Thread: Developers Blog

As some of you might know we've been working on something called Corp Locations (formerly called corp bookmarks). The concept is quite simple really. Once Crucible is released, you will be able to share your bookmarks with your corp so anyone in the corp can see them and use them. Well, you're not exactly sharing them, what you are really doing is copying them and giving them to the corp. There is a little bit more to it than that though.
To protect our server the corp bookmarks are cached so they may be up to 5 minutes out of date. We're also limiting them to 250 bookmarks per corp. Both those numbers might change based on feedback and how well this performs.
Anyone in the corp can create Corp Locations, however, if you do create one, you will be displayed as its creator. So filling up the corp's location storage space, or putting in misleading locations (safespot at an enemy POS for example) will probably get you kicked out of the corp pretty quickly. Everybody can also delete locations they themselves created, but only corp members with the role 'Communications Officer' can delete locations that other members have created.
There has been some discussion on the forum about whether this makes a scout's life too easy. With Corp Locations, a scout can save strategic locations and then in 5 minutes or less the whole corp has access to it. We’re aware of this concern but we don’t see it as a problem right, given the tools that are already available on TQ. We will be monitoring, and if this does turn out to be a problem, we have number of options open to address it.
Thats pretty much what I have to say about this. Oh wait we also moved the location folder structure to the server which means that no longer will your bookmarks be lost to cache issues on your end.

Click to enlarge


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As some of you might know we've been working on something called Corp Locations (formerly called corp bookmarks). The concept is quite simple really. Once Crucible is released, you will be able to share your bookmarks with your corp so anyone in the corp can see them and use them. Well, you're not exactly sharing them, what you are really doing is copying them and giving them to the corp. There is a little bit more to it than that though.
To protect our server the corp bookmarks are cached so they may be up to 5 minutes out of date. We're also limiting them to 250 bookmarks per corp. Both those numbers might change based on feedback and how well this performs.
Anyone in the corp can create Corp Locations, however, if you do create one, you will be displayed as its creator. So filling up the corp's location storage space, or putting in misleading locations (safespot at an enemy POS for example) will probably get you kicked out of the corp pretty quickly. Everybody can also delete locations they themselves created, but only corp members with the role 'Communications Officer' can delete locations that other members have created.
There has been some discussion on the forum about whether this makes a scout's life too easy. With Corp Locations, a scout can save strategic locations and then in 5 minutes or less the whole corp has access to it. We’re aware of this concern but we don’t see it as a problem right, given the tools that are already available on TQ. We will be monitoring, and if this does turn out to be a problem, we have number of options open to address it.
Thats pretty much what I have to say about this. Oh wait we also moved the location folder structure to the server which means that no longer will your bookmarks be lost to cache issues on your end.

Click to enlarge


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You may remember from the earlier blog (hint: read that blog if you haven't already) that we're making some adjustments to starbases in Crucible. Based on discussion in the feedback thread, we have made some changes to our plan, which will be detailed here.
ERRATA:

• Disregard all mention of "offline timers"; starbase structures will continue to offline instantly. Whoops.

CHANGES:

• - Each production run of fuel blocks will now take five minutes rather than ten minutes
• - Each production run of fuel blocks will now produce FORTY fuel blocks rather than FOUR
• - Fuel blocks can now be produced in Component Assembly Arrays as well as Ammunition Assembly Arrays
• - Control towers will now use 40/20/10 blocks an hour for large/medium/small towers, up from 4/2/1 (matched by production increases)
• - Faction towers will no longer have a fuel bay capacity bonus; their bays will be 140k/70k/35k in line with standard towers
• - Faction towers will have a 10% fuel use reduction for "tier 1" towers and a 20% fuel use reduction for "tier 2" towers (compared to their standard tower equivalents), taking them to 36/18/9 and 32/16/8 respectively for large/medium/small towers

CLARIFICATION:

