EVE Online's Carbon engine is now open source: Fenris Creations explains why
gamesindustry.biz186 points by Stevvo 5 days ago
186 points by Stevvo 5 days ago
Already used (sounds like, successfully) by the usual GitHub phishing campaigns:
> found a workaround for the shader compilation bug that keeps the mesh from vanishing. I attached the fix here.
https://github.com/carbonengine/trinity/issues/21
(Microsoft should stop it with the "This is not the web page you are looking for." where people specifically came looking to learn whether something was administratively blocked - or whether it is no longer available by choice of the affected party.)
With all due respect, this reads to me as a couple of confusing non sequiturs. I took a quick look at the link you included, and it didn't help me understand what you're talking about either. Probably I'm just horrendously ignorant, but I would love to understand what you're referring to, and the point you're making about it.
What engine? Is not this game played in a spreadsheet?
https://prosperousuniverse.com is closer, but still not actually a spreadsheet.
"This is EVE Online for people who think the 3D spaceships part of EVE is time wasted away from their spreadsheets. "
I got way into Prosperous Universe for a few months, a few years back—it was fun for awhile but the pace at which new features were being added to the game was (and still seems to be) absolutely glacial, given what the game is. Really fun ideas in there, though.
Jokes aside apparently they've hired economist to keep the game's market's stable.
This was at least a decade ago, but the game's economy seems to be managed well enough. Cost of having stuff transported is still 1M / jump.
PLEX keeps the markets stable now as they control the flow of PLEX like its Spice from Arrakis
Wasn't that Yanis Varoufakis?
Nope, Varoufakis consulted with Valve
Ah, that's correct.
Got it wrong, because he did write some articles about the EVE economy, like this one: https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2014/01/30/war-spikes-in-the-...
He has however written about the game before, and been interviewed about it: https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2014/01/30/war-spikes-in-the-...
that's very interesting, is there a place to read his achievements related to Steam? genuinely curious, because Steam is very popular now, and wondering what he did there, and whether his theories helped boost Steam economy/marketplace or not
I've wanted to try out EVE Online for a while now. Never found the time, and it seems to be a bit of a time sink. Since I have no idea if I'm actually going to enjoy it or not, it never took priority.
These kinds of news make me want to find the time. Good job!
I bought the game when it first came out (2003? Boxed, from Target) and played with an online friend for a while. We mostly mined and we didn't really have a corporation, it was just the two of us. There wasn't much else to do at the time. At one point I fell asleep at my keyboard during a mining op. Gave up soon after.
In 2015 a coworker talked me into trying it again. We joined a small corporation, swore fealty to a larger corp (Brave? Band of Brothers?) and moved to low-security space. We got involved in massive 3000+ ship battles, some of which made the news. These are not as fun as you would think.
However, the most fun I had was joining 100+ ship bomber fleets that would warp in on unsuspecting mining operations and destroying billions of ISK (in game currency) worth of ships. We'd use Mumble for voice chat, which allows for a hierarchy of chat rooms, so that we could hear the fleet commander giving orders but he couldn't hear us. It was super organized and our fleet commander was really skilled.
In the end I couldn't keep up with the time commitments. For the fun stuff, you had to be online at a certain time and there was a lot of prep involved (buying the proper ships which changed all the time, getting your ships to the right station, etc). I still consider it some of the best multiplayer experiences I've ever had though. Nothing beats warping in and seeing those huge mining ships and then hearing the fleet commander start issuing targeting orders. It would raise the hair on my arms.
My buddy and I were playing a bunch of years back, unaffiliated with a big corp, just doing our own thing in mid-sec systems. They added wormhole diving into w-space in one of the updates, and we decided to try it out, which was pretty fun. We both made enough resource to fly Drakes at the time.
In one of the wormhole there was an ambush, I got blown up but my buddy managed to lose them, but didn't leave the system. He started talking to them in local chat, and in the end we ended up joining them. We were playing together for a while after, but life ultimately took over for me. My buddy remained for a while. He was a long-haul trucker and would play in his downtime from various truck stops across US and Canada.
