EVE Guide Day 2
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Day 2
EVE Fanfest 2006
AN EDIT WAS PENDING TO THIS GUIDE! CHECK IT OUT BELOW THE BODY!
Day 2
11:00-12:30
Enter the second day of the 2006 EVE-Online fanfest, and as opposed to the two days before, the lobby isn't crammed with people. Instead, most had taken up place in the auditorium, which was now lined with chairs facing the stage.
The auditorium was around half-full throughout the first presentation, with people slumped into the chairs, nursing their hangovers and groaning softly, while CCP's Lead Concept Artist Ásgeir Jón gave the attendants a walkthrough in how concept art is created for EVE-Online. It mostly featured him drawing on a digital tablet, showing the various stages between rough outlines to a more detailed, coloured and shaded image. Interesting as it was, there was little new about it, which was probably just as well given the general state of people that morning.
Next up was Dan "Redundancy" Speed with a speech on the upcoming revision to the EVE engine. Again, this presentation didn't cover much critical ground (being placed just before noon), but did give a very nice insight into the DirectX 9 upgrades to EVE. Suffice to say that the EVE Ships with normal maps and HDR enabled look worlds apart from the current in-game models. At the same time, Redundancy stressed that CCP's main goal with the engine rewrites is better performance, with the more robust graphics coming in as a welcome side-effect.
After a half-hour lunch break, one Monty Sharma from Vivox came up to the stage, and talked about the co-operative project between Vivox and CCP aiming to integrate voice support into the game. Monty began his presentation with apologizing for his hangover, which judging by his lapses of attention and stops during the whole thing seemed to be rather severe. Regardless, he managed to cover some ground, mostly explaining the main points of the upcoming EVE-Online VOIP system, which apparently will a) run on seperate servers, b) integrate straight into the game and the new Gang mechanics and c) cost those wishing to use it $10 a year. Fancy that.
13:00-14:30
The first real meat we were treated to at the fanfest came during Torfi "t0rfifrans" Ólafsson's presentation, CCP's Technical Producer. The whole thing started innocently enough, after a fashion, with a demonstration of Torfi loading up some rather basic mannequins, then having one of them walk in a circle around the other, an animation supposedly made procedurally. This, supposedly, was being done as a part of a long-term research project within CCP, and Torfi went on showing dozens of the blighters walking around in a seemingly random pattern. Sure, it was cool (the animation looked very nice, for one), but most of the people in the auditorium were really curious as to what the relation was to EVE, so Torfi just decided to drop his little bomb.
CCP are, apparently, planning to allow players to explore and walk around in stations. This came as a bit of a surprise to many of us who remember the many proclamations from CCP that they were planning no such thing, during one such refusal that one of them coined the phrase "As soon as you let players walk around in stations, they'll want to shoot each other, and by then you basically have a brand new game". Regardless, they seem determined to go through with it, although any sort of violent interaction inside stations will most likely be limited.
CCP's Chief Technical Officer, Halldór "prepH" Fannar, followed after Torfi, mostly talking about the new organizational structure of EVE's programming assets, increased versatility (multiple code branches, etc), a mention of Linux/Apple-friendly versions and CCP's new in-house toolset, Jessica (replacing the now-redundant Jennifer). He also discussed the upcoming graphic upgrades, although he mostly just expanded on Redundancy's segment, emphasizing the degree of flexibility and variety the new engine will have over the current client.
I must admit that at this point, I had been sitting in the auditorium for three hours with no real breaks, having ignored the lunch break, and as such my brain was drifting in and out. I did manage to get the general gist of Kjartan Pierre "LeKjart" Emilson's presentation on the Chinese EVE server that launched in March. Details that did manage to get through are as follows:
- 1.5m people registered for the open EVE Beta
- They currently have 20.000 subscribers (this huge discrepancy between subscribers and beta applicants is apparently normal)
- They already have alliances battling for supremacy in 0.0 space
- These alliances are run by "Superguilds" (cross-game guilds numbering in the dozens, if not hundreds of thousands), in turn run by multi-millionaires, who pay people real money to do their fighting for them.
- I'm glad I don't have to face one of those Superguilds.
In other words, it's going great, with some aspects mirroring Tranquility... and some aspects not.
15:00-
Nathan "Oveur" Richardsson's presentations are always interesting, if just for his presentation (relying heavily on internet slang, such as his much-quoted "Yarrrdware"). He began with a recap on the many features of Kali Release 1, such as Contracts, Rigs, Combat Boosters etc. He then moved on to Kali 2, mentioning the Graphic updates (DirectX 9), improvements and changes to Starbases, Constellation Sovereignty and general warfare changes and upgrades. And a thing called Heat.
According to Oveur, "Heat" is the planned ability to "overload" modules on your ship, something that will generate heat that will need to be dissipated, lest it builds up and wrecks all kinds of havoc. At the same time you might underpower other modules to compensate, allowing for on-the-fly changes to tactics, for example increasing a tank at the expense of damage output.