Fuel switchover will happen with a scheduled patch approximately two weeks after Crucible, details of which will be announced closer to the time.
Towers will continue to use the original fuel types right up until this patch happens.
After this patch is applied, they will use fuel blocks exclusively for fuel.
If you ensure that your tower is stocked with a mix of old fuel and fuel blocks, it will continue to use the old fuel until the switchover patch, at which point it will start using the fuel blocks instead in a fully seamless manner.
We recommend ensuring that you keep enough old-style fuel in your tower to last three days past the scheduled switchover patch - so that, in the unlikely event that the patch runs into a technical glitch that prevents deployment, your towers won't go offline - and fill the rest up with fuel blocks. This should ensure a smooth switch-over.
Afterword

If there are any further questions, please ask them in the feedback thread. Be aware though that we're not in a position to make non-emergency changes for the Crucible release at this time; any additional adjustments will have to wait until future patches.
Thanks for reading,
-Greyscale

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You may remember from the earlier blog (hint: read that blog if you haven't already) that we're making some adjustments to starbases in Crucible. Based on discussion in the feedback thread, we have made some changes to our plan, which will be detailed here.
ERRATA:

• Disregard all mention of "offline timers"; starbase structures will continue to offline instantly. Whoops.

CHANGES:

• Each production run of fuel blocks will now take five minutes rather than ten minutes
• Each production run of fuel blocks will now produce FORTY fuel blocks rather than FOUR
• Fuel blocks are now 5m3 rather tha 50m3
• Fuel blocks can now be produced in Component Assembly Arrays as well as Ammunition Assembly Arrays
• Control towers will now use 40/20/10 blocks an hour for large/medium/small towers, up from 4/2/1 (matched by production increases)
• Faction towers will no longer have a fuel bay capacity bonus; their bays will be 140k/70k/35k in line with standard towers
• Faction towers will have a 10% fuel use reduction for "tier 1" towers and a 20% fuel use reduction for "tier 2" towers (compared to their standard tower equivalents), taking them to 36/18/9 and 32/16/8 respectively for large/medium/small towers

CLARIFICATION:

Fuel switchover will happen with a scheduled patch approximately two weeks after Crucible, details of which will be announced closer to the time.
Towers will continue to use the original fuel types right up until this patch happens.
After this patch is applied, they will use fuel blocks exclusively for fuel.
If you ensure that your tower is stocked with a mix of old fuel and fuel blocks, it will continue to use the old fuel until the switchover patch, at which point it will start using the fuel blocks instead in a fully seamless manner.
We recommend ensuring that you keep enough old-style fuel in your tower to last three days past the scheduled switchover patch - so that, in the unlikely event that the patch runs into a technical glitch that prevents deployment, your towers won't go offline - and fill the rest up with fuel blocks. This should ensure a smooth switch-over.
Afterword

If there are any further questions, please ask them in the feedback thread. Be aware though that we're not in a position to make non-emergency changes for the Crucible release at this time; any additional adjustments will have to wait until future patches.
Thanks for reading,
-Greyscale

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As most of you are no doubt aware, many CCP employees were slaughtered in the Tama system yesterday in an unprecedented Live Event announced that same day. 71 members of the CCP in-game alliance took part and were (except for a handful of cowards who warped their capsules out!) eventually sent back to our home system of Polaris in need of new clones.
Our goal was to mobilize a sizeable fleet of devs that would be tough enough to not be wiped out in minutes, but eventually we hoped to attract enough attention to be overpowered and killed. We wanted to give people a fight to remember and we hope we did just that.
In total, CCP destroyed 430 capsuleer vessels belonging to 316 different characters. Included in this are three characters who were accidentally pod killed by the CCP horde, all of which have been reimbursed their losses (fun fact: One of them was Darius III of the CSM). To quote the infamous TomB, the pod he destroyed was because of “Lag!”. Sure, Tom…we all believe you ;).
In total, 2,009 ship/capsule losses were recorded in the Tama system yesterday, a rather considerable jump from the daily average of just 56 per day from the November 1^st to November 22^nd period.
CCP lost the following ship types in the engagement:

Capsule	59
Apocalypse Navy Issue	27
Vindicator	10
Guardian	9
Bhaalgorn	8
Machariel	6
Damnation	3
Raven Navy Issue	3
Nightmare	2
Dominix Navy Issue	2
Gallente Shuttle	1
Broadsword	1
Caldari Shuttle	1

