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Loading… Live Episode 8 – EVE Online Dev Chat Transcript - Page 6
Reuben
Waters: If you leave wormhole
space to go back to the main systems, will it be hard to get back to
player owned stations in the wormhole space?
Arend Stührmann: Let’s put it this way: If you leave your player owned station behind without someone to look after it, or a plan on how you’re going to try and locate it again, given the fact that wormholes are a constantly shifting and changing network of connections it might be a little tricky. But I’ve seen a lot of players discussing ways and means to make sure that they can sort of have a sign post back to their player owned station in wormhole space. So with a bit more work and some planning I think it’s relatively easy to get back there. But make no mistakes, setting up and maintaining a player owned station in wormhole space? It’s going to be quite the logistical challenge.
Ben De La Durantaye: What about other ancient factions? Will they eventually be added into the game?
Arend Stührmann: That’s something which unfortunately I have to leave up to the storyline team to talk about. Who knows, there’s a huge universe out there, and as we continue to expand the area of space that our pilots can get to, who knows what you’ll bump into out there?
Reuben Waters: Jaxmax asked: Does wormhole space have its own sort of system map function? Are there regular warp gates between areas, or is inter-area travel via scan able wormhole only?
Arend Stührmann: It’s completely via scan able wormholes, and they break down and reform according to the same shifting, randomized algorithm that makes the connection to known space. So there’s no way to map it out, this is the great unknown. If you open your universe map in wormhole space it’ll pretty much just say, “You are here”, centered on the known universe without giving you any indication of where you actually are. It is a trip into the unknown, so if you’re going to want to try and map it out, that’s a bit of a challenge, but I’m sure someone’s going to manage it sooner or later.
(at this point, Arend answers some questions directly from the text chat in the Ten Ton Events room)
I saw a couple asking whether the AI for the sleepers is going to be used elsewhere. If we were to have introduced this AI across the board with Apocrypha, we would have killed a lot of mission runners. So make no mistake, this AI is light years beyond what currently exists… if what you can call what currently exists in any way AI. But we do plan to gradually introduce it into known space and into the missions, so as time goes by, expect missions to become a lot more challenging.
The other question was: If you’ve got ships in a carrier, does that count towards the mass? No it doesn’t. The only thing that counts is the mass of the ship you’re piloting. So stuff your carrier full if you want to, and send it through. But always bear in mind that if you lose that carrier or someone jumps in after you, you might not be able to get it out.
And will you be able to live out of wormhole space? I think you can certainly try. If you find enough other players to use them as a source of ammunition and you’ve got a friend with a logistic ship to repair you or you’ve got a nicely thought out setup that’s geared towards long-term survivability, then sure you can probably live out there for quite some time. The probes are now recoverable, so you’re not going to be expending them quite as much as before. So yea, I think it’s quite possible to live out there for a while.
Jeff Woleslagle: I like that question from The Atheist: Is there opportunities to mine out in wormhole space?
Arend Stührmann: Yes there is. There are no static asteroid belts, but we’ve put a lot of exploration sights in there that you can probe down, which can attain asteroid belts that you can mine.
Oh yes, the question about the warp noise. We have a new warp noise, one that doesn’t make your eardrums bleed. (laughter)
And as for when we’ll see more epic missions? Well, as I said, the content team is already scripting a lot more of them, and this is the kind of content that we can literally produce with every expansion, so as we continue expanding EVE, we’ll be adding more and more epic mission arcs to the mix.
Jeff Woleslagle: Will there be new music in Apocrypha?
Arend Stührmann: Yes there is. RealX has been hard at work composing new tracks, and they’ll be out in glorious 5.1 surround sound as well if I’m not mistaken.
Oh, and I’ll just talk a little bit about the lag issues. Well, one of the things we’ve done is we have, just only recently actually as just the first step towards this, we’ve massively upgraded the server hardware to cope with the expected influx of players. So we are now running our game database completely off of solid state firmware, so there’s no actual hard drives anywhere in there. We’re also looking at upgrading the server hardware even further to speed things up and make sure there’s enough resources available to everyone. So I think with the new hardware and some of the server optimizations that we’ve launched in recent times, we will be able to comfortably cope with the influx of new players that we’re expecting to see.
