Chocolate Heaven

My thoughts and opinions here are a fair reflection of those posted over on Ecliptic Rift, which as always, is worth a read.

Like you, I’m just upset rather than angry. I’ve been here since the beginning, and through all the troubles the game and CCP itself has gone through I’ve got by alright; even ye olde t20 incident saw me casually waiting for some sort of explanation of what exactly happened. This though; confirmed on various levels by various individuals is really quite painful. I honestly cannot imagine the sheer pressure those CSM members must have been feeling after seeing this document, knowing all-too-well that they could say nothing about it to the community they represent because of NDAs.

It was just a week ago that I was talking with a friend that I was visiting – also an Eve player – about my thoughts regarding CCP. I have for a while now held the belief that all the rampant fanboyism and all the threadnaughts were in some kind of cosmic (pardon the pun) balancing act as a result of the company growing. That CCP was sitting on the fence with growing pains as it slowly contemplated which side of the fence it would eventually sit on: Small, friendly company? Or a large entity obsessed with corporate greed? This I think has convinced me of the latter, and its and incredibly sad realisation.

A Distinct Lack of Arsed

Some who know me fairly well were probably aware that I had hit a bit of a lull in playing recently; that, or they’re stalkers. I log in mostly for skill changes and building stuff – something I feel is more of a responsibility than something I necessarily want to do (though I admit that when I’m doing it, it is enjoyable).

I have been thinking about moving Eilean over to another account and letting it lapse, half-heartedly of course, since its paid for with ISK that I don’t even notice the lack of when it goes to PLEX. Around the time I made my last Industry Character post I realised I was hitting another “wall of Can’t Be Arsed”, and was banking on my trip to Iceland for FanFest to reinvigorate my interest and get me playing again. It worked to a degree. I logged a massive amount of hours after that, mostly just chatting with people; I was still fairly excited about the future. But it didn’t last more than a few weeks. Then I lapsed into being almost a non-entity to all but a few close friends.

Now I’m thinking of taking it further. To what extent, I’m not as-yet sure. But I suspect like anything truly interesting I’ve done in the past, you’ll only likely hear about it if you ply me with alcohol and genuine interest. And since the former is decidedly lacking in interwebs-land, I guess its not going to happen anytime soon.

Walking in Stations

Or more accurately, walking in one room of a station. The same room. In all stations.

I defended CCP a lot when people would criticize them about taking a billion years to produce Incarna only to have some Captain’s Quarters done by the time it launched. I was there in presentations about the whole thing when they explained that the whole concept had been developed then scrapped several times over before settling on a solution that was easily expandable post-launch.

This aside, it was a bit saddening that the best look we got of these CQs in Iceland was a video showing a partially textured room and gangway, when 2.5 years previously, people had been demoing walking about in quarters, a station environment and a bar. But never mind!

For me, the main problem came in with the introduction of just one room for the expansion. I’m not knocking the time and effort that surely went into creating the Minmatar CQ, but new turrets and a dirty room to saunter around do not make for particularly inspiring main features of an expansion. Sure, its free, and I can’t complain about that, but the fact remains; it is distinctly underwhelming.

Add to this the fact that my PSU and GPU run incredibly hot with station environments rendered now – even on the lowest settings – I find myself in two minds about whether to enjoy the shiny view, or not die from the heat the PC case kicks out in protest of the visuals it has to render. Since I sometimes need to run 3 clients at once – admittedly 90% of that time is spent outside of a station – the initial loading those clients up may cause some kind of mini-nuclear meltdown inside my computer.

There’s a lot of people that have turned it off already. I suspect this to be the usual vocal minority forum-goers, but I’m leaning in that direction too. At least til winter when the extra heat will be welcome. If I’m still around then…

Those Are Some Fancy New Boots

I feel that a lot of people (myself included) felt a bit angry about the cost of cosmetic items following the release of Incarna. I really wanted to sidestep this entirely, but:

Micropayment: Transaction in small amounts, costing a few cents to usually less than five dollars, typically involving sale of information on internet. (http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/micropayment.html)

While I would be happy to pay a couple of £ for some really nice items (thus putting the ‘micro’ in ‘micropayment’), dishing out the equivalent cost of a month’s subscription (15 euro (we get billed in euros in the UK for some reason)) for a pair of shoes which you can’t even preview on your own sodding character just isn’t going to happen for me, and I have loads of ISK.

