Ye Olde Tymes

I stumbled upon the old dev blogs from 2003, some are interesting in a historical kind of way.

I may have just created a new job description, video game archaeology.

Although actually digging up old Atari 2600 E.T. cartridges buried many years ago is a more hands on form.

Anyway it is quite a startling comparison between those times and the current version of CCP.

For example (verbatim) :

..that if you put two cups of water in the freezer. One at 90°C and one at 18°C, the 90°C one will freeze faster?

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/1168

Would any one be interested in writing a player blog? It would be a place were players would write about their day to day life in EVE for others to read and comment on.

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/1165

Also fixed was the globalness of the jettison timer and it reduced to 3 minutes. We need to have the timer, as spurting cans all over the place, puts the hurt on servers and players. Note to miners; using secure-containers to do what you have been using the loot containers, gives you more capacity and password protection of the contents.

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/1158

Over the 2 months that we have been live, vast amounts of logs have been produced; this has been slowly degrading SQL server performance. It first became and issue last Sunday. Database load coupled with node deaths as a result of that, was the biggest reason for EVE not setting a new simultaneous users record last Sunday (we have set a new record each Sunday since release) and signup/churn last week was more than enough for a new one.

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/1150

Fascinating!

The Updates Are Coming!

It would seem as I was writing yesterdays post CCP was also releasing the information about how they are going to manage releases from this point on.

Funnily enough my post was somewhat accurate about future releases being small as the bulk of the Kronos release has been pushed forward towards the end of June 2014.

However it is better they release a properly thought out and implemented industry update than something half arsed.

We will have to wait and see what we end up with.

So below this is the explanation from CCP about the future releases.

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/from-2-expansions-to-10-releases-eve-onlines-new-release-model-explained/

Six Weeks Later

So ignoring all the events at Fanfest 2014 what information is useful to the player base of Eve Online, DUST514 and Valkyrie?

The biggest announcement seems to be the date of the next, and last, big expansion release.  It will be called Kronos and the release date is June the 3rd.  Kronos mostly seems to be an industry release, and that is a good thing, but the bigger news is the way CCP will handle expansions in the future.

Gone is the twice yearly cycle of updates expansions, replacing this is a release cycle of six weeks, which may, or may not, provide more expansion material over the course of a year.'

Keeping to a six week release cycle is ambitious.

CCP don't do ambitious very well.

How will they name the new expansions?

If they have to come up a new name every six weeks then pretty soon we'll be getting expansions called Snowball IX, Snowball X, etc etc.

What may happen is the old Summer (Winter), and Winter (Summer) release dates would set the name, and then six weeks after that would have a suffix of 1.0, 2.0, etc.

Who knows!

What I don't want is after six weeks we only receive a new drone, or a ship re-balance.

These have to be proper expansions, not updates that placate the masses in the short term but ultimately alienate the player base.

The Legion of DUST514

Fanfest 2014 is on at the moment, but the live feed begins at a horrible time for me and only gets worse.

So catching up on news from the get together is tough.  However overnight CCP released news about a version of DUST514 for the PC.

[Dust 514 News] Introducing Project Legion

[CVG] Dust 514 dev announces Project Legion for PC

[Eurogamer] CCP re-imagines PS3 shooter Dust 514 for PC as Project Legion

[Massively] EVE Fanfest 2014: Project Legion brings DUST 514 to the PC

[PCWORLD] Meet Project Legion, the epic new first-person PC shooter from EVE Online's creators

While it is still at least a year away, possibly more when real time is used instead of CCP time, at least it shows a forward step from the parent company.