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Dev blog: Download on Demand client for EVE Online

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Blue Harrier
#201 - 2014-12-18 11:44:39 UTC
This is my second test with the new downloader (I posted my first test in the wrong place), this is on my laptop over WiFi so loading times were slower as expected.

The initial small download of the installer went fine.
I then made a folder on my D: drive ready for the installation (so I could browse to it)
Ran the installer and browsed to the folder

The launcher downloaded and installed as expected
Adjusted the path in the desktop icon to point to Duality
Ran the launcher and came across the first problem, you cannot pause the download so you can change the resource path location before the download commences

Really the launcher should ask at this point where you would like the shared files stored, with copious details of what is being download and the suggested locations for the files, or should pick up the drive letter where the launcher is installed and use this as the default drive for the shared files.

Went in to the launcher settings and changed the path to D:\Eve Shared Files
Closed the launcher to prevent further downloading

Restarted the launcher and checked it was downloading the files to the correct folder on D: (it was)

While the download continued I browsed to the \ProgramData folder (normally hidden) and deleted the already downloaded files in the \CCP folder (only 38Mb).

Once complete I logged into the game (slight delay on getting to the selection screen but not excessive), clicked on my character and again a slight delay on entering the game (not excessive).

The longest time for me was setting everything up because on the laptop the FPS has taken a huge hit and even with everything turned down I can only get 30FPS where before I could get 60FPS.
Might be time for a new laptop LOL.

Changed ship from Helios to Procurer which seemed to go pretty smooth, undocking was a bit ‘jittery’ as resources loaded (somewhat expected as the laptop is struggling).
Scanned for an ice belt, flew to belt, extracted 5 blocks of ice and re-docked all seemed fine

Total size of folders; D:\Eve on Duality\Eve 314Mb, D:\Eve Shared Files .99 Gb (the same as on my main PC.

Hope this helps, regards Blue.

"You wait - time passes, Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold." from The Hobbit on ZX Spectrum 1982.
CCP Maxwell
C C P
C C P Alliance
#202 - 2014-12-18 13:05:48 UTC
Blue Harrier wrote:
This is my second test with the new downloader (I posted my first test in the wrong place), this is on my laptop over WiFi so loading times were slower as expected.

The initial small download of the installer went fine.
I then made a folder on my D: drive ready for the installation (so I could browse to it)
Ran the installer and browsed to the folder

The launcher downloaded and installed as expected
Adjusted the path in the desktop icon to point to Duality
Ran the launcher and came across the first problem, you cannot pause the download so you can change the resource path location before the download commences

Really the launcher should ask at this point where you would like the shared files stored, with copious details of what is being download and the suggested locations for the files, or should pick up the drive letter where the launcher is installed and use this as the default drive for the shared files.

Went in to the launcher settings and changed the path to D:\Eve Shared Files
Closed the launcher to prevent further downloading

Restarted the launcher and checked it was downloading the files to the correct folder on D: (it was)

While the download continued I browsed to the \ProgramData folder (normally hidden) and deleted the already downloaded files in the \CCP folder (only 38Mb).

Once complete I logged into the game (slight delay on getting to the selection screen but not excessive), clicked on my character and again a slight delay on entering the game (not excessive).

The longest time for me was setting everything up because on the laptop the FPS has taken a huge hit and even with everything turned down I can only get 30FPS where before I could get 60FPS.
Might be time for a new laptop LOL.

Changed ship from Helios to Procurer which seemed to go pretty smooth, undocking was a bit ‘jittery’ as resources loaded (somewhat expected as the laptop is struggling).
Scanned for an ice belt, flew to belt, extracted 5 blocks of ice and re-docked all seemed fine

Total size of folders; D:\Eve on Duality\Eve 314Mb, D:\Eve Shared Files .99 Gb (the same as on my main PC.

Hope this helps, regards Blue.



Thanks.

There is still work to be done on the installer/launcher regarding where you choose to keep your downloaded resources.

CCP Maxwell - QA Engineer - Team RnB
Thalen Draganos
State War Academy
Caldari State
#203 - 2014-12-18 13:18:40 UTC  |  Edited by: Thalen Draganos
nvm
290xanaots
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#204 - 2014-12-18 13:44:17 UTC
Sgt Ocker wrote:
290xanaots wrote:
Soooooo... we're headed *away* from the hi-res textures that we are/have been begging for forever. Sad

A download is a 1 time deal, and storage is laughably cheap these days. Hook it up with those sweet, sweet hires textures. I don't care if it's 200+GB. I didn't buy a multi-TB HDD to not use it.

I'm just a pleb but my understanding of this change, you will indeed be able to have high textures, if you have your game (graphics) setup for high textures. On the other hand if like many you have your graphics set for performance rather than pretty, you will only get the textures required for your current settings.
If I can ever afford a computer to run multiple clients on high texture settings the new client will download what is required, at the time they are required.


What I'm talking about is the hires texture pack megathread that we've been begging for since... Fanfest 2013 (?) One of the reasons given for why these 4x res textures weren't being used was the storage and bandwidth necessary for keeping/transferring them. It's a real bummer to see us shifting further away from this kind of thing.

Unless, like one poster mentioned, this is a method of separating the functional side of the client from the art assets thus enabling a wider range of textures to be easily added, we're headed away from where 150 pages of players would like to head.
CCP Darwin
C C P
C C P Alliance
#205 - 2014-12-18 13:57:30 UTC
290xanaots wrote:
One of the reasons given for why these 4x res textures weren't being used was the storage and bandwidth necessary for keeping/transferring them. It's a real bummer to see us shifting further away from this kind of thing.


