Thread: Developers Blog

Fanfest 2012 is shaping up to be the best Fanfest ever, however here at CCP we understand that not everyone can make it to this icy rock in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. After all, sometimes you just want to sit back, relax at home, and have a portion of Fanfest brought to you.
Well EVE TV is here to help. For Fanfest 2012 we're pulling out all the stops to bring you 3 full days of live action, covering the Thursday, Friday and Saturday of Fanfest 2012!
So what can you expect?

• Full live feed from Fanfest 2012, now covering all 3 days’ worth of events.
• An estimated 32+ hours of content broadcast live from the new venue.
• Major presentations streamed as they happen with regularly updated highlights of concurrent events.
• CCP Soundwave is joined by CCP Sunset and CCP Guard to guide you through the full line-up of events.
• Continuous information overload from the presentations, EVE & Dust Fanfest Tournaments, Dev interviews, player interviews and events.
• The Party on Top of the World! Including live acts: HaZaR, GusGus, HAM, DJ Alienhand, RoXoR and more!

To make such an awesome show possible we have two viewing options for you this year:
EVE TV HD

The full show in glorious High Definition, the only option if you want the full experience of Fanfest brought to your home. This feed will offer several viewing options to match your internet speed and will all be significantly higher quality than the standard definition feed.
Includes Exclusive Fanfest 2012 Virtual Swag!

As an added bonus, your purchase of an EVE TV stream of Fanfest 2012 includes two in-game items exclusive to viewers and visitors of Fanfest 2012.

• The limited edition Fanfest 2012 Quafe T-Shirt, sized for your Incarna avatar, modeled after the physical shirt to be given to Fanfest event attendees.
• The Iteron Mark IV Quafe Ultra Edition industrial ship

See more information on these one-time collectables here: http://fanfest.eveonline.com/en/info/ingame
To secure the HD feed for Fanfest all you have to do is login to account management or click the button below and follow the link for "Fanfest HD video stream". For payment options you can choose between either 1 PLEX or a comparable price payable by credit card and various other options.



During Fanfest just log back into account management and you will find a “Watch now!” banner that will take you to the HD stream, when the stream is not running this banner will confirm your purchase of the HD stream.
Your special edition items will be delivered to you through the redeeming system in-game upon purchase of the EVE TV HD feed. One “Quafe T-shirt In-game item” and one “Iteron Mark IV Quafe Ultra Edition ship” can be redeemed per purchase; multiple purchases per account are available. For more information on redeeming items in EVE Online please visit http://wiki.eveonline.com/wiki/Redeeming
EVE TV FREE

For those who don't want to watch in HD then we've thought about you too! The entire stream will be available in a lower quality feed which will be free to view. You don't have to do anything in advance to watch this feed, simply visit http://fanfest.eveonline.com to watch! But note you won’t receive any of the exclusive Fanfest 2012 items!
Whichever option you choose we hope you'll enjoy the show and even at this late stage we'd encourage everyone to book those last minute tickets and come see Fanfest for yourself, there's no replacement for joining us in person and experiencing EVE history being made all around you!
Coverage will include Fanfest activities, as well as EVE TV exclusive interviews and commentaries throughout the broadcast. No minimum uptime guaranteed.
Technical Requirements:

HD stream

• Recommended 1.5mb/sec broadband internet connection or better.
• Internet browser capable of playing Adobe Flash.
• There will be 3 streaming bitrate options for HD viewers to best match your internet speed.

Free stream

• 512k broadband internet connection
• Internet browser capable of playing Adobe Flash
• There will be 1 streaming bitrate option provided.

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EVE pilots,
We have had two prominent issues pop up during the release of our new EVE launcher. This blog spells out workarounds for the 2 main problems and to let you know what plans are in place to push out fixes.
These explanations are going to get technical.

Issue 1 - File Permissions

Issue description:
If, during patching, you see something like this error stack which ends with “WindowsError” this may be the issue;
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "lib\update.pyc", line 527, in Update
File "lib\update.pyc", line 576, in _Update
File "lib\update.pyc", line 304, in Run
File "zsync\zsync.pyc", line 1421, in ApplyPatch
File "zsync\zsync.pyc", line 1412, in ApplyPatch
File "zsync\zsync.pyc", line 1497, in DeleteFile
WindowsError
During the course of patching, if a user clicks a link in the Launcher window, a browser process will be created, displaying the webpage in question. This new process inherits the file handles of its parent (the Launcher) and therefore can cause conflicts with the Launcher as it attempts to patch.
Workaround:
If you encounter this error, close any browser window inspired/launched by the Launcher and restart the Launcher, which will resume patching. Failing this, please run the Repair Tool .