Arend Stührmann: Let’s put it this way: If you leave your player owned station behind without someone to look after it, or a plan on how you’re going to try and locate it again, given the fact that wormholes are a constantly shifting and changing network of connections it might be a little tricky. But I’ve seen a lot of players discussing ways and means to make sure that they can sort of have a sign post back to their player owned station in wormhole space. So with a bit more work and some planning I think it’s relatively easy to get back there. But make no mistakes, setting up and maintaining a player owned station in wormhole space? It’s going to be quite the logistical challenge.
Ben De La Durantaye: What about other ancient factions? Will they eventually be added into the game?
Arend Stührmann: That’s something which unfortunately I have to leave up to the storyline team to talk about. Who knows, there’s a huge universe out there, and as we continue to expand the area of space that our pilots can get to, who knows what you’ll bump into out there?
Reuben Waters: Jaxmax asked: Does wormhole space have its own sort of system map function? Are there regular warp gates between areas, or is inter-area travel via scan able wormhole only?
Arend Stührmann: It’s completely via scan able wormholes, and they break down and reform according to the same shifting, randomized algorithm that makes the connection to known space. So there’s no way to map it out, this is the great unknown. If you open your universe map in wormhole space it’ll pretty much just say, “You are here”, centered on the known universe without giving you any indication of where you actually are. It is a trip into the unknown, so if you’re going to want to try and map it out, that’s a bit of a challenge, but I’m sure someone’s going to manage it sooner or later.
(at this point, Arend answers some questions directly from the text chat in the Ten Ton Events room)
I saw a couple asking whether the AI for the sleepers is going to be used elsewhere. If we were to have introduced this AI across the board with Apocrypha, we would have killed a lot of mission runners. So make no mistake, this AI is light years beyond what currently exists… if what you can call what currently exists in any way AI. But we do plan to gradually introduce it into known space and into the missions, so as time goes by, expect missions to become a lot more challenging.
The other question was: If you’ve got ships in a carrier, does that count towards the mass? No it doesn’t. The only thing that counts is the mass of the ship you’re piloting. So stuff your carrier full if you want to, and send it through. But always bear in mind that if you lose that carrier or someone jumps in after you, you might not be able to get it out.
And will you be able to live out of wormhole space? I think you can certainly try. If you find enough other players to use them as a source of ammunition and you’ve got a friend with a logistic ship to repair you or you’ve got a nicely thought out setup that’s geared towards long-term survivability, then sure you can probably live out there for quite some time. The probes are now recoverable, so you’re not going to be expending them quite as much as before. So yea, I think it’s quite possible to live out there for a while.
Jeff Woleslagle: I like that question from The Atheist: Is there opportunities to mine out in wormhole space?
Arend Stührmann: Yes there is. There are no static asteroid belts, but we’ve put a lot of exploration sights in there that you can probe down, which can attain asteroid belts that you can mine.
Oh yes, the question about the warp noise. We have a new warp noise, one that doesn’t make your eardrums bleed. (laughter)
And as for when we’ll see more epic missions? Well, as I said, the content team is already scripting a lot more of them, and this is the kind of content that we can literally produce with every expansion, so as we continue expanding EVE, we’ll be adding more and more epic mission arcs to the mix.
Jeff Woleslagle: Will there be new music in Apocrypha?
Arend Stührmann: Yes there is. RealX has been hard at work composing new tracks, and they’ll be out in glorious 5.1 surround sound as well if I’m not mistaken.
Oh, and I’ll just talk a little bit about the lag issues. Well, one of the things we’ve done is we have, just only recently actually as just the first step towards this, we’ve massively upgraded the server hardware to cope with the expected influx of players. So we are now running our game database completely off of solid state firmware, so there’s no actual hard drives anywhere in there. We’re also looking at upgrading the server hardware even further to speed things up and make sure there’s enough resources available to everyone. So I think with the new hardware and some of the server optimizations that we’ve launched in recent times, we will be able to comfortably cope with the influx of new players that we’re expecting to see.
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