The totals for ship losses in the system seem to suggest that CCP employees have a strange tendency for firing upon rookie frigates when they see them, though many larger ships were also destroyed:

	Kills total	Killed by CCP
Rookie ship	468	98
Frigate	330	73
Battlecruiser	163	63
Battleship	166	56
Cruiser	93	32
Stealth Bomber	112	25
Interceptor	64	14
Destroyer	51	13
Assault Ship	44	13
Covert Ops	47	6
Force Recon Ship	16	6
Heavy Assault Ship	12	6
Logistics	15	5
Strategic Cruiser	6	5
Capsule	363	3
Shuttle	27	3
Industrial	8	2
Interdictor	6	2
Combat Recon Ship	3	2
Command Ship	5	1
Transport Ship	3	1
Electronic Attack Ship	5
Heavy Interdictor	2
Total	2009	429

Lots of assorted parties joined the fray once word got out. The majority of ships destroyed were destroyed by characters who were not a member of any alliance, with CCP (thankfully!) coming in at the top spot for the alliances.

Not in an alliance	727
C C P Alliance	429
Pandemic Legion	419
Important Internet Spaceship League	85
Goonswarm Federation	50
Only For Fun	40
Test Alliance Please Ignore	34
Northern Coalition.	31
Tactical Narcotics Team	21
RvB - RED Federation	18
Other	155

Our congratulations to the players who made it on to the list of top 25 killers in Tama yesterday, alongside eight developers. This list excludes capsules, rookie ships and shuttles that were killed (because come on, that’s not really sporting, is it chaps).

CCP GingerDude	37
CCP Klumpur	35
Space Chi	33
Sekh Ondaari	32
Jack bubu	24
Beastoria	21
Joe Public	21
CCP TomB	20
CCP Soulless	20
Margido	16
CCP Diagoras	16
MhG29L	16
Jirad TiSalver	16
Blood r4ge	16
The United NPCs of Tama	13
CCP Space Cadet	13
DeVoT1oN	13
Mang0o	12
CCP Zirnitra	12
Murtific	11
CCP Sreegs	11
Gallactica	11
James Damar	11
Mijstor Jedann	10
DarkXale	10

Additional props to Beastoria for landing the final blow on four CCP ships, with Fattymcbutterpants (a name which had the CCP fleet unified in laughter when called out as primary on EVE voice) and another character who should probably be renamed, both achieving three final blows each. We’re also happy to report that whilst NPCs did indeed manage to destroy 13 ships in Tama yesterday, no CCP ships were lost to NPCs. And that's despite CCP Sreeg’s Nanobot Accelerator rigged buffer tank.
After the last CCP pilot was blasted full of holes and sent on his merry way via the clone express, players kept fighting in the system for almost four hours.

We had our backend tool construct a word cloud from the biggest thread discussing the event, and judging by that, fun was had.



Many thanks to everyone who took part and had fun with us, all of us here at CCP who were able to be there had an absolute blast. I’m certain that this is far from being the last time a fleet is spotted leaving Polaris.

If you have any tips or feedback for us for future events, or want to make fun of our fits, please visit the comments thread for this blog.
CCP Diagoras

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Returning pilot? Visit Account Management for the latest offers and promotions.



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As most of you are no doubt aware, many CCP employees were slaughtered in the Tama system yesterday in an unprecedented Live Event announced that same day. 71 members of the CCP in-game alliance took part and were (except for a handful of cowards who warped their capsules out!) eventually sent back to our home system of Polaris in need of new clones.
Our goal was to mobilize a sizeable fleet of devs that would be tough enough to not be wiped out in minutes, but eventually we hoped to attract enough attention to be overpowered and killed. We wanted to give people a fight to remember and we hope we did just that.