Issue 2 - Data corruption

Issue description:
The error looks like this (or something similar) and ends with “data corruption” or “data stream”:
No handlers could be found for logger "zsync"
Exception in thread Thread-3:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "threading.pyc", line 530, in __bootstrap_inner
File "threading.pyc", line 483, in run
File "zsync\readFromUrl.pyc", line 117, in DownloadPart
File "zsync\readFromUrl.pyc", line 136, in _DownloadPart
File "zsync\zsync.pyc", line 762, in callback
FileSyncError: data corruption
Or this:
No handlers could be found for logger "zsync"
Exception in thread Thread-4:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "threading.pyc", line 530, in __bootstrap_inner
File "threading.pyc", line 483, in run
File "zsync\readFromUrl.pyc", line 117, in DownloadPart
File "zsync\readFromUrl.pyc", line 136, in _DownloadPart
File "zsync\zsync.pyc", line 522, in callback
TypeError: Error while decompressing: 1

If you have this issue, you will see irregularities such as the Launcher and the repair tool looping over and retrying steps to download and apply the patch. You can also see long hangs in the launcher updater.
Workaround:
We have found one solution which has been confirmed by players and testing in-house which has to do with ESET Smart Security and ESET NOD32 Antivirus. We have been in contact with ESETs support and given them all the information they need to reproduce this problem in their test environment.
The issue is that a security feature in this software which is called “application protocol content filtering” is blocking the repair tool, the Launcher updater and the Launcher itself from downloading data (EVE files) from our Content Delivery Network.
The workaround is to disable the “application protocol content filtering” while the update is running and then re-enable it. The how-to has been posted in full here: http://community.eveonline.com/news....nid=4930&tid=1

Upcoming Launcher Patch

The launcher team has been pulling long hours investigating these problems and producing fixes. We have a new launcher release out on the Singularity test server (“Sisi”) now. This is release (1.11) and is going out to Tranquility early tomorrow (Friday 16^th March) which should alleviate the “File Permissions” issue and we are continuing to investigate 3^rd party software conflicts around the “Data Corruption” issue. We have also delayed a minor EVE client patch until next week so that people with problems can have a more stable launcher in place before then.
And now some background. Since the Crucible 1.5 patch on Tuesday we have had more than 220,000 users log in to Tranquility with approximately 6,000 people having launcher issues. This is 6,000 too many and I want to apologise for the inconvenience to those users.

Why a Launcher?

Quite a few people have been asking why we need to have a launcher. The launcher team released a Dev Blog with an explanation but I wanted to list out here what the launcher will give us.
Over the years, the process for CCP to push out a patch has become so onerous that it was becoming as big an effort to deliver a one line code fix for a crash as it was to deliver a major content release. A single code fix would take weeks to deploy rather than hours. The launcher will go a long way to allowing us to react much faster to issues when they arise and to be able to push out smaller amounts of content to you on a more regular basis as well as our big releases.
Another feature is that the launcher gives us much more logging information. We are currently using it a lot and it is helping us find and fix many of the issues being encountered.
We will be monitoring the comments thread for this blog and the rest of the forums in case of more issues.
CCP Unifex
Jonathan Lander
Senior Producer of EVE Online
and
CCP Cascade
Product Owner – EVE Launcher


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EVE pilots,
We have had two prominent issues pop up during the release of our new EVE launcher. This blog spells out workarounds for the 2 main problems and to let you know what plans are in place to push out fixes.
These explanations are going to get technical.

Issue 1 - File Permissions

Issue description:
If, during patching, you see something like this error stack which ends with “WindowsError” this may be the issue;
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "lib\update.pyc", line 527, in Update
File "lib\update.pyc", line 576, in _Update
File "lib\update.pyc", line 304, in Run
File "zsync\zsync.pyc", line 1421, in ApplyPatch
File "zsync\zsync.pyc", line 1412, in ApplyPatch
File "zsync\zsync.pyc", line 1497, in DeleteFile
WindowsError
During the course of patching, if a user clicks a link in the Launcher window, a browser process will be created, displaying the webpage in question. This new process inherits the file handles of its parent (the Launcher) and therefore can cause conflicts with the Launcher as it attempts to patch.
Workaround:
If you encounter this error, close any browser window inspired/launched by the Launcher and restart the Launcher, which will resume patching. Failing this, please run the Repair Tool .

Issue 2 - Data corruption

Issue description:
The error looks like this (or something similar) and ends with “data corruption” or “data stream”:
No handlers could be found for logger "zsync"
Exception in thread Thread-3:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "threading.pyc", line 530, in __bootstrap_inner
File "threading.pyc", line 483, in run
File "zsync\readFromUrl.pyc", line 117, in DownloadPart
File "zsync\readFromUrl.pyc", line 136, in _DownloadPart
File "zsync\zsync.pyc", line 762, in callback
FileSyncError: data corruption
Or this:
No handlers could be found for logger "zsync"
Exception in thread Thread-4:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "threading.pyc", line 530, in __bootstrap_inner
File "threading.pyc", line 483, in run
File "zsync\readFromUrl.pyc", line 117, in DownloadPart
File "zsync\readFromUrl.pyc", line 136, in _DownloadPart
File "zsync\zsync.pyc", line 522, in callback
TypeError: Error while decompressing: 1