My coworker ended up defecting to a corporation that lived in wormhole space! The wormholes add so much to the game. A lot of times we'd find the mining ops by people scouting through wormholes. Another activity I liked was hacking those resource thingies (I forget what they were called, or even what they were). Doing that in wormhole space was so scary but the payoffs could be huge.
NPSI romps were pretty fun. Been a few years since I've fired it up.
NPSI = Not Purple, Shoot It!
Squad up and then move to some objective location and raise hell shooting anything (w/ coordination from squad leader since the idea is to usually pool DPSl) not in the squad.
It's a time sink, where much of the gameplay happens outside the game, or with tools outside the game, and at mid-high level it seems that social engineering your "friends" is the only true 7d-chess tactic.
I'd really like to see a new game in this genre that does things better and leaves room for more ways of play.
I've followed along this game more than the ~6 month I've played it (and EVE Echoes for a year) and all I can say is that playing as an explorer can be fun. Though so much time wasted scanning solar systems. I would be logging; on travel through wormholes that connect different solar systems, mapped out within a third-party site for the corporation I was part of, particularly to mark shortcuts to the major trade hubs. And in all this time I found only two Ghost Sites[0] (my favorite PvE mission type for exploration), which are hard trials for an explorer that test your situational awareness, maneuvering, puzzle solving skills, and strategy to make the most out of them. If I would have come across more often, I would probably be hooked on the game for longer.
[0] https://www.eveonline.com/eve-academy/careers/explorer/ghost...
The new player experience is quite nice now a days. The PvE campaigns has also been improved over the last few years.
To go deep into it I feel like social gameplay is required but there are plenty of opportunities to consume Eve Online in short bursts. Even when connected with a Corp or other player organizations like Red vs Blue. I found there is also a lot of mechanics that can be enjoyed solo or with light socialization.
To anyone considering it: I would encourage you to jump in with a free account and try it out! and fly safe!
It is definitely a social game. You're not going to have a good time if you try to play it solo. At least that was the case when I played it 10+ years ago. No clue if they changed it significantly since then.
It hasn't, at best since then they've added more ship personalization options in the form of ship skins, and some gamification via events, daily login campaigns, and now seasonal-like content where they promote different activities. The current one started yesterday, you can track down and / or follow NPC haulers (or something like that; the event does not appear in sov null. I moved there a month ago after it seemed like that's where all the fun stuff happens)
Depends on the way you play can be a time sink, or session-like game. It is extremely deep and complex to learn from scratch though.
I've made some of the best friends playing it when I had time, friendship formed out of high stakes in this game (you regularly lose hours of grind or real money if you pay for the game - in seconds) and respect you have for each other skill.
For a long time I was convinced they used Erlang for handling all the distributed, concurrent state. I guess not.
Last I checked (and remember right) they used Stackless Python. Very interesting, it can serialize tasklets and send them to another machine to continue executing. Seems no longer maintained though.
They moved away. Details in this blog post: https://evefrontier.com/en/news/moving-into-the-future-upgra...
I mean eve frontier is a pretty huge fork from almost scratch, did they backport changes into normal eve?
> Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).
...why did they make a website not html-first?
I figure this is the nextjs exception? The website would probably be HTML-first (I.e. SSR, would work non-interactively without JS), just that the JS doesn’t fail silently.
Is this unique to Stackless Python?
Don‘t know any other runtimes that have that by default. Probably kind of possible in Erlang or so by transferring the state, but stopping and moving a green thread in the middle of execution I’ve not seen elsewhere.
at least while ago they used Stackless Python
They moved away. Details in this blog post: https://evefrontier.com/en/news/moving-into-the-future-upgra...
Can I use this to release my own games, and does this release includes everything needed to build games like EVE online?
All of it is under MIT so probably.