Click to enlarge (screenshot courtesy of throughnewbeyes.wordpress.com)
In total, CCP destroyed 430 capsuleer vessels belonging to 316 different characters. Included in this are three characters who were accidentally pod killed by the CCP horde, all of which have been reimbursed their losses (fun fact: One of them was Darius III of the CSM). To quote the infamous TomB, the pod he destroyed was because of “Lag!”. Sure, Tom…we all believe you ;).
In total, 2,009 ship/capsule losses were recorded in the Tama system yesterday, a rather considerable jump from the daily average of just 56 per day from the November 1^st to November 22^nd period.
CCP lost the following ship types in the engagement:

Capsule	59
Apocalypse Navy Issue	27
Vindicator	10
Guardian	9
Bhaalgorn	8
Machariel	6
Damnation	3
Raven Navy Issue	3
Nightmare	2
Dominix Navy Issue	2
Gallente Shuttle	1
Broadsword	1
Caldari Shuttle	1

The totals for ship losses in the system seem to suggest that CCP employees have a strange tendency for firing upon rookie frigates when they see them, though many larger ships were also destroyed:

	Kills total	Killed by CCP
Rookie ship	468	98
Frigate	330	73
Battlecruiser	163	63
Battleship	166	56
Cruiser	93	32
Stealth Bomber	112	25
Interceptor	64	14
Destroyer	51	13
Assault Ship	44	13
Covert Ops	47	6
Force Recon Ship	16	6
Heavy Assault Ship	12	6
Logistics	15	5
Strategic Cruiser	6	5
Capsule	363	3
Shuttle	27	3
Industrial	8	2
Interdictor	6	2
Combat Recon Ship	3	2
Command Ship	5	1
Transport Ship	3	1
Electronic Attack Ship	5
Heavy Interdictor	2
Total	2009	429

Lots of assorted parties joined the fray once word got out. The majority of ships destroyed were destroyed by characters who were not a member of any alliance, with CCP (thankfully!) coming in at the top spot for the alliances.

Not in an alliance	727
C C P Alliance	429
Pandemic Legion	419
Important Internet Spaceship League	85
Goonswarm Federation	50
Only For Fun	40
Test Alliance Please Ignore	34
Northern Coalition.	31
Tactical Narcotics Team	21
RvB - RED Federation	18
Other	155

Our congratulations to the players who made it on to the list of top 25 killers in Tama yesterday, alongside eight developers. This list excludes capsules, rookie ships and shuttles that were killed (because come on, that’s not really sporting, is it chaps).

CCP GingerDude	37
CCP Klumpur	35
Space Chi	33
Sekh Ondaari	32
Jack bubu	24
Beastoria	21
Joe Public	21
CCP TomB	20
CCP Soulless	20
Margido	16
CCP Diagoras	16
MhG29L	16
Jirad TiSalver	16
Blood r4ge	16
The United NPCs of Tama	13
CCP Space Cadet	13
DeVoT1oN	13
Mang0o	12
CCP Zirnitra	12
Murtific	11
CCP Sreegs	11
Gallactica	11
James Damar	11
Mijstor Jedann	10
DarkXale	10

Additional props to Beastoria for landing the final blow on four CCP ships, with Fattymcbutterpants (a name which had the CCP fleet unified in laughter when called out as primary on EVE voice) and another character who should probably be renamed, both achieving three final blows each. We’re also happy to report that whilst NPCs did indeed manage to destroy 13 ships in Tama yesterday, no CCP ships were lost to NPCs. And that's despite CCP Sreeg’s Nanobot Accelerator rigged buffer tank.
After the last CCP pilot was blasted full of holes and sent on his merry way via the clone express, players kept fighting in the system for almost four hours.

We had our backend tool construct a word cloud from the biggest thread discussing the event, and judging by that, fun was had.



Many thanks to everyone who took part and had fun with us, all of us here at CCP who were able to be there had an absolute blast. I’m certain that this is far from being the last time a fleet is spotted leaving Polaris.

If you have any tips or feedback for us for future events, or want to make fun of our fits, please visit the comments thread for this blog.
CCP Diagoras

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Returning pilot? Visit Account Management for the latest offers and promotions.