Oveur then went on to wistfully speculate about the state of EVE in ten years time. He mentioned things like walking inside stations, planetary interaction, new environments, new tech levels (as far as tech 5), and the extremely coy mention of new races (note plural), including Jove. Sixth race? He wouldn't tell.
Reynir "Solaris" Harðarson (Creative Director) was next, arriving just in the nick of time for his spot. True to form, Reynir's 45-minute lecture on the "Definition of Evil" was a deep, philosophical affair about evil and it's absolutes with only superficial ties to EVE-Online until the very end of the lecture, where he brought to the fore the question of morality in massively multiplayer games. It was interesting, to say the least, but it did bring to mind a college professor completely engrossed and utterly interested in the subject, talking with distracted fervor about an esoteric subject that only came together if you sat through the whole thing. I'm personally a fan of his speeches, but I can understand if people get a bit lost.
The next, and last, presentation came from Hilmar Veigar "Hellmar" Pétursson, CCP's CEO. He began with talking about the exponential growth EVE and CCP have seen, with the subscriber count rising from 74,000 to 145,000 in the span of a year, and CCP's employee count rising from 55 to 145 in the same time period. He talked a bit about the Chinese Cluster, and the growing pains associated with nearly tripling the staff. He then switched on to the topic of marriages, first referring to the marriage proposal made on-stage last year between a New Zealand fan couple. And dropped the biggest bomb of the day:
CCP has bought out White Wolf Publishing.
What followed was a short speech about the difficulties of mergers (including a series of frankly hilarious photoshop pictures featuring vampire animal hybrids, such as the Hyena Spider Vampire, none of which I managed to capture on film), a few words from White Wolf's CEO Mike Tranney and a brief explanation of what this means for both companies. In essence, according to Hellmar, all of EVE's Intellectual Property that does not directly relate to the Online game, things such as the CCG, novels and artbooks, and any EVE-based pen and paper roleplaying games will be in the hands of White Wolf, while CCP will at some point most likely do a World of Darkness MMO (World of Darkness being White Wolf's primary IP and line of games). The presentation sort of faded into the Panel Discussion, with Mike Tranney, Hellmar and several CCP devs taking questions from curious fans, although very little worth reporting came out of that, since at the same time sandwiches and beer were served, resulting in a rather sudden shift in sobriety amongst many of those present. At some point it became a "party", replete with bands and TV cameras going around, allowing the people at home to make fun of the drunkards present.
I managed to get home at some point.
PENDING EDIT:
Day 2
11:00-12:30
Enter the second day of the 2006 EVE-Online fanfest, and as opposed to the two days before, the lobby isn't crammed with people. Instead, most had taken up place in the auditorium, which was now lined with chairs facing the stage.
The auditorium was around half-full throughout the first presentation, with people slumped into the chairs, nursing their hangovers and groaning softly, while CCP's Lead Concept Artist Ásgeir Jón gave the attendants a walkthrough in how concept art is created for EVE-Online. It mostly featured him drawing on a digital tablet, showing the various stages between rough outlines to a more detailed, coloured and shaded image. Interesting as it was, there was little new about it, which was probably just as well given the general state of people that morning.
Next up was Dan "Redundancy" Speed with a speech on the upcoming revision to the EVE engine. Again, this presentation didn't cover much critical ground (being placed just before noon), but did give a very nice insight into the DirectX 9 upgrades to EVE. Suffice to say that the EVE Ships with normal maps and HDR enabled look worlds apart from the current in-game models. At the same time, Redundancy stressed that CCP's main goal with the engine rewrites is better performance, with the more robust graphics coming in as a welcome side-effect.
After a half-hour lunch break, one Monty Sharma from Vivox came up to the stage, and talked about the co-operative project between Vivox and CCP aiming to integrate voice support into the game. Monty began his presentation with apologizing for his hangover, which judging by his lapses of attention and stops during the whole thing seemed to be rather severe. Regardless, he managed to cover some ground, mostly explaining the main points of the upcoming EVE-Online VOIP system, which apparently will a) run on seperate servers, b) integrate straight into the game and the new Gang mechanics and c) cost those wishing to use it $10 a year. Fancy that.
13:00-14:30
The first real meat we were treated to at the fanfest came during Torfi "t0rfifrans" Ólafsson's presentation, CCP's Technical Producer. The whole thing started innocently enough, after a fashion, with a demonstration of Torfi loading up some rather basic mannequins, then having one of them walk in a circle around the other, an animation supposedly made procedurally. This, supposedly, was being done as a part of a long-term research project within CCP, and Torfi went on showing dozens of the blighters walking around in a seemingly random pattern. Sure, it was cool (the animation looked very nice, for one), but most of the people in the auditorium were really curious as to what the relation was to EVE, so Torfi just decided to drop his little bomb.
CCP are, apparently, planning to allow players to explore and walk around in stations. This came as a bit of a surprise to many of us who remember the many proclamations from CCP that they were planning no such thing, during one such refusal that one of them coined the phrase "As soon as you let players walk around in stations, they'll want to shoot each other, and by then you basically have a brand new game". Regardless, they seem determined to go through with it, although any sort of violent interaction inside stations will most likely be limited.