Of course, the counter to this is that they did state fairly frequently their intention to keep a very close eye on the PLEX market following the release of the Noble Exchange. I imagine this includes fluctuation of the prices based on supply/demand. At least I hope so, otherwise I feel really sorry for the artists that worked on the clothing items, because no bugger is going to wear them. That said, I don’t really like the selection we can buy at the moment anyway. Or at least, I don’t think they would suit my characters; I’m not paying that much just to see if they do.

So What’s Going On?

From my perspective, I’m not sure yet. I do plan to do something as a reaction to this, but at the same time, I want to hear some kind of official response before I properly throw my rattle out of the pram. We’ll have to wait and see I guess.

The lack of voice – of any kind – from CCP does have echoes of the t20 fiasco, but at least this time we have reasonable community representatives rather than a corporate-drone-like Keiron that we had back then, who’s responses were so vague and written in legalese that all it did was make the community incredibly angry.

But to answer the original question posed by this entry: Is Eve dying? No. Its already dead. And I fear I’ve been deceived into thinking otherwise for a long time.

For the presently-unaware, a few days ago, CCP announced that something interesting would be happening on the Dust 514 website by way of a gigantic countdown timer. The half-awake amongst us will have realised that this coincided with the E3 show (which is still on-going). Those that dug a little deeper worked out that it would align perfectly with the Sony Press Conference.

This in and of itself didn’t necessarily spell doom and gloom for those out there that have a 360 but not a PS3 – myself included: those who watched Microsoft’s presentation would have seen some Mass Effect 3 footage and said game using Kinect features, but Mass Effect 3 was never intended to be an exclusive on any platform. So there was still hope.

Once the Dust counter hit zero, we were ‘treated’ to a livestream of the press conference. I use inverted commas there, because it was the same stream you could see on GameTrailers, Gamespot, or any of the others covering E3. But after an hour or so of trudging through various games that none of us really cared about (even if some were quite pretty), we got what was probably the shortest presentation of the two-hour show.

Dust is to be a PS3 exclusive. And much rabbling ensued (and still is!) on ye olde tweetfleet.

Why Consoles?

Much as I still find the idea of having a run-and-gun game on a console somewhat silly – with analog sticks being such a poor means of accurately coordinating shots compared to the fidelity of the classic mouse and keyboard combination – the decision to make this game a console-only pewpew experience is one that makes a lot of sense.

CCP have always taken on difficult tasks. Eve itself is testament to that. While most MMO developers start on the micro level and scale things up with each expansion, CCP have done the opposite (for the most part) with Eve. They gave us a galaxy to play with, and as time’s gone on, they have been drilling down to give us more detail beyond its grass-roots epic space battles. You can see this in effect in PI today, and Incarna as it’s slowly released over the next year or so.

But what does that have to do with Dust? Its the same thing. Sure, its an abstraction from the game of Eve, but its not a separation from the world of Eve.

The climb in subscribers hasn’t been exponential for Eve. Its been steady up until now (with a few exceptions for things like Unholy Rage), but one has to wonder how many of those are unique new subscribers. I myself make up six subscriptions, for example. I think what CCP discovered a few years ago, is that their leading edge in sci-fi simulation wasn’t going to cut it forever. Sure, they get to enjoy a lot of luxuries because they’ve had no direct competition for the last eight years, but that just makes it a niche game, and sooner or later, you’re going to run out of niche gamers.

A move then – not only to another genre, but to an entirely different platform – makes sense. We’ve already seen the years of forum whining about Incarna being ‘irrelevant’ to Eve, and how people just want “moar spaceships!!”, so moving some of these not-so-spaceshippy activities to another game is probably a good idea.