If you have this issue, you will see irregularities such as the Launcher and the repair tool looping over and retrying steps to download and apply the patch. You can also see long hangs in the launcher updater.
Workaround:
We have found one solution which has been confirmed by players and testing in-house which has to do with ESET Smart Security and ESET NOD32 Antivirus. We have been in contact with ESETs support and given them all the information they need to reproduce this problem in their test environment.
The issue is that a security feature in this software which is called “application protocol content filtering” is blocking the repair tool, the Launcher updater and the Launcher itself from downloading data (EVE files) from our Content Delivery Network.
The workaround is to disable the “application protocol content filtering” while the update is running and then re-enable it. The how-to has been posted in full here: http://community.eveonline.com/news....nid=4930&tid=1

Upcoming Launcher Patch

The launcher team has been pulling long hours investigating these problems and producing fixes. We have a new launcher release out on the Singularity test server (“Sisi”) now. This is release (1.11) and is going out to Tranquility early tomorrow (Friday 16^th March) which should alleviate the “File Permissions” issue and we are continuing to investigate 3^rd party software conflicts around the “Data Corruption” issue. We have also delayed a minor EVE client patch until next week so that people with problems can have a more stable launcher in place before then.
And now some background. Since the Crucible 1.5 patch on Tuesday we have had more than 220,000 users log in to Tranquility with approximately 6,000 people having launcher issues. This is 6,000 too many and I want to apologise for the inconvenience to those users.

Why a Launcher?

Quite a few people have been asking why we need to have a launcher. The launcher team released a Dev Blog with an explanation but I wanted to list out here what the launcher will give us.
Over the years, the process for CCP to push out a patch has become so onerous that it was becoming as big an effort to deliver a one line code fix for a crash as it was to deliver a major content release. A single code fix would take weeks to deploy rather than hours. The launcher will go a long way to allowing us to react much faster to issues when they arise and to be able to push out smaller amounts of content to you on a more regular basis as well as our big releases.
Another feature is that the launcher gives us much more logging information. We are currently using it a lot and it is helping us find and fix many of the issues being encountered.
We will be monitoring the comments thread for this blog and the rest of the forums in case of more issues.
CCP Unifex
Jonathan Lander
Senior Producer of EVE Online
and
CCP Cascade
Product Owner – EVE Launcher


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There can be little doubt about what the coolest aspect of EVE is. Inflation, money supply and the velocity of money is where it‘s at, right? Well, that‘s what this blog is about.
Three of four main price indices show considerable inflation in February, ranging from 1.4% for the Consumer Price Index to 8.1% for the Mineral Price Index. This inflation has been evident since last August. Many have suggested that this is caused by the rewards coming from Incursions.
There‘s certainly a lot of money coming from Incursions. Incursion rewards in December amounted to 9.6 trillion ISK, which is an all time high, while the rewards in January and February were 9.0 and 8.7 trillion ISK respectively. That‘s quite a bit of money entering the economy. However, Incursions are not the biggest ISK faucet, bounties are. Bounty prizes paid out in February totalled 33 trillion ISK.
The following graph shows the development of the Consumer Price Index and and the money supply per subscriber. The money supply is shown as an index to facilitate comparison.

Changes in the money supply dwarf the changes to prices. While the money supply grew more than thirteenfold, the CPI fell by almost a quarter. It‘s clear that these series aren‘t strongly correlated. The existence of money alone doesn‘t contribute much to inflation. Money that isn‘t being spent won‘t affect prices. This brings us to the concept of the velocity of money, i.e. frequency with which a given quantity of money changes hands in transactions. It can be stated as the total value of all transactions in a period, divided by the money supply. In our case, we shall be using monthly measurements, i.e. market transactions per month divided the average money supply that month. Only transactions on the general market are included. Transactions through contracts, direct trade and loyalty point stores are excluded. The following figure compares the monthly velocity of money to the Consumer Price Index.

Here we see a proper correlation between the two series, at least until year 2009. The velocity of money falls steeply and steadily from the start of the graph, January 2007, until late 2008. This is happening at a time when the money supply was growing. As the increased money supply wasn‘t increasing trade to the same degree, the result was a lower velocity of money. An important factor in this was probably the absence of a trusted banking sector, which could offer interest and distribute the unused ISK to those in need of funds. It‘s also important to note that money supply and the velocity of money are far from being the only things that affect inflation. Supply side changes can have a big impact on prices. This was the case in 2007 when Invention was introduced to Tech II production, which dramatically reduced Tech II prices.
The correlation between the velocity of money and the CPI seems to change by the end of 2008. From January 2007 to October 2008, the correlation between the two series is 0.86, which is quite strong for a non-academic case like this one. From November 2008 to February 2012 the correlation is -0.01, which is just about as uncorrelated as possible. So, what happened in November 2008? PLEX was introduced. PLEX seems to increase the velocity of money in the New Eden economy as it “liberates“ ISK from people with more money than they know what to do with and gets it to ISK needy people that create and sell PLEX.
Obviously, the intricacies of the mechanics behind inflation are far more complex than described here, as evidenced by the vast literature and the various schools of thought on the subject. We may dive deeper into this in the future, but for now we‘ll just put it out there for discussion.
As previously mentioned, three of four main price indices measured considerable inflation last month. This inflationary trend is most likely driven from the demand side, as suggested by increasing velocity of money, but also by generally increased activity within EVE. More jumps are being made, more missions being run, more PvP kills are being made and so forth. But where such happy times roam, inflation tends to follow.
The index values for February are:

	February 2012	1 Month Change	12 Month Change
Mineral Price Index	87.7	5.2%	20.8%
Primary Producer Price Index	88.2	4.3%	22.3%
Secondary Producer Price Index	116.8	1.6%	6.1%
Consumer Price Index	75.1	3.4%	16.7%

The following graph shows the development of the indices since October 2003.