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Hi, we are CCP Shiny and CCP Ronin and are writing on behalf of EVE Localization and Teams Stonehenge and Cerberus. We want to talk a bit about Localization and more specifically Cerberus, the new localization technology behind EVE Online that will be shipping incrementally, starting with the Crucible expansion.
“Isn’t localization just about translating words into another language?” I hear you say. And quite frankly, a large portion of localization is indeed translation and translation management with a few functional aspects tossed in for good measure.
However, once we include a concept like Internationalization/Localizability, which can be loosely defined as “Designing software so that it can be properly localized into any locale and language without any compromise to its functionality or look and feel”, we are passing the gates of Cerberus, at which point things get a whole lot more interesting, starting with updating our existing translations and adding Japanese, as well as expanding to include even more localized clients in the future.
But let’s start with some history

In 2006 the German EVE client was launched, followed by the Russian in 2009. Those languages have experienced a rocky history of crowd sourcing and finding the right provider with frankly mixed success. (Next time you meet a German player, ask what the translation of “Doomsday Devices” is in-game.) Over the years we have managed to improve those initial translations, and have received increasingly useful feedback over time.
However, neither the EVE code nor our tools and processes had been designed to support localization very well. Attempts were made to localize EVE into Japanese and French starting in 2007, but both had to be abandoned in part due to those technical limitations. It became clear that porting EVE into any new languages in the future would require replacing our localization system with something more sophisticated.
And thus Cerberus was born

Last year, Team Cerberus from our Atlanta office began work on creating a new, modern localization system within CCP's Carbon framework. This new technology was integrated into EVE's main development branch this past summer. Since then, Teams Stonehenge and Cerberus have been working together on migrating all the text in EVE to this new system. Note that this is not a simple port of all text from one system to another. The UI text in all systems has undergone a substantial overhaul, taking advantage of the new localization features, which will improve the experience of EVE both in English and other languages.
Alright, but what is it?

The new localization system in EVE introduces technology which will, in the future, vastly improve upon our ability to deliver a quality localized EVE experience to our current German, Russian and Chinese-speaking players, in addition to improving our ability to introduce new languages – starting with Japanese but with plans already underway to include other languages as well. Even the original English text will benefit from the introduction of this new system, as we'll see shortly.
While most of the improvements to our localization system affect the development backend of EVE, making life easier for programmers and designers, there will also be improvements to the text that you will see in-game. Previously, our ability to use variables (essentially names of people, places and things) was limited to simple string replacement. A programmer or designer would create a string, and have the ability to insert another string into it. The first string did not otherwise know anything about what was being inserted and would always show the same text, no matter whether you were talking about a character, an alliance, or a shiny rock. The new system brings two concepts to EVE that allow us to improve on this: entity metadata and conditional statements.
Entity metadata (and by entity, I'm referring to characters, types and locations) allows the localization system to store characteristics of EVE entities. For characters, the localization system will now have access to a character's gender. For types and locations, the localization system will now have access to things like indefinite article (in English), gender (in German) and pronunciation (in Japanese, used for sorting). Conditional statements then allow us to use variable values or metadata to actually change a string based on these inputs. Personal pronouns, for example, can be changed depending on whether the character in question is male or female. In non-English languages, adjectives can also be changed based on a character's (or an item's) gender.
One of many examples of improvements we are introducing with Cerberus is that conditions on numeric types will allow us to specify plural forms when necessary. "You own 1 share of that corporation stock" and "you own 5 shares of that corporation stock" will now be just one string in the backend, and will use the right form of the noun based on the number input. The usage of plurals can vary greatly in languages. In Russian, for example, which uses two plural forms, our translators will be providing all three forms of the noun so that the correct one can be chosen based on input. In both English and German, there is one singular and one plural form. And in Japanese, plurals are not used at all. So in the “number of shares” example, English, German, Russian and Japanese are all handled in quite different methods:

And of course the system is flexible enough for us to localize the EVE Client to other languages relatively easily, and that is definitely our plan.
The short term effects