PC gamers, by and large (unless they are literally blinkered by the likes of WoW) are at least aware of Eve these days. CCP’s flagship product enjoys interactions with the press far outreaching its meagre subscriber base size. Counter to this, is the console market. Having read some of the comments on places like the Playstation blog, a lot of the responses seem to be positive about Dust and that it “came out of left field”. People who game primarily on consoles haven’t really heard of Eve, but a lot of people that play shooters like squad-based gameplay and progression. If that wasn’t the case, the Battlefield games wouldn’t sell as well as they do.

By bringing one aspect of Eve to consoles exclusively, and having it still directly tied to the same online world we experience on our PCs exclusively, CCP can expand the interest in their IP to places that would otherwise have ignored it. Its a really good way of showing people the awesomeness of New Eden without directly alienating their existing customers.

Why the PS3?

I know, I know. When we last saw Dust actually being played, it was at FanFest 2009. Anyone paying attention could see then and there that it was being played on an XBox 360; the controllers are quite a give-away.

I’m not going to say I bought a 360 purely on that basis, but it did play a fairly substantial role in my decision of whether to get a 360 or PS3. Currently, it pretty much gathers dust (lolpun) sitting under the TV until such time as I feel like watching a DVD. I have some games for it, but its so rare that I feel like playing something not on the PC that its horridly underused.

So I should be grumpy about this PS3 exclusivity thing, no? Well, yes and no. Its been long enough since I bought the XBox that I don’t really feel it as a sting in the wallet. Sure, its annoying that I bought a console that I hardly use, but that’s more my fault than anything, and it still serves a purpose as a fairly decent (if expensive) DVD player.

But none of this gets to the heart of the matter. Why no longer on XBox?

I’ve seen comments from people in the past about expenses. How true these claims are, I couldn’t possibly say. These people talk about development costs and Microsoft taking commission on the use of their services and so on. If this is the case, then I can see why CCP would want to move away from such a relationship. Nobody is going to say that Dust isn’t a risky venture, and the better use of their literal ISK that CCP make, the less there is to lose should it all go pear-shaped.

On a personal level, I’ll be damned if I’m paying 15-20% more for a game on a console and then paying a subscription just to play it online when I can do so for free on the PC for less initial investment. And for this reason the PS3 makes more sense: it costs nothing to play online, as any non-MMO should.

There’s also the added bonus of developing for a single platform: it cuts down (potentially) on playtesting and QA time. We all know first-hand how CCP’s QA department can fumble a release, so this could be a blessing when it comes to updates to the game.

But What About…?

There’s a lot of pseudo controversial issues I’ve not talked about here. Like the end of the Dust trailer showing the mercs performing the inverse of the Future Vision video and taking out spaceships from the ground, or how Dust will interact with the PI system, or the micro-transaction ruination of everything good and pure in this world. These are all discussions that need to happen at some point, but they aren’t going to happen here. I’m happy to bounce ideas around with people in-game about the direction of Eve or Dust and how they could destroy (or enrich) each other, but I want to keep this platform primarily focused on Eve, and nothing else.

Will I Play It?

At this stage, I don’t know. I’m assuming a 2012 release, so there’s plenty of time for me to make a bit of money to buy a PS3, or trade-in the 360 I have. On the other hand, the last time I got vaguely hyped about a co-operative shooter was Brink just last month, and while I didn’t find the game as totally disagreeable as some did… even though I was playing with friends and the game featured character progression and levelling, it just didn’t hold my interest at all. I still only have 4 hours clocked on that game, and I have a horrible suspicion that Dust would end up the same as my 360 – gathering a thick cake of its namesake under the TV.

Well, several actually.

So, it seems my post generated some interest from various parties, if only for its blatant inaccuracies. Firstly, my claim about Māori designs coming out of nowhere was false:

“For the Brutor tribe, we were actually inspired by the Maori warriors of New Zealand…” (The Art of EVE. 2007. White Wolf Publishing)

The sketch for Brutor in this book also mentions a mix of the above and African. Though that said, the sketch for Sebiestor says ‘cute and girly’, so how accurate that is, I’m not sure.