The only index showing deflation in February is the Secondary Producer Price Index. The reason for this is a fall in the prices of goods from Planetary Interaction, which outweighs the inflationary effect from other product categories. This fall comes as the market settles down after period of rapid rise in the price of PI made goods. This rise was caused by uncertainty and increased cost for PI production, following the announcement and implementation of player-owned customs offices.
For more detail on the indices, please refer to the Market Indices page on Evelopedia.
Full series of the four main price indices in Excel format
Full series of the four main price indices in CSV format

Catch CCP Recurve and his economical friends at Fanfest 2012! More information on Fanfest topics, tickets and travel can be found here. Staying at home? Then don't forget the EVE TV Live Stream!
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CCP Unifex, during the EVE Keynote at Fanfest 2012, announced that the 10^th Alliance Tournament will begin on June 30, 2012.
With new Battlecruisers, boosted Destroyers and enhanced Assault Frigates, we will be spicing up the rule set once again and bringing in some new faces and fresh ideas for EVE TV's coverage. There will be future Dev Blogs on the tournament in the coming weeks which will cover the rules, broadcast schedule and sign up details.
For those who missed the last one - all the matches from Alliance Tournament VII, VIII and IX are available on CCP's YouTube channel.
EVE TV's Player Commentator Team


We will once again be opening up the application process for players who would like to be PVP commentators, these elite players are handpicked by us to fly out to Iceland for the tournament finals played over the final two weekends.
As a commentator you'll be on the set discussing the tournament, tactics, teams and talking with developers about EVE live on air. You'll also take shifts in the commentary booth providing live commentary on the matches themselves. You need to know your PvP and you need to know how to keep on talking!
Alliance Tournament X will take place over four consecutive weekends starting on Saturday, June 30 and ending with the grand final on Sunday, July 22.You'll be flown out to Reykjavik, Iceland to join the team here at CCP HQ to help us run the show during the live broadcast of the two final weekends. Flights (from all Icelandairdestinations) and accommodation are supplied by us. All you need is a little spending money.
So you're interested? Next step is to check this short list and make sure you match what we're looking for!

• Can you come out and play?Selected players will need to hold a valid passport (we will require scans to confirm this at a later stage) and be available to fly to Iceland on the Wednesday, July 11 and returning home on Monday, July 23.
• A sense of humor is a must:commentators will need to be sharp-witted, knowledgeable, presentable and comfortable with talking on camera and into a microphone. To greater the chances of getting through, we highly recommend submitting any pre-made or purpose filmed video you have of yourself (link to a YouTube clip!) as part of your application.
• You need to know your PvP: We don't despise industrialists, mission-runners and miners but as this is a PvP tournament and you need to be well versed.
• You must be 21+ in order to apply.

If you are interested in taking part, please email us at evetv@ccpgames.comby 23:59 GMT (Eve Time) on Sunday April 29, 2012 with the following information. Those lucky enough to be selected for the second round of eliminations must be available to attend voice chat interviews on Saturday, May 5, 2012. The chosen commentators will be announced by May 9, 2012.

• Character and real name.
• Date of birth.
• Nationality and current country of residence.
• Tell us about yourself, both in game and out. Remember what you're applying for and sell yourself to that effect.
• Confirm you are available between the 11th and 23rd of July to fly to Iceland. If you need to book time off work / school please don't do it until we accept you; but please check that it is possible, if there is any doubt here please let us know.
• Remember your applying to be on TV! Include any multimedia you think shows you off, all of the people chosen for the last Tournament had sent in video clips/links to YouTube!

Remember applications close on April, 29 so get mailing!
As with every year the Tournament Team will be at Fanfest 2012 running the Fanfest PvP Tournament. We encourage anyone interested in becoming a commentator to talk to us on site.
A final note: The Tournament from the perspective of a commentator is an amazing experience. You get to take part in a unique production, fly to Iceland, get a tour around the CCP office and chat to developers like almost no other players will ever get the chance to. But with great power comes great responsibility, planning and promotional shows take place during the weeks up to the final show and you may not be asked to fly to Iceland if you fail to take part, or become unavailable during this time!

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CSM7 Elections: The Results!