The good: As mentioned above, the new localization system is a vital part of the EVE Japan release and our plans of further localization to other languages. As part of the Crucible release, a preview version of the Japanese translation will be available to players on Tranquility. Please note that this is a preview version and is neither complete nor fully validated. Work on EVE Japan will be continuing into next year, but we felt that it was important to provide this preview of the Japanese translation as we continue to iterate upon it. If you play with the Russian or German client you will also see some improvements where we have already given the translation an overhaul to utilize this new technology.
The bad: As part of this migration we had to re-translate the entire UI, Notifications and Messages in-game. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, a small part of the UI as well as content that has been developed by the feature teams for this release will be in English for the German and Russian client on the initial launch date. We did not take the decision to release with a partially un-localized client lightly and are not happy with this situation. In the end we decided though that given the choice, our German and Russian players were likely to prefer being able to use the fantastic features and changes that have been developed for the Crucible expansion at the end of November, as opposed to delaying the entire release for all players until the translations were ready. We are working hard on getting the remaining areas localized though and are aiming at delivering a fully localized client over the next few weeks.
The ugly: Due to this re-translation, you may also see some changes to the way text has been translated or even some migration-related issues like variables displaying in-game. We have teams of professional translators working on resolving this. However, we also realize the potential that arises from this particular situation and the migration and re-translation in general. So without further ado, allow me to present:
A Thousand Little Loc Things

It used to be the case that we were at times hesitant to make specific changes to the in-game text for German and Russian, since that text had been in use for a very long time and people were used to it. We were also aware that the players had started to use their own version of terms that had been translated with variations or in an unpopular way. Additionally, we have seen from the comments in the last localization survey that there are areas that need more attention than we had thought, while other areas we had considered important were hardly mentioned. So bearing all this in mind, we would like to use this opportunity to get in touch with our player base more closely and start a wish list of fixes and features in a similar way as the 1000 Little Things list, but this time for localization specific changes and features. We are going to put up three separate threads – one each in the German and Russian forums, so players can comment in their own languages, and one in the Issues, Workarounds & Localization section for those who want to comment in English.
We are open to any and all localization specific suggestions, but of course there is a caveat or two: We are not promising that we will be able to make everything posted there happen or that we will be able to reply to every post, but we do promise that we will be reading and considering everything. Some things might also happen sooner, while others will be something we would like to do, but that will not be possible right away. Lastly, we would like to suggest that very small, specific issues (think “there is a spelling mistake in mission x”) be put into a bug report rather than the 1000 Little Loc Things, since that way turnaround will be faster. (While we are on the topic of bug reports, I would also like to mention that the ISD Bughunter division is also eager to get more Russian and German speakers on board!)
The long term effects

Between the Cerberus technology, our internal efforts and emphasis on localization and any contributions that you, the players, will be able to make – be it in form of suggestions or working as Bughunters – I foresee a considerably brighter future for our localization than it has been over the past years. We don’t want to go into detail just yet, but there are various small and big plans in progress which we will be talking about over the next year. Personally, this makes us very happy grammar nerds.

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I remember trails in EVE. A long time ago we really had them. In my memory they were cool. And beautiful. So I installed Empyrean Age again and played a little bit on one of our reference servers, “Classic client” of course. And it was then I realized that the old trails were actually really cool, but not exactly what I would call beautiful. Take a look, does this bring back memories?

Figure 1: Trails in Empyrean Age (click to enlarge)

Figure 2: Trails in Empyrean Age (click to enlarge)
So last summer, when the office was really quiet and I had some time, I started thinking about trails in EVE again: why they were removed a while ago in Apocrypha, how I could bring them back, and most important…how to make them look better and render faster.
My initial plan was to get them done during summer. Turned out I was a little bit too optimistic. Actually way too optimistic…
Splines to the rescue!

From the beginning it was pretty clear we should use splines for the new trails. They give you some nice smooth curves and are positioned only by a couple of control points and normals. And their math is simple enough to be done in a vertex shader, so no need to update a vertexbuffer every single frame for every single ship in the scene. By the way, that was how the old trails did it.
See for yourself how simple cubic hermite splines are:

Now I knew how to generate a smooth curve, but certainly not what actual geometry would be bent by it. Single billboards? Star-shaped planes? Or a chain of particles? To be honest I had no idea and I think I pretty much tried it all. Here are some of the more promising looking results:

Figure 3: Planes facing the camera (click to enlarge)

Figure 4: 3 star-shaped planes (click to enlarge)

As you can see: not very beautiful. Definitely they render faster than the old ones, but they look like you would want to immediately turn them off in the options menu.
Raytracing