The second apology is related to the first. One of my friends (and an ex-corpy) in-game also pointed out that while my example tattoo (of my character) was nice, it isn’t really accurate:

The women were not as extensively tattooed as the men. Their upper lips were outlined, usually in dark blue. The nostrils were also very finely incised. The chin moko was always the most popular, and continued to be practised even into the 1970s.

I think if we’re going with this, we should probably limit the types of tattoo by bloodline and gender as well, since Sebiestor are something different, and women aren’t likely to have more than the mouth region with moko. So… yeah. I guess calling it a beard or stubble is kind of insulting, given what its supposed to represent. Sorry about that!

The next thing to apologise for is confusion surrounding the Ray of Matar tattoo. I got a spike of traffic yesterday because of my post, but for the wrong reasons. Its never my intention to confuse anyone, or to spout ignorant garbage, but considering all the faux pas I made, I really dropped the ball on this one.

My opinion on this specific tattoo is almost certainly false, since its based on a reading of the short story from at least five years ago. In fact, the last time I remember reading it was in 2004, when I was still very involved in Matari RP. One of the images in the story:

This is a tattoo displayed within the text for the Ray of Matar story. It is unmarked apart from some (to me anyway) illegible script within the image itself.

Its probably this that gave me the idea, but when you re-read the text you’re presented with “extending down and side-ways from her left eye were several dark lines, ranging from one to three centimeters in length.” which is entirely different to the pattern above.

But there was more to it than this image. I (mistakenly?) merged the above image with the representation of Karin Midular from in-game, who at the time had a tattoo vaguely similar to the one above. I can no longer find an image of her larger than about 128x128px so its really hard to see, or indeed to prove my crazy ramblings.

Anyway, the point is, I should have re-read a load of PF before making such claims. I also should have done a bit of research on the Maori thing, since I do own the Art of EVE book, and I have got internet access… Hopefully people will forgive me.

My opinions and discussion on this topic are going to based primarily on the Matari options (naturally!), but I do have characters from most bloodlines that need inking, scarring and piercing.

So we got our tattoos and stuff this week. I’d played about with them on Singularity a couple of weeks back, and my initial thoughts were “these are kinda pretty, but where are the original designs?” I think I (mistakenly) assumed that there would be more selection by the time the 1.4 update to Incursion would be deployed, because now its live, my thoughts are along the lines of “these are kinda pretty, but where are the original designs?”

Except, I sort of know where the original designs are; lining the ‘we can’t do this’ bin in Reykjavik. Whatever happened to ‘war on the impossible’?

While at FanFest, I heard two reasons for this change. One technical, and one aesthetic.

The Technical

Having very little knowledge of texture mapping and 3D type things, I don’t feel qualified to go into great detail about this, but I can relay (as best as I am able) information that I’ve absorbed.

Falling back to the most basic level, there’s two types of computer graphic: Bitmap and Vector. Don’t get confused by the filetype .bmp which is a Bitmap image, but its not exclusive to the file format. Bitmap is essentially drawing pixels on a screen. Your attempts at pixelly spaceships in MS Paint are Bitmap images. When you’re out snapping digital photos, those are Bitmaps. All your game screenshots are Bitmaps.

Vectors are a bit different. Vector images are rendered using mathematics, and while you can have pretty complex Vector images, they are best used for simplistic shapes and logos. The reason behind this, is that because they are rendered from numbers, they can be scaled up or down easily (which – as an example – is where .svg comes from – Scalable Vector Graphics) without a loss of image quality.

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Due to the complex patterns in skin and hair, character textures are Bitmap images; usually very large, compressed images, but Bitmaps all the same.

Going back to the previous example though: Tattoos are (reasonably) simplistic shapes, so they’d be ideal for saving in a Vector format.