The CSM election results were announced earlier by the CEO of CCP, CCP Hellmar, at the EVE Online Fanfest here in Reykjavik. This election has been astonishing to watch, with more campaigning and space drama than we’ve seen in any election so far. So, as promised, the fourteen delegates of the seventh Council of Stellar Management are:

10,058	The Mittani
4,150	Two Step
3,714	Elise Randolph
3,329	Greene Lee
3,184	Trebor Daehdoow
3,163	Kelduum Revaan
2,845	Seleene
2,465	UAxDEATH
2,439	Hans Jagerblitzen
2,289	Meissa Anunthiel
2,284	Dovinian
1,561	Issler Dainze
1,533	Alekseyev Karrde
1,282	Darius III

Congratulations to the delegates. Alexander Gianturco (The Mittani) has re-won the chairman position having won the most votes of the delegates this election. He is also the first candidate to exceed the 10,000 vote mark. This CSM will take office on April 4^th, and their first order of business will be to decide upon the vice-chair, secretary and vice-secretary positions. The full list of results will be available shortly on this page.

Voter Demographics
There were 59,109 votes cast by eligible voters, amassing a turnout of 16.63%. This means that this election once again saw record voter turnout. Of the total votes cast, 563 (0.95%) chose to abstain. This is the lowest number of abstains of any CSM election so far. The CSM6 election saw 659 (1.34%) abstains.

Female users seem less inclined to vote than male users, with 3.51% of voters being female despite making up 5.11% of the total EVE user base.

The average age of users who voted was 32 years, an increase from 31.3 last election. The average age of accounts that voted was 2.89 years, up from the average of 2.66 years last election. This can largely be attributed to the increasing average age of the EVE user base.

Age in days	Frequency	Cumulative
30	8,447	14.29%
250	8,489	28.65%
500	7,551	41.43%
750	7,721	54.49%
1000	6,105	64.82%
1250	4,970	73.23%
1500	4,503	80.85%
1750	3,244	86.33%
2000	5,061	94.90%
2500	2,073	98.40%
3000	943	100.00%

Turnout by country was as follows:

Country	Votes	% of Voters	Voters as % of subscribers	Subscription %
United States	22114	37.41%	17.36%	35.85%
United Kingdom	6607	11.18%	18.44%	10.09%
Russia	4760	8.05%	13.91%	9.63%
Germany	4237	7.17%	12.58%	9.48%
Canada	3248	5.50%	18.07%	5.06%
Australia	2203	3.73%	16.22%	3.82%
Netherlands	1505	2.55%	22.15%	1.91%
France	1389	2.35%	19.86%	1.97%
Denmark	1143	1.93%	19.36%	1.66%
Sweden	1122	1.90%	18.90%	1.67%
Ukraine	987	1.67%	16.24%	1.71%
Norway	774	1.31%	17.79%	1.22%
Finland	717	1.21%	21.69%	0.93%
Romania	576	0.97%	23.69%	0.68%
Belgium	499	0.84%	20.82%	0.67%
Poland	469	0.79%	13.77%	0.96%
Austria	465	0.79%	14.60%	0.90%
New Zealand	452	0.76%	24.24%	0.52%
Spain	401	0.68%	19.63%	0.57%
Italy	355	0.60%	15.78%	0.63%

These can be compared to the results of previous elections by reading the following developer blogs:
CSM 1 Election Results
CSM 2 Election Results
CSM 3 Election Results
CSM 4 Election Results
CSM 5 Election Results
CSM 6 Election Results

Our congratulations to the delegates of the seventh CSM and many, many thanks to all those who took part in the election process.

CCP Diagoras


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Speaking during the “CCP Presents” Keynote at EVE Fanfest 2012, CCP’s CTO Halldor Fannar and Tony Tamasi (SVP Content & Technology) from Nvidia gave a demonstration of dynamic tessellation using the Sansha Revenant carrier that first invaded during the EVE Online: Incursion expansion. Dynamic tessellation is a staple feature of DirectX 11 and we have recently been exploring options for adding DirectX 11 support to EVE Online, leading to the tech demo at Fanfest.
Below are a couple of screenshots from an earlier render. The tech demonstration shown at Fanfest was rendered in real time on stage during the keynote and recordings will be made available in the coming days.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge
The applications of tessellation are numerous, but ultimately it provides a procedurally generated, scalable level of detail from a single 3D model (it adds or removes triangles). This is an interesting proposition and could provide the players of EVE with a range of detail never experienced before. When we originally created EVE we wanted to deliver this kind of detail but due to the limitations of hardware this was simply not possible. We can build models to amazing precision and now, combined with the new hardware tessellation architecture in DirectX 11 and the latest Nvidia GPUs, this level of detail becomes possible and practical to render in real-time.
The stand-alone tech demo was produced in conjunction with graphics programmers at Nvidia, both as a way to gauge player interest in adding DirectX 11 support to EVE and for CCP to understand the implications for their art pipeline when working under this new rendering API.
It’s important to note that the demo is not running in EVE’s graphics engine, “Trinity”, and we are not in a position to say when DirectX 11 support will be added. However, the response to the tessellation demo at Fanfest and the chatter on the forums has been overwhelmingly positive and a good indicator that DirectX 11 is something EVE players are interested in us pursuing.
The primary focus for CCP throughout this exploration is to ensure that players without DirectX 11 capability can continue to enjoy a great and performing graphical experience while simultaneously allowing those with newer cards and operating systems to experience the enriched visual content that DirectX 11 can offer. It’s important that we keep the EVE experience relevant to our players as the environment and capabilities evolve but in doing so we must understand what the customer wants. This was a great way for us to get an early read on how important work of this nature is to our players.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into a possible future for EVE Online and keep on the look out for further updates on DirectX 11 in EVE Online.
CCP Solomon
Associate Technical Producer - Foundation Technology