So obviously any form of solid geometry will break or look ugly if bent and viewed from certain angles. So now I knew how not to do it. At that point you usually should take a big step back and start thinking about what it is you want to achieve: drawing a smoothly bent cylinder, (because that’s what a trail basically is) a glowing cylinder. And then I had an idea: why not solve it with ray tracing in the pixel shader? At first this sounds a little bit crazy, but when you look at the math it’s not that difficult. Intersecting a ray with a finite cylinder is certainly doable in a shader and given a fairly high number of those finite cylinders per trail the result is going to be a smoothly bent cylinder.
The math for intersecting a view ray with an infinite cylinder:

Click to enlarge
Now we need to turn this infinite cylinder into a finite one by solving two more intersections: the eye ray with both of the capping planes:

Click to enlarge
This will eventually get us the entry and exit point of the eye ray at the finite cylinder, resulting in the length of this ray inside the whole trail. It is easy to derive some color value based on that:

Figure 5: Ray traced finite cylinders (click to enlarge)

Figure 6: finite cylinders form trails (click to enlarge)
The rest is easy: close the gaps, apply some fading and let the art director play around with size, length and color:

Figure 7: Looking nice and polished... (click to enlarge)
Ignore the EVE server

Now I knew how to render the trails, but I still had to figure out where the actual positions of all the spline control points would come from.
(Btw, the summer was long gone now…)
One reason why the old trails would sometimes get all messed up was that they relied on the exact ship’s position as dictated by the server. All MMO players know this can lead to some strange behavior of your ship’s movement, especially in lag situations. So for positioning the trails I had to ignore the absolute positions of the ship, instead relied on the smooth movement info interpolated in the client (for example the speed you see in the HUD, it never changes abruptly). If your ship is suddenly repositioned by the server, the trails now just “jump” with it! You will hardly notice. Finally, the spline control points are merely the position offsets from your ship to where it has been before. Thus, the faster the ship, the longer the trails.
All this came together just in time to be released in Crucible, so I really hope that you will enjoy the new trails. I know I do, because now they are as good as I remember them.

Figure 8: Wolf with trails (click to enlarge)

Figure 9: Trails from the Punisher (click to enlarge)

Future improvements
Of course there is always more. Some animation on the trails, adding light absorption, refraction, etc. I would like to spend more time on the trails, so if you guys appreciate the new trails I might get the time I need to do all of this…

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I remember trails in EVE. A long time ago we really had them. In my memory they were cool. And beautiful. So I installed Empyrean Age again and played a little bit on one of our reference servers, “Classic client” of course. And it was then I realized that the old trails were actually really cool, but not exactly what I would call beautiful. Take a look, does this bring back memories?

Figure 1: Trails in Empyrean Age (click to enlarge)

Figure 2: Trails in Empyrean Age (click to enlarge)
So last summer, when the office was really quiet and I had some time, I started thinking about trails in EVE again: why they were removed a while ago in Apocrypha, how I could bring them back, and most important…how to make them look better and render faster.
My initial plan was to get them done during summer. Turned out I was a little bit too optimistic. Actually way too optimistic…

Splines to the rescue!

From the beginning it was pretty clear we should use splines for the new trails. They give you some nice smooth curves and are positioned only by a couple of control points and normals. And their math is simple enough to be done in a vertex shader, so no need to update a vertexbuffer every single frame for every single ship in the scene. By the way, that was how the old trails did it.
See for yourself how simple cubic hermite splines are:

Now I knew how to generate a smooth curve, but certainly not what actual geometry would be bent by it. Single billboards? Star-shaped planes? Or a chain of particles? To be honest I had no idea and I think I pretty much tried it all. Here are some of the more promising looking results:

Figure 3: Planes facing the camera (click to enlarge)

Figure 4: 3 star-shaped planes (click to enlarge)

As you can see: not very beautiful. Definitely they render faster than the old ones, but they look like you would want to immediately turn them off in the options menu.

