surprisingly; it did bring me Premium graphics at about the same performance as the previous ‘Classic Content’ client operated. A good start, however the underlaying Cider from Transgaming still has it issues and bugs, the game is way more playable on Mac OSX now.

But it did bring more, much more. Some of the new features are Tech3 Strategic Cruisers, new way of probing but most fun of all; Wormholes…

CCP claims to have extended the EVE Universe with about 46% by adding ‘Unknown’ systems. These Unknown system can be reached by jump thru ‘Wormholes’. Wormholes are not known in the current EVE mapsystem, so pilots have the scan with probes for them. Once you found one, you can enter is by ‘jumping’ thru the Wormhole.

There are several kind of Wormholes. Some bring you to another place in the ‘known’ EVE Universe. A Wormhole found in Jita could bring you to Rens instantly, but could also bring you to pirate invested systems like Rancer. It all seems random, but it sure is fun.

However, the Wormholes that bring you to ‘Unknown’ space are the ones that gives you real fun. These systems are not mapped, are really unknown, and are the ones that have to be ‘examined’ by the real explorer amongst the EVE pilots. CCP is really mysterious about what the expect in these Unknown systems, besides the fact that these systems are populated by a new ‘race’, called the Sleepers. But the explorers in EVE already shared information about what they discovered.

We know already that there are 3 kind of Unknown space systems; Unknown Space, Dangerous Unknown Space and Deadly unknown Space. The first if most likely to be found in empire regions; it’s not hard to kill the Sleeper NPC you find inside and can be even killed with a good solo setup. The second one is much harder; solo killing is a no-go, so you have to go in gangs with experienced pilots to kill the Sleepers. The last one is still a bit of a mystery. It seems that even with a Capital fleet, the Sleepers are hard to kill!

Once in an Unknown System, you can also encounter a ‘Phenomena’. Not all Unknown systems have these, and there is little known about these Phenomena till date. One thing is for sure, it will effect some attributes on your ship. There are reports about suddenly a shorter locking range, missiles that have a shorter flight time, Shields that shifts hitpoints, etc. etc.

To make all this even more difficult, Wormholes are collapsing by time, of by the number of ships passing thru. Some fuzzy information can be found in the Info panel of a Wormhole. When a Wormhole collapses, the Unknown system you are in is completely isolated, and you have to scan for another ‘exit’ Wormhole again. And where this ‘exit’ Wormhole will bring you…. Who knows. So first of all you ALWAYS have to have a probing ship with you to find another exit, and then you only can hope this exit brings you somewhere into friendly space, so you can get back to your HQ with your fleet in one piece.

But why go into Wormholes and kill the Sleepers, besides the fun? Well, it’s all about Tech3. The only way to get Tech3 ships (and more in near future?) is to ‘harvest’ the minerals from Gas Clouds, get the decryptors from Hacking sites, Salvage the parts from Sleeper ships, and get information parts from Archaeology sites that are found in these Unknown Systems. Combining these parts all together brings you the ability to invent and build Tech3 Strategic Cruisers.

Next time I will go more in detail about the Tech3 stuffies, but for now; have fun and beware in the Unknown Space!

Linky: Some information about Wormholes and Unknown Space I try to keep update regular

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/)