Not sure about if it includes everything to make EVE online though
Does it include the server or just the base for the client?
Edit: someone posted below that it's base disparate components, not the actual game. So you can (MIT) but you'll have to put some work in.
Not a fan of space engines where locations are fixed.
what you want a game where they take into account the expansion of space? are we also going to model the complete breakdown of causality on the otherside of the ftl?
They don't even do orbits of basic solar system objects. Lol.
Eve online has always just pretended to be a space sim.
It helps me to just think of all these games as early 20th century naval warfare sims with a fantasy space theme. We like dreadnoughts and have a hard time with extraterrestrial physics.
To me it seems like the engine (and the mechanics) are focused on being an MMO first and a "simulation" second. From their website "EVE Online is a community-driven spaceship MMORPG where players can play free, choosing their own path from countless options."
There are concepts in the game that would be unlikely in a simulation game but are common in MMO's. Think of fast travel, instance dungeons and more.
One of Eve Online's strengths is that it conforms gameplay to the MMO setting. That is one of the main driving factors in it's design and allows for example for Time dilation, huge battles and continuous universe and economy that it is famous for.
This is different from for example World of Warcraft, in my view that is a RPG first MMO second. That is one of the reasons it has sharding and smaller pvp battles.
Well, even in Naval battles the environment is not this static - weather playing a major role in many naval campaigns, from hiding your ship in a rain squall to braving freezing waters during the polar night with the arctic convoys.
And of course tide played a major role, with the Germans during the Battle of Jutland racing to get past a sand bang to avoid being stuck at open sea & be mauled even more by the British.
games are about fun, if something only adds realism for no reason it's not good game design to add it
I still think it would be doable if done right. There are so many interesting elements of modern science and hard SF that could be included to introduce interesting game mechanics:
- adding various types of radiators (solid, droplet, etc.), gloving when weapons fire or engines activate, shooting them off prevents system from running
- planets on eccentric orbits with wildly varying surface conditions in mere days as the planet periodically get closer and farther to the star, from frozen solid to metals flowing like water days apart
- aerostat habitats in the atmosphere on gas giants or Venus like worlds, you could fly around but go to low (or get swept by a storm) and you might get crushed
- radiation belts, sun grazing comets or energy harvesting stations very close to a stellar body, can enter for a very limited time until even your shielded systems burn out - and good like with repair space walks!
- tidally locked bodies, where one side is always illuminated and the other one has an eternal night, with perhaps a thin habitable belt where conditions are just right for life, presenting interesting options for story telling and world building
Fun is of course subjective. Some of us care about realism more than others.
It's going to be such a fun game flying 1000 lightyears at a couple hundred meters per second.
> pretended to be a space sim.
When has it ever done that.
Keep in mind, I played like starting year 3
That's inaccurate, orbital periods are a thing at least for moons. It's one of those things you'd have to spend a year or two piloting an Orca to notice though.
I followed and forked it on GitHub. When Eve Online first came out, the graphics were stunning. I'm planning to dig into the code and take a close look at how the graphics renderer was implemented.
I hope this will lead to some AI bros quickly finding performance optimization options; the game can be very heavy on graphics despite most of what's visible being a skybox and UI elements, and the UI is often very sluggish and unresponsive, that is, they seem to be doing too much on the main thread.
What's the point, you just press Ctrl Shift F9 to play the real Eve.
Because that display mode is often also sluggish in the scenarios where you would reach for it, including client-side input handling, and it loses information like the radius of interdiction bubbles.
Seems like a huge chunk is missing there, these mostly seem to me like a bunch of smaller reusable components with nothing really tying it together.
Makes sense, they probably don’t want to leak _the_ secret sauce driving the game itself.
I saw some eve-specific logic in Destiny repo, like warp enter condition and warp velocity math, or entity visibility between grids.
(Also, it’s full of std::(unordered_)map/set. Surprised they didn’t try squeeze some more perf there.)