Raytracing

So obviously any form of solid geometry will break or look ugly if bent and viewed from certain angles. So now I knew how not to do it. At that point you usually should take a big step back and start thinking about what it is you want to achieve: drawing a smoothly bent cylinder, (because that’s what a trail basically is) a glowing cylinder. And then I had an idea: why not solve it with ray tracing in the pixel shader? At first this sounds a little bit crazy, but when you look at the math it’s not that difficult. Intersecting a ray with a finite cylinder is certainly doable in a shader and given a fairly high number of those finite cylinders per trail the result is going to be a smoothly bent cylinder.
The math for intersecting a view ray with an infinite cylinder:

Click to enlarge
Now we need to turn this infinite cylinder into a finite one by solving two more intersections: the eye ray with both of the capping planes:

Click to enlarge
This will eventually get us the entry and exit point of the eye ray at the finite cylinder, resulting in the length of this ray inside the whole trail. It is easy to derive some color value based on that:

Figure 5: Ray traced finite cylinders (click to enlarge)

Figure 6: finite cylinders form trails (click to enlarge)
The rest is easy: close the gaps, apply some fading and let the art director play around with size, length and color:

Figure 7: Looking nice and polished... (click to enlarge)

Ignore the EVE server

Now I knew how to render the trails, but I still had to figure out where the actual positions of all the spline control points would come from.
(Btw, the summer was long gone now…)
One reason why the old trails would sometimes get all messed up was that they relied on the exact ship’s position as dictated by the server. All MMO players know this can lead to some strange behavior of your ship’s movement, especially in lag situations. So for positioning the trails I had to ignore the absolute positions of the ship, instead relied on the smooth movement info interpolated in the client (for example the speed you see in the HUD, it never changes abruptly). If your ship is suddenly repositioned by the server, the trails now just “jump” with it! You will hardly notice. Finally, the spline control points are merely the position offsets from your ship to where it has been before. Thus, the faster the ship, the longer the trails.
All this came together just in time to be released in Crucible, so I really hope that you will enjoy the new trails. I know I do, because now they are as good as I remember them.

Figure 8: Wolf with trails (click to enlarge)

Figure 9: Trails from the Punisher (click to enlarge)

Future improvements
Of course there is always more. Some animation on the trails, adding light absorption, refraction, etc. I would like to spend more time on the trails, so if you guys appreciate the new trails I might get the time I need to do all of this…

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Greetings Capsuleers,
You might have seen the recent news item about the free implants coming to EVE this winter with Crucible. The first of these implants, the Genolution CA-1 is inbound very shortly. Everyone with an active paid account on Nov29th through Dec 2^nd will get one to redeem for their character. Pilots on trial accounts will not receive an implant, but are of course welcome to join the party before the giveaway ends.
This implant is the first of two in a set, with the second one arriving in December. You’ll notice they have both an attribute bonus and a skill hardwiring one, so don't miss out. They’ll come in handy when you‘re obliterating your foes with your brand new Tier 3 Battlecrusier.
The modestly titled “Core Augmentation” implant set was developed by Genolution with the assistance of implantation specialists and other leaders in the field of neural augmentation, some of whom have long been rumored to be SoCT alumni.
The CA-1 is a rarity in the often hyper-specialized industry of neural augmentation. It provides a dual function; tapping into both the occipital lobe for a perception boost, and also the neocortex, for improving the brain’s handling of a ship’s energy and capacitor needs. Like the infamous pirate implant sets found on capsuleer markets, each implant is also designed to work at higher levels when integrated into a neural implant network.
Though many in the augmentation industry initially questioned the agenda behind Genolution’s entry into the implantation field, fears eventually subsided as the implant was shown to be one of the safest on record. Genolution went one step further to assuage fears however and vowed never to release the implant to open markets, providing only a single-run issue to capsuleers as a
demonstration of the technology.
Technical specifications:

Hardwiring - Genolution Core Augmentation CA-1

• Slot 1
• Boosts perception by 3
• Provides +1.5% powergrid bonus
• Provides +1.5% capacitor amount bonus
• Implant set bonus: 50%

As with all item giveaways, we intend these items to be a nice bonus for people actively playing EVE. Therefore, we will be vigilant in monitoring creative attempts to farm these items, and take action on a case to case basis.

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