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Hi, my name is CCP Shiny and I am writing on behalf of Team Stonehenge to bring you the latest updates for our localized clients. But if you are playing on the English client, you may want to read on, too, because there is a goodie hidden in there for you as well.
Let's start with a little history: When we did the localization for Russian and German, one of the core issues was how much we should actually translate. On one hand, we didn't want to divide, or shard, the EVE universe by client language. So we decided not to translate most names - including item names on the market, objects in space, location names and so on. On the other hand, this caused an effect where the game was never fully localized and therefore never felt natural to players that were used to fully localized games.

Click to enlarge
So as part of our upcoming release in Japanese, we decided to find a solution to this conundrum.
The first step was to actually translate literally everything for the Japanese client. This means all "important names"(items, locations, agents, NPC corporations and alliances, objects and entities in space, incursion names) are also translated into Japanese. This wasn't a trivial task and it took CCP Prism X nearly two months to change database objects to allow those names to be efficiently displayed with translations in-game.
But now we are back to sharding the universe by language, so we decided to implement functionality that would help keep everyone talking and allow for a more customized experience.

• Important names can be displayed in English or in the localized client language.

• CCP karkur from Team Avatar cast some UI magic that will allow you to see the translations of the important names in a tooltip.

You can also right-click on the name in a localized client and copy the translation so you can share it. The important names can optionally be marked with an asterisk in your client to make it easier to see what you can translate in this manner. You can of course also still see the information of auto-linked chat text in the language your client is set to.

All of these options can be selected on the language tab in the Systems Settings Menu. For the Russian and German client, this functionality is also present but for Crucible 1.6 we are still following our old localization policy of not translating important names. So Russian and German will still be translated in the same manner as before, with the added bonus of bilingual functionality for market categories, incursion names, etc. We are considering revising our original localization policy though which would mean translating important names also for Russian and German – this would allow for the exact same bilingual options as in the Japanese client. However, as mentioned earlier, this is no small task so don't expect any dramatic changes right away.
But wait, there is more!

• The agent journal has an optional column that displays the English name of the mission titles.

This way you can look up missions in your favourite mission guide while still being able to read the mission description in your own language.

Click to enlarge
The final piece of the puzzle was the search and this is where it gets good for our English players as well. We wanted to allow players using the localized clients to search both for the English names and their translations. While we were pondering possible solutions for this, the guys on Team Cobra Kai showed us the prototype of a universal search functionality they had been working on a while back. As you know, there are different search fields all over the client, like in People & Places, the market, assets and so on. For some fields like People & Places you also have to select a search type to get a result which can be tedious, especially if you are not sure whether "Dingbat Lovers"is a corporation or an alliance. The universal search does away with all that - CCP BitShift from Team Kobra Kai has summed up how it works:
Adding more languages means there is more text to search which is taxing on our database infrastructure. To remedy that we now index all the data in all the languages in a third party full text search engine called Sphinx (http://sphinxsearch.com/). This creates a unified interface which we can expose any data to that we want to be searchable. We have two types of data which need indexing, static and dynamic data. Static data is the data which does not change during runtime, such as solarsystem, agent and type names. We index that data once. But dynamic data is data that gets created or updated during runtime, such as player owned structures and ship names. We need to re-index that data and update our search indexes. We periodically re-index that data which means it's not as real time as if we'd search our database, but that's a fair tradeoff for being able to search faster and with minimal cost to database resources.
By moving the majority of the costs of searching from the database to the search server, we open up future possibilitiesof improving the search experience, such as searching all categories at the same time. Up till now you've had to specify what you are searching for, such as character names or places. Since all the data now goes into a unified index, we don't do that anymore, but we can get everything back which matches the text we are searching for. This means as you search for "jita" you get back multiple results for all terms that contain a word starting with jita. Additionally, searching for "jita cald" will return any of the indexed search terms that have words starting with those two search terms, in any order. This will become useful in future releases, when we move more game data into being searchable. But that is a subject for another devblog ..."
This system has the potential to allow you to find anything in game by using one search field only, with the results being prioritized and sorted into groups. That way when you are looking for an item to buy on the market, you may one day also be able to see at the same time that you already own this item since the search will look in your assets, too. And not only that – it has the potential of being expanded to searching in your EVE Mail, and even out of client text like EVElopedia. This sounded like a winner, so Team Stonehenge went to work on it. With Crucible 1.6 there will be such a search server for Tranquility, which means that the foundation for future functionality has been laid. However, while I expect you may hear some news on the search from other teams over time that will base their changes on the new system, the above is only to describe what it could do, not a promise that this is what it will be.

• The first iteration of the universal search we are releasing with Crucible 1.6 will allow you to search in People & Places without having to pick the search type.

You can also look for exact matches and in the localized clients you can search for the English translations or the localized version of any important word.