CCP's Chief Technical Officer, Halldór "prepH" Fannar, followed after Torfi, mostly talking about the new organizational structure of EVE's programming assets, increased versatility (multiple code branches, etc), a mention of Linux/Apple-friendly versions and CCP's new in-house toolset, Jessica (replacing the now-redundant Jennifer). He also discussed the upcoming graphic upgrades, although he mostly just expanded on Redundancy's segment, emphasizing the degree of flexibility and variety the new engine will have over the current client.
I must admit that at this point, I had been sitting in the auditorium for three hours with no real breaks, having ignored the lunch break, and as such my brain was drifting in and out. I did manage to get the general gist of Kjartan Pierre "LeKjart" Emilson's presentation on the Chinese EVE server that launched in March. Details that did manage to get through are as follows:
- 1.5m people registered for the open EVE Beta
- They currently have 20.000 subscribers (this huge discrepancy between subscribers and beta applicants is apparently normal)
- They already have alliances battling for supremacy in 0.0 space
- These alliances are run by "Superguilds" (cross-game guilds numbering in the dozens, if not hundreds of thousands), in turn run by multi-millionaires, who pay people real money to do their fighting for them.
- I'm glad I don't have to face one of those Superguilds.
In other words, it's going great, with some aspects mirroring Tranquility... and some aspects not.
15:00-
Nathan "Oveur" Richardsson's presentations are always interesting, if just for his presentation (relying heavily on internet slang, such as his much-quoted "Yarrrdware"). He began with a recap on the many features of Kali Release 1, such as Contracts, Rigs, Combat Boosters etc. He then moved on to Kali 2, mentioning the Graphic updates (DirectX 9), improvements and changes to Starbases, Constellation Sovereignty and general warfare changes and upgrades. And a thing called Heat.
According to Oveur, "Heat" is the planned ability to "overload" modules on your ship, something that will generate heat that will need to be dissipated, lest it builds up and wrecks all kinds of havoc. At the same time you might underpower other modules to compensate, allowing for on-the-fly changes to tactics, for example increasing a tank at the expense of damage output.
Oveur then went on to wistfully speculate about the state of EVE in ten years time. He mentioned things like walking inside stations, planetary interaction, new environments, new tech levels (as far as tech 5), and the extremely coy mention of new races (note plural), including Jove. Sixth race? He wouldn't tell.
Reynir "Solaris" Harðarson (Creative Director) was next, arriving just in the nick of time for his spot. True to form, Reynir's 45-minute lecture on the "Definition of Evil" was a deep, philosophical affair about evil and it's absolutes with only superficial ties to EVE-Online until the very end of the lecture, where he brought to the fore the question of morality in massively multiplayer games. It was interesting, to say the least, but it did bring to mind a college professor completely engrossed and utterly interested in the subject, talking with distracted fervor about an esoteric subject that only came together if you sat through the whole thing. I'm personally a fan of his speeches, but I can understand if people get a bit lost.
The next, and last, presentation came from Hilmar Veigar "Hellmar" Pétursson, CCP's CEO. He began with talking about the exponential growth EVE and CCP have seen, with the subscriber count rising from 74,000 to 145,000 in the span of a year, and CCP's employee count rising from 55 to 145 in the same time period. He talked a bit about the Chinese Cluster, and the growing pains associated with nearly tripling the staff. He then switched on to the topic of marriages, first referring to the marriage proposal made on-stage last year between a New Zealand fan couple. And dropped the biggest bomb of the day:
CCP has bought out White Wolf Publishing.
What followed was a short speech about the difficulties of mergers (including a series of frankly hilarious photoshop pictures featuring vampire animal hybrids, such as the Hyena Spider Vampire, none of which I managed to capture on film), a few words from White Wolf's CEO Mike Tranney and a brief explanation of what this means for both companies. In essence, according to Hellmar, all of EVE's Intellectual Property that does not directly relate to the Online game, things such as the CCG, novels and artbooks, and any EVE-based pen and paper roleplaying games will be in the hands of White Wolf, while CCP will at some point most likely do a World of Darkness MMO (World of Darkness being White Wolf's primary IP and line of games). The presentation sort of faded into the Panel Discussion, with Mike Tranney, Hellmar and several CCP devs taking questions from curious fans, although very little worth reporting came out of that, since at the same time sandwiches and beer were served, resulting in a rather sudden shift in sobriety amongst many of those present. At some point it became a "party", replete with bands and TV cameras going around, allowing the people at home to make fun of the drunkards present.
I managed to get home at some point.
-Ryan "Draknorr" Bohmann
| Converted from Guides | |
|---|---|
| Created: | 2006-11-11 15:37:24 |
| Last Changed: | 2006-11-12 04:47:15 |
| Author: | Draknorr |
| Category: | Event Coverage |
| Last Edited | 701 |
| Score: | 5.00 |
| Note: | None |
| Guide ID: | 821 |
| Last Changed: | Unknown |
|
Category: EVE Online
This page last modified 2009-10-27 14:04:28.
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