EVE Online Ambulation update…

At CCP’s Fan Fest this year they demonstrated their new ambulation simulation. That’s right, you can get out of your pod and walk around the stations!

The folks over at Ten Ton Hammer posted up a video on youtube, and their site:

Link to their article

All I have to say is “ZOMG THAT’S SO FREAKIN KEWL!!!!eleventy!!!1111!!!one!!!11!1!!!”

OK, so those of you not familiar with EVE, it’s kinda like Babylon 5, you have a number of races, (all pretty much off shoots of humans) in a far far away galaxy, marooned there when I worm hole leading from our part of the universe collapsed. Everything is run by mega corporations, and the players are the instruments of the corporations will. Everyone starts out as a “pod pilot”, which is basically a vessel for your body that lets you control your ships with thought. You can make any choice you feel you would like to pursue as a profession and work yourself up to piloting whatever ships suit the skills for the profession you’ve chosen. Right now, EVE takes place pretty much in your ship. You can dock at stations to take care of various mundane things, or manufacture, buy, sell etc. Most of the action takes place in space, either killing each other, NPC space ships or mining asteroids…there’s a few other things, but they all basically fall under those categories in one way or another.

So, since launch (like around 2003 or so) people have been staring at their respective space ships. The graphics are pretty good, that’s what drew me to play it (that and I need a break from EQ2). BUT, with this addition, as you can see in Ten Ton Hammer’s clip, there’s going to be infinitely more dimension to the game. Here’s a little bit of what CCP’s community relations director had to say:

“In regards to the video itself, here’s a sequence of events. The room where the video starts with the Amarr female and Caldari male is a map room. One of a number of functions will be that of a ‘war room’, where corporation officers will be able to use the map as a sort of white board for planning attacks.

There is a hallway with a nice water effect to the sides of the pathway.

The second room (or third scene) is a meeting chamber. Depending on corporation resources and the type of station (among other factors), the decor can be changed. You could consider the Gallente female a corporation recruiter in this shot.

There is another hallway transitioning to the docking bay. The docking bay itself is designed with an eye at trying to give the scope of just how big EVE ships are.

After boarding the ship (an off-screen event in the video), the Zealot leaves the station and you can see the increased detail on the surface of the station. There have been some recent Dev Blogs with static images, now you can see one in the EVE environment.

Other information: Those players that do not wish to interact with the full-body avatar aspect of the game will not be forced to do so, a la the now defunct Earth & Beyond and their station interface. In-station servers will be separate from the space servers, so there will be little (if any) lag introduced into the other environment. A high quality download will be available in the future, no time frame as of yet.

Enjoy!
kieron
Director of Community Relations, EVE Online”

They will be running the outside of the pod experience on separate servers, so they won’t be taking the normal servers. It’s completely optional, so if you don’t want to get out of your pod you don’t have to.

The dev blog over on the EVE website has a lengthy piece about how they don’t intend and type of FPS at first (but didn’t rule it out), and the range of behaviors is going to be a bit limited. But things that you would want to do, such as meet up with friends, plan stuff out on a giant star map, etc will be going in. Their goal initially was to make it as life-like as possible without sacrificing performance…Quite a feat in itself.

Along with this addition they’re also updating a lot of the graphics, and the graphics engine itself. Not having seen it in action yet, I can’t really comment if it will function any better than what they have now, but some of the shots of what they’re proposing for new models are REALLY nice.

This expansion, Trinity, is going to be quite a good one, and I, for one, am absolutely nuts with anticipation over it.

 

~ by g0thicicecream on November 8, 2007.