As you are reading this, all the features described are on Singularity for you to try out.
We are looking forward to your feedback and hope you will enjoy it!
Happy searching,
CCP Shiny

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.
Returning pilot? Visit Account Management for the latest offers and promotions.


More...

Hi, my name is CCP Shiny and I am writing on behalf of Team Stonehenge to bring you the latest updates for our localized clients. But if you are playing on the English client, you may want to read on, too, because there is a goodie hidden in there for you as well.
Let's start with a little history: When we did the localization for Russian and German, one of the core issues was how much we should actually translate. On one hand, we didn't want to divide, or shard, the EVE universe by client language. So we decided not to translate most names - including item names on the market, objects in space, location names and so on. On the other hand, this caused an effect where the game was never fully localized and therefore never felt natural to players that were used to fully localized games.

Click to enlarge
So as part of our upcoming release in Japanese, we decided to find a solution to this conundrum.
The first step was to actually translate literally everything for the Japanese client. This means all "important names"(items, locations, agents, NPC corporations and alliances, objects and entities in space, incursion names) are also translated into Japanese. This wasn't a trivial task and it took CCP Prism X nearly two months to change database objects to allow those names to be efficiently displayed with translations in-game.
But now we are back to sharding the universe by language, so we decided to implement functionality that would help keep everyone talking and allow for a more customized experience.

• Important names can be displayed in English or in the localized client language.

• CCP karkur from Team Avatar cast some UI magic that will allow you to see the translations of the important names in a tooltip.

You can also right-click on the name in a localized client and copy the translation so you can share it. The important names can optionally be marked with an asterisk in your client to make it easier to see what you can translate in this manner. You can of course also still see the information of auto-linked chat text in the language your client is set to.

All of these options can be selected on the language tab in the Systems Settings Menu. For the Russian and German client, this functionality is also present but for Crucible 1.6 we are still following our old localization policy of not translating important names. So Russian and German will still be translated in the same manner as before, with the added bonus of bilingual functionality for market categories, incursion names, etc. We are considering revising our original localization policy though which would mean translating important names also for Russian and German – this would allow for the exact same bilingual options as in the Japanese client. However, as mentioned earlier, this is no small task so don't expect any dramatic changes right away.
But wait, there is more!

• The agent journal has an optional column that displays the English name of the mission titles.

This way you can look up missions in your favourite mission guide while still being able to read the mission description in your own language.

Click to enlarge
The final piece of the puzzle was the search and this is where it gets good for our English players as well. We wanted to allow players using the localized clients to search both for the English names and their translations. While we were pondering possible solutions for this, the guys on Team Cobra Kai showed us the prototype of a universal search functionality they had been working on a while back. As you know, there are different search fields all over the client, like in People & Places, the market, assets and so on. For some fields like People & Places you also have to select a search type to get a result which can be tedious, especially if you are not sure whether "Dingbat Lovers"is a corporation or an alliance. The universal search does away with all that - CCP BitShift from Team Kobra Kai has summed up how it works:
Adding more languages means there is more text to search which is taxing on our database infrastructure. To remedy that we now index all the data in all the languages in a third party full text search engine called Sphinx (http://sphinxsearch.com/). This creates a unified interface which we can expose any data to that we want to be searchable. We have two types of data which need indexing, static and dynamic data. Static data is the data which does not change during runtime, such as solarsystem, agent and type names. We index that data once. But dynamic data is data that gets created or updated during runtime, such as player owned structures and ship names. We need to re-index that data and update our search indexes. We periodically re-index that data which means it's not as real time as if we'd search our database, but that's a fair tradeoff for being able to search faster and with minimal cost to database resources.
By moving the majority of the costs of searching from the database to the search server, we open up future possibilitiesof improving the search experience, such as searching all categories at the same time. Up till now you've had to specify what you are searching for, such as character names or places. Since all the data now goes into a unified index, we don't do that anymore, but we can get everything back which matches the text we are searching for. This means as you search for "jita" you get back multiple results for all terms that contain a word starting with jita. Additionally, searching for "jita cald" will return any of the indexed search terms that have words starting with those two search terms, in any order. This will become useful in future releases, when we move more game data into being searchable. But that is a subject for another devblog ..."
This system has the potential to allow you to find anything in game by using one search field only, with the results being prioritized and sorted into groups. That way when you are looking for an item to buy on the market, you may one day also be able to see at the same time that you already own this item since the search will look in your assets, too. And not only that – it has the potential of being expanded to searching in your EVE Mail, and even out of client text like EVElopedia. This sounded like a winner, so Team Stonehenge went to work on it. With Crucible 1.6 there will be such a search server for Tranquility, which means that the foundation for future functionality has been laid. However, while I expect you may hear some news on the search from other teams over time that will base their changes on the new system, the above is only to describe what it could do, not a promise that this is what it will be.

• The first iteration of the universal search we are releasing with Crucible 1.6 will allow you to search in People & Places without having to pick the search type.

You can also look for exact matches and in the localized clients you can search for the English translations or the localized version of any important word.

As you are reading this, all the features described are on Singularity for you to try out.
We are looking forward to your feedback and hope you will enjoy it!
Happy searching,
CCP Shiny

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.
Returning pilot? Visit Account Management for the latest offers and promotions.


