EVE Fanfest 2007 (isdn = no)

[interman]

Evefest is a yearly gathering on Iceland where space nerds from all over the world go to mine space rocks, fight each other in tournaments, get drunk with the developers, and have fun around Reykjavik. The main topic this time was Trinity, their upcoming expansion scheduled for the end of November. Dedicated EVE sites will no doubt cover things in great detail, but here are the high points, and 130 or so photos.





Day 1
The first day revolved mostly around registration, and a few interesting lectures.

Heat – by Kristinn “Tuxford� Sigurbergsson









Heat is essentially an old idea. They added it as a means of added authenticity, and allow for what they call “rat in a corner gameplay�. Basically a means of surviving something you otherwise probably wouldn’t.


Version 1:
• Heat – damage to modules.
• Only moduless in the same rack take damage
• Chance-based. Modules can go offline if they’ve sustained enough damage. Needs to be fixed at a station, but cheap. Annoying if you're far from a station.

Version 2:
• Modules have more hit points.
• Increased repair cost.
• Damage based on distance from module
7 slots away = 25%
3 slots away = 50%
1 slot away = 75%

Heat sinks:
Empty / offline modules reduce damage chance.

Repair cost:
10% of base price.
No partial repairs.
More if the module is offline.
Repair in space. Right click, repair.
Consumes nanite repair paste, an NPC commodity.
You can repair in space, but it’s definitely an ISK sink.
Can't repair if active / overloaded. Combat repair not viable.

The future:
Tied closely to tech 3.
• Not simply better.
• Perhaps sustainable heat dissipation.

NOT DECIDED YET.

How to PVP like an expert - by Eris Discordia









Start small. Stick with frigates and cruisers for a long, long time.
Small groups are great to learn from.
Be quiet on team speak, especially if you're in a big group.

Fansite Basics - by Valerie “Pann� Massey







Find a niche.
Be at least 85-90% feature complete when launching.
Expanding later is fine, but avoid empty / non-working links.
Have good content at launch.
Don't be a douche to other sites.

Novel - by Tony Gonzales





On June 19 a new novel will be released, based on NPC characters. It had been discussed whether player should be involved, but there was simply not enough control over what happens. The book will be aimed at the sci-fi market, but effort will definitely be made to try and have it stand out from other similar looking books.

Tony read one of the 74 chapters, which dealt with some kind of moderated session between the races. They didn’t really agree on a whole lot.

This book is basically the reason why the in-game storyline has been on hold for a while. Players will of course get the important bits in the future through the game, but those looking for more will definitely want to check out this book. More books may be released in the future, depending on how well this one will sell, but the ending is supposedly quite loose, and CONCORD will play an import part.

Blue Lagoon

Anyone who goes to Iceland has to drop by the blue lagoon. This is basically a place where you can bathe in fairly hot “lava warmed� water, which is apparently healthy for both the mind and body. The thing was however that by the time we got there the wind and rain was so powerful that you could compare it to having your boat sink in the stormy pacific, only the water is hot and you won't drown as long as you stand upright. Still, I think just about everyone had a great time, even if it wasn’t exactly what they expected.

[interman]

Day 2









Player council
The idea is essentially that in the future there'll be a group of players that have been voted upon to communicate with CCP in a way that goes beyond what's done today. This is intended to be a form of deliberative democracy, though in the second part Jessica Mulligan and Richard Bartle (the “mom and dad of MMOs�) played devils advocate and pointed out a few flaws in the relationship.









The definition of “developer�, “god�, or as the CCP guys call themselves “janitors� were also discussed. This is something that has changed quite dramatically from the days of having 30,000 members when the developers could make much more direct impacts, to now with 200,000 members when it’s tough to make real impact without spending considerable amounts of time. In an ideal democracy we could for instance see a situation where a corporation would convince a great number of other players to have the game's ships replaced with, say pink ponies, and that's something they'll obviously want to avoid.

Pretty much anyone will be able to run for election, and you can vote once pr account.

[interman]

Alliance Panel Discussion
Here representatives from seven large alliances joined to present their alliance, their past, present and future, and communicate issues of importance. Unfortunately not that many questions were raised from the audience, so the majority of the discussion was about issues of role-playing, in which the head of PIE Inc chimed in. The Goonfleet (originating from the somethingawful.com forums) presentation was easily the funniest, explaining a bit about why, and how they do what they do – with examples from other games like Second Life.

[interman]

Live Visions: Börkur “CCP Nag� Eriksson
Lead graphical designer (confirm this) spent an hour or so showing how he creates his awesome paintings in Photoshop. He started literally from an orange background, to a misty sci-fi scene. Most of his work, which you can check out on the official website, takes between 3-4 hours, to 3-4 days.








The world within: Torfi F. Olafsson









“Ambulation� as it's currently called is one of the major new features that'll be included sometime next year. The idea is that you can dock at a station somewhere and basically walk around and interact with people. You will be able to have corporation offices here (public and private parts), but also rent spaces in which you can build a bar, a clothes shop, a plastic surgeon office, and basically other things that involve your appearance. Corporations will be able to have meetings here using text and/or EVE voice, players will be able to get drunk and slap each other, but you will not be able to kill anyone. It would be quite funny, though not very fair if a newbie could sneak up on a titan (largest ship in-game) and just stab him to death.

Your captain quarters will be your home, where you can keep outfits and whatever else, but it'll disappear if your ship gets blown up. It can however be stored at a space station.