The argument then, is that some of the older designs did not scale properly in all directions when using different face shapes. If anyone had a free character morph available when 1.4 hit and happened to apply a tattoo then morph the facial areas, they would see all sorts of scaling and compensation going on. The result is tattoos that scale nicely in all directions.

This technical restriction is my favourite, perhaps because I know literally nothing about how CCP has implemented rending of tattoos. However, the few tattoos that do have some semblance to the ones of old are also quite similar to the ones they didn’t include. My old tattoo, for example, I’ve drawn several times – with my old friend, the pen tool in Photoshop – to apply to photo-manipulations (for a calendar project), to a highly cartoonised version of my character in glorious 2D, and to a captured character portrait from a couple of months ago (which you’ll see in a bit further on), when I was bemoaning the lack of any tattoos. I guess some people are never happy, eh?

My point is, if my old tattoo can be stretched and scaled manually, without it looking like a dog’s dinner, then I think CCPs technology can do the same.

The Aesthetic

The second reason some of the tattoos weren’t transferred over, is that they “looked bad”. This brings me rather neatly to the long-overdue, and somewhat trend-setting first image for this post:

I’m not going to argue that this looks bad. I don’t really like how it looks, this is true, but as the saying goes; different strokes for different folks. This is very simplistic though; nobody’s going to argue that.

Our new selection of ink seems to fall into two main categories: The overly complex, and the ridiculously simplistic (see above). I fail to see how most of the old tattoo designs couldn’t have been recreated for this. I mean, they managed to make two Ray of Matar tattoos (below), which does great job of confusing me and screwing with Matari lore, so why not do the others? They aren’t as ornate as the new-new ones, but they aren’t anywhere near as simplistic (and honestly, lazy) as the one above.

I'm not sure is the literal Ray of Matar in this image. I think the left side is more like the old one in-game, but I get the impression that the one on the right is a more accurate depiction of the pattern, lore-wise.

I think the tattoos they did remake for the new chargen are the only ones that sit in the middle; not too complex, but not so simple that you feel like no effort was involved. They cover just enough of the face, and are intricate enough to make you ponder on their meaning; this is how it should be.

Another example (sorry, this is getting pretty image-intensive):

This (above) was the full resolution of my character, pre-1.4. I feel I did a reasonable job of handing her a Voluval mark that was stolen from her. If I can do this at such a low resolution, imagine what a professional could do with 2048×2048 maps. Is this too simplistic? Clearly not, from what we’ve already seen. Is it too complex? Hardly. Would it scale correctly? I don’t have the answer for that one, but we’ve seen all the other currently-available facial tattoos scale perfectly, so I see no reason why this (and others) weren’t included.

Instead, I’m left with this:

Now, I do actually like this tattoo. Its ornate, but not completely over-the-top. However, its not really Matari. While we don’t really know what mish-mash of cultures the Matari are supposed to be, it looks like now we’re Māori. Which is lovely, but I don’t recall that ever coming up before.

In addition to this, many of these new detailed inks have some lovely chin patterns, which on smaller images translate quite well as stubble. I can’t speak for everyone of course, but I’m not much of a fan of the Bearded Lady look. Maybe its the same as ‘Real men are manly enough to wear pink’. ‘Real women are feminine enough to sport a goatee’? No? No, I didn’t think so.

I sound very bittervet in this post, I suspect. But that’s not really the case. Tattoos are not only an integral part of personal identity for the Matari, but also denote social standing and help define their role in life. There are those that protest against it (ICly, of course), but because so many of our characters are left without the markings we chose months (or even years) ago, they are – for all intents and purposes – no longer the same character. We’re entering an age of acquiescence. Characters everywhere are accepting other characters’ changes purely because there’s no recourse for it. Nobody is exclaiming about drastically different Voluval markings because we have no choice in the matter. I really love the new patterns we have, but they should be in addition to the markings we had before, not in place of them.

I don’t want a goatee. I don’t want to look like some perversion of Māori society. I just want my old tattoos back.