More...

Hi, my name is CCP Shiny and I am writing on behalf of Team Stonehenge to bring you the latest updates for our localized clients. But if you are playing on the English client, you may want to read on, too, because there is a goodie hidden in there for you as well.
Let's start with a little history: When we did the localization for Russian and German, one of the core issues was how much we should actually translate. On one hand, we didn't want to divide, or shard, the EVE universe by client language. So we decided not to translate most names - including item names on the market, objects in space, location names and so on. On the other hand, this caused an effect where the game was never fully localized and therefore never felt natural to players that were used to fully localized games.

Click to enlarge
So as part of our upcoming release in Japanese, we decided to find a solution to this conundrum.
The first step was to actually translate literally everything for the Japanese client. This means all "important names"(items, locations, agents, NPC corporations and alliances, objects and entities in space, incursion names) are also translated into Japanese. This wasn't a trivial task and it took CCP Prism X nearly two months to change database objects to allow those names to be efficiently displayed with translations in-game.
But now we are back to sharding the universe by language, so we decided to implement functionality that would help keep everyone talking and allow for a more customized experience.

• Important names can be displayed in English or in the localized client language.

• CCP karkur from Team Avatar cast some UI magic that will allow you to see the translations of the important names in a tooltip.

You can also right-click on the name in a localized client and copy the translation so you can share it. The important names can optionally be marked with an asterisk in your client to make it easier to see what you can translate in this manner. You can of course also still see the information of auto-linked chat text in the language your client is set to.

All of these options can be selected on the language tab in the Systems Settings Menu. For the Russian and German client, this functionality is also present but for Crucible 1.6 we are still following our old localization policy of not translating important names. So Russian and German will still be translated in the same manner as before, with the added bonus of bilingual functionality for market categories, incursion names, etc. We are considering revising our original localization policy though which would mean translating important names also for Russian and German – this would allow for the exact same bilingual options as in the Japanese client. However, as mentioned earlier, this is no small task so don't expect any dramatic changes right away.
But wait, there is more!

• The agent journal has an optional column that displays the English name of the mission titles.

This way you can look up missions in your favourite mission guide while still being able to read the mission description in your own language.

Click to enlarge
The final piece of the puzzle was the search and this is where it gets good for our English players as well. We wanted to allow players using the localized clients to search both for the English names and their translations. While we were pondering possible solutions for this, the guys on Team Cobra Kai showed us the prototype of a universal search functionality they had been working on a while back. As you know, there are different search fields all over the client, like in People & Places, the market, assets and so on. For some fields like People & Places you also have to select a search type to get a result which can be tedious, especially if you are not sure whether "Dingbat Lovers"is a corporation or an alliance. The universal search does away with all that - CCP BitShift from Team Kobra Kai has summed up how it works:
Adding more languages means there is more text to search which is taxing on our database infrastructure. To remedy that we now index all the data in all the languages in a third party full text search engine called Sphinx (http://sphinxsearch.com/). This creates a unified interface which we can expose any data to that we want to be searchable. We have two types of data which need indexing, static and dynamic data. Static data is the data which does not change during runtime, such as solarsystem, agent and type names. We index that data once. But dynamic data is data that gets created or updated during runtime, such as player owned structures and ship names. We need to re-index that data and update our search indexes. We periodically re-index that data which means it's not as real time as if we'd search our database, but that's a fair tradeoff for being able to search faster and with minimal cost to database resources.
By moving the majority of the costs of searching from the database to the search server, we open up future possibilitiesof improving the search experience, such as searching all categories at the same time. Up till now you've had to specify what you are searching for, such as character names or places. Since all the data now goes into a unified index, we don't do that anymore, but we can get everything back which matches the text we are searching for. This means as you search for "jita" you get back multiple results for all terms that contain a word starting with jita. Additionally, searching for "jita cald" will return any of the indexed search terms that have words starting with those two search terms, in any order. This will become useful in future releases, when we move more game data into being searchable. But that is a subject for another devblog ..."
This system has the potential to allow you to find anything in game by using one search field only, with the results being prioritized and sorted into groups. That way when you are looking for an item to buy on the market, you may one day also be able to see at the same time that you already own this item since the search will look in your assets, too. And not only that – it has the potential of being expanded to searching in your EVE Mail, and even out of client text like EVElopedia. This sounded like a winner, so Team Stonehenge went to work on it. With Crucible 1.6 there will be such a search server for Tranquility, which means that the foundation for future functionality has been laid. However, while I expect you may hear some news on the search from other teams over time that will base their changes on the new system, the above is only to describe what it could do, not a promise that this is what it will be.

• The first iteration of the universal search we are releasing with Crucible 1.6 will allow you to search in People & Places without having to pick the search type.

You can also look for exact matches and in the localized clients you can search for the English translations or the localized version of any important word.

As you are reading this, all the features described are on Singularity for you to try out.
We are looking forward to your feedback and hope you will enjoy it!
Happy searching,
CCP Shiny

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.
Returning pilot? Visit Account Management for the latest offers and promotions.


More...