In terms of appearance the characters in amublatation have to be customized by the character. You can't just import your “main apperance�, since this uses a very different system of deformation. “Main appearences� can also have too many weird expressions, which would look weird if you could actually walk around like that. When walking around you can set a mood (happy, ambivalent, angry, and so on), and your emotes, idle animation, and a few other things will differ depending on that, along with status.

Characters can get slimmer or fatter depending on how much food you eat. I'm not sure if you can buff by exercising like in GTA: San Andreas, but you can get slimmer by having an operation of some sort. Character animation will change depending on size.

If you look at the original artwork you'll notice that it's quite cartoony. In ambulation CCP is going for a more photo realistic approach, so faces are built from a series of images where certain parts have been borrowed. This is transparent to the player.

Clothes will be made similarly to how it's done in Ultima Online, so someone would buy white pants, a dye kit, maybe something like silver lining, press create, and set whatever price they feel like. Space stations will be very much empty at first, so it's definitely up to the players to populate them. However, the developers hate empty rooms, so it seems like the stations will expand or something like that as players rent rooms. The rooms will work much like an IRC chat room, meaing there'll be an owner / operator, who can appoint other operators, and normal players. Access can be filtered to player names (for instance only people with first name John, but none with last name Smith), or for instance only people from a certain corporation or alliance. Automated bouncers can be hired if you want to throw out someone, for instance if someone just leaves on his computer all night (which would take up one slot). You can also hire robot NPCs that can communicate with players using a custom discussion tree. This NPC can give items, take items, meaning you could set up intricate quests involving several NPCs if you want.

Rooms will have a maximum number of players, depending on whether it's for instance a basic corporation room (with support for maybe 16 players), or a deluxe room (with support for maybe 64 players). The first release will apparently only have basic rooms. You won't be able to bump into people, but as you pass through someone there'll be an animation of you at least sort of trying to dodge each other.

Space stations will look very much according to the race it belongs to, but they're making sure that the insides won't look too much like chapels. Elevators will always be close by, meaning you can get back to your ship very quickly.

[interman]

Eve Bar Quiz
An hour or so before the big show for the night the players got to join in on an eve bar quiz. The 29 questions were very specific with regards to ingame mechanics, requirements, names of expansions, and so on. Do you know how many drone slots a Thorax has?

The EVE Show
The highpoint of the night was the EVE show. This is essentially a game show where some of the developers were put into two groups, battling it out in several rounds. Some of these had the guys and girl sing item description – opera style, one that had the devs guessing what something was, incomplete sentences, DIY drama, and a paper/rock/scissor game called lake/cow/bomb. Cow drinks lake. Lake defuses bomb. Bomb blows up cow. By this time the majority of the people on and off stage were reasonably intoxicated. Many laughs were had, and the phrase “that's what she said!� was beaten like a dead horse.

[interman]

Day 3

Graphics in Trinity
The day began with CCPs CTO and a representative from NVIDIA talking about upgrading the graphics of EVE, from the four year old engine used today, to a DirectX 10-based engine using many of the very best looking effects. In the expansion for November ships, docks, and space stations have been prioritized. We saw an example where the Amarr titan went from a basic model, to using height mapping, Fresnel effects, dual materials, HDR, and more. The polygon count has greatly increased, but the most interesting change is that they’re going to a per-pixel way of dealing with the graphics (using shaders), as opposed to just dealing with vertices and polygons. This not only looks better, but is a much more efficient way of dealing with rendering, looking at the number of draw calls for instance.

Ultimately what we saw looks extremely good, but things like effects, the environments and so on won’t receive as substantial an upgrade until the next expansion.



























A lot of 8600 GTs were given away during the event.

[interman]

General Trinity info





















EVE Voice is now free. You’ll be able to listen on multiple channels, and toggle which one you want to speak on. A kind of favorites list lets you quickly communicate with people without the need of searching and so on.

There will be new kill, mine, and courier missions, new paths, and mini-professions.

Lots and lots of new loot to be collected. A recruitment feature lets corp leaders specify exactly what kind of recruits they’re looking for.

Social networks will be improved. Players can for instance now take screenshots, and have them automatically be uploaded to a website.



Most windows will have context sensitive help, powered by wiki technology. This means anyone can contribute, and it’s also intended as a means of recording all of the events that happen in EVE, somewhere everyone can see it.

[interman]

We also got a look at the future and how players may be interacting with planets. Not much has been decided though.



Transgaming has made a port for Mac and Linux. These will work exactly like the PC version, and will receive the same updates at the same time.





Lag is also one of the big issues the developers have been facing. In order to solve this CCP is working with IBM and Microsoft in order to build one of Europe’s most powerful servers, but it’ll take a while.

[interman]

Developer roundtable
During the roundtable players lined up by the stage, asking whatever game related they had on their minds. Some questions seem to be asked year after year, but this time a few of those got answers that seemed much more promising.












THE END

Bonus pics can be found here: http://www.gamershell.com/misc/eve_fanfest...ots.html?page=1

[Gazz]

Great work Interman, must have taken you some time to get all these pictures uploaded and marked. Game looks great although I try to stay clear of any mmo's because they are so damm addicting. Sweet to see the developers drinking beer on stage, they rule. The crowd however seems to be pretty full of ehmm, how do I put this nicely..... Guys who have issues getting dates, that's it. The guy on the front row in the last picture looks a lot like geekboy, the guy I have in my signature.

So did you drink a lot of beer there and score the boothchicks? They were there I hope...