I know. I suck at anything that would require an explicit, or even vaguely useful timeframe.

So what follows is my short notes from Friday of FanFest, and some opinions on some of the stuff from Saturday. I think that pretty much anyone that is interested in EVE has probably seen all the shiny videos that CCP has posted, especially the really shiny stuff from the last day, which is why I’m skimming a bit.

Friday

If you recall my nifty personal schedule, you’ll remember that I wanted to go to the Dev Track sessions. Unfortunately, a late rise on Friday meant I missed the first one, and subsequently used the remaining three session slots to just chill out on comfy sofas at the venue. I am kicking myself for not making the most of the time, but on the other hand, this was my holiday, so eh. I’ll live.

EVE Gate

• Mobile version on the roadmap for this year – I’m pretty sure a lot of people will be happy when that happens!
• Social networking hooks – So we can link stuff to Twitter or Facebook. There weren’t examples of this, but if it works like it does with other stuff, it might be a nice addition for ze TweetFleet.
• I had a load written about the new forums, but a) they’ve been made live now, and b) loltiming!
• One other thing was that while there’s a ‘like’ button for posts, they are open to the idea of having a ‘dislike’ as well, if there’s enough demand. Go forth forum warriors, and let your voices be heard!

Captain’s Quarters

• First iteration will have 4 set designs – one for each race. This will vary depending on the station you are docked at, not the race of your character.
• Assets (as in game assets, not in-game assets) have been developed in a way to maximise re-usability – They want us to be able to customise the layout in a later release, so that we can have a vaguely personal space.
• Will not be able to invite other capsuleers around yet. Very much what they want, but they need to fix all of the fluid interactions and animation aspects before it can be pushed live. This is actually the main reason for people not being different heights; technical difficulties in matching animations from sender to receiver.
• Does not override NeoCom – Everything you could do before, you can still do now in the same amount of time – Remember that changing ships takes 30s anyway, so even if it wasn’t the case, you could still switch ships in the same amount of time as before.
• Demo video was looking unfinished. Quarters themselves looked quite nice, but access ramp+balcony was untextured. I get the impression that they wanted a playable demo similar to the one they had in 2008, but the textures weren’t finished in time. Shame.
• Should have access to test next weekend on SiSi – lol, so last week then.
• Will be able to sit down, rotate camera, so you can take lots of nice screenshots of your character/s.
• Restructuring of the NPE so players are first introduced to their character and then space – should help with immersion.
• Aura will be back and fully localised in English, German and Russian as part of the expanded game introduction.

Beer Quiz

• Devs are crazy!

Saturday

Shiny things are shiny. I like the new turrets. They are very sexy, but I’m unsure on the practicalities of it. Do they do the animation when you lock a target? Stay out until you have no more locked targets? That’s about the only thing I can think of.

I think I enjoyed seeing the nebulae more than the turrets. Its really hard to see, even on the higher resolution Youtube videos, but they are seriously impressive-looking. Gave me tingles, and I love when things make me feel tingly.

The future vision is interesting. I think we all want to be nuking console kiddies from orbit. Right? There’s a lot of issues with it, and people have pulled it apart a lot. I think its not meant to be an accurate representation of the future of EVE, but rather the direction its heading in. Its meant to be fantastical and exciting, rather than accurate. And I think on that level, it succeeds.

Party at the Top of the World was cool. I stayed longer this time, but I decided to bail with the people I was with because It got too crowded. I think in general everything was much busier for all presentations at the event this year. More players. And they let in more Reykjavik folk.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of inviting local peeps in. But this year, there were so many players, and so many locals… By about 1am, I had trouble identifying the EVE people. Some had taken up residence further away in the venue, almost far enough to not hear the music. I think this might be the strategy in future, if they end up not changing to the new convention centre, or if its not finished construction.

Overall, I had a lot of fun. Iceland is awesome, and I really recommend that everyone go at least once. Next year I’m already arranging a corporate blob event, along with renting an apartment for a week and getting as many peeps there as possible!