I'm not sure I understand your concern. The storage and bandwidth needed for such textures is the same whether they're downloaded all at once or incrementally. However, download-on-demand does potentially give us a way to control whether they get downloaded for a particular player, which helps with some aspects of those problems.

I can't see in what way we'd be said to be "shifting further away" from increased texture resolution with this change. I did earlier post that there still are a number of other changes that would have to occur to enable such a feature, but that's always been the case.

CCP Darwin  •  Senior Software Engineer, Art & Graphics, EVE Online  •  @mark_wilkins
CCP Darwin
C C P
C C P Alliance
#206 - 2014-12-18 13:59:39 UTC
Thalen Draganos wrote:
If the "Eve on Demand" thing is going to download the client in pieces and be stored, then why not leave things as they are.


The idea is to get people (particularly brand-new trial players) up and running faster with a new download of the game.

Quote:
If the "Eve on Demand" thing is going to force people to download the pieces every time they see an object once every time you log in, clearing the cache each time you log off, you will:


That's not how the feature works. The cache persists across logging off and rebooting.

CCP Darwin  •  Senior Software Engineer, Art & Graphics, EVE Online  •  @mark_wilkins
Thalen Draganos
State War Academy
Caldari State
#207 - 2014-12-18 15:20:20 UTC  |  Edited by: Thalen Draganos
nvm
290xanaots
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#208 - 2014-12-18 18:16:06 UTC  |  Edited by: 290xanaots
CCP Darwin wrote:
290xanaots wrote:
One of the reasons given for why these 4x res textures weren't being used was the storage and bandwidth necessary for keeping/transferring them. It's a real bummer to see us shifting further away from this kind of thing.


I'm not sure I understand your concern. The storage and bandwidth needed for such textures is the same whether they're downloaded all at once or incrementally. However, download-on-demand does potentially give us a way to control whether they get downloaded for a particular player, which helps with some aspects of those problems.

I can't see in what way we'd be said to be "shifting further away" from increased texture resolution with this change. I did earlier post that there still are a number of other changes that would have to occur to enable such a feature, but that's always been the case.


My concern is that a push for a smaller initial download size seems to be directly in opposition to the huge player support for an "Ultra" resolution texture release. This is a good summary of the FF 2013 discussion that sparked the megathread to show CCP that there is, indeed, a large enough demand, and that players really do not mind allocating the disc space and processing power to make it happen.

I am concerned that we won't see that "Ultra" release because small download size is prioritized.
CCP Snorlax
C C P
C C P Alliance
#209 - 2014-12-18 19:08:03 UTC
290xanaots wrote:
My concern is that a push for a smaller initial download size seems to be directly in opposition to the huge player support for an "Ultra" resolution texture release. This is a good summary of the FF 2013 discussion that sparked the megathread to show CCP that there is, indeed, a large enough demand, and that players really do not mind allocating the disc space and processing power to make it happen.

I am concerned that we won't see that "Ultra" release because small download size is prioritized.

The download-and-demand feature is removing one roadblock in the way of optional higher-res texture, so please don't be concerned that this is in any opposition of that. There is more to this than the size of the download (which still is a concern for attracting new players) or disk space (nobody worries about that anymore). The build and deployment process did not support any sort of optional content so we already had to make changes to support that, but more importantly, building the full set of stuff files is a time consuming process. A side effect of going to download-on-demand is that we now have a significantly shorter build process, making it much easier to deal with more content.

So, there is no reason to associate this feature with any opposition to ultra resolution textures.

CCP Snorlax - Software Architect - Team RnB - @CCP_Snorlax - http://ccpsnorlax.blogspot.is/
Jon Dekker
Dekker Corporation
#210 - 2014-12-18 20:04:15 UTC
CCP Snorlax wrote:
290xanaots wrote:
My concern is that a push for a smaller initial download size seems to be directly in opposition to the huge player support for an "Ultra" resolution texture release. This is a good summary of the FF 2013 discussion that sparked the megathread to show CCP that there is, indeed, a large enough demand, and that players really do not mind allocating the disc space and processing power to make it happen.

I am concerned that we won't see that "Ultra" release because small download size is prioritized.

The download-and-demand feature is removing one roadblock in the way of optional higher-res texture, so please don't be concerned that this is in any opposition of that. There is more to this than the size of the download (which still is a concern for attracting new players) or disk space (nobody worries about that anymore). The build and deployment process did not support any sort of optional content so we already had to make changes to support that, but more importantly, building the full set of stuff files is a time consuming process. A side effect of going to download-on-demand is that we now have a significantly shorter build process, making it much easier to deal with more content.

So, there is no reason to associate this feature with any opposition to ultra resolution textures.


Yes, I was thinking the same thing, this actually allows high res textures. It allows a far broader range of asset support and opens up many new possibilities.

I'm curious, would this allow for the inclusion of the other things that CCP is working on like Valkerie and Legion, into an overall single EVE client, instead of multiple separate games?

Would this also allow us to combine all of our accounts to a single sign-on process, with the ability to spawn a new "window" for alts, without running multiple instances of the EVE client at once? That's confusing, what I mean is, that currently if you want to play two characters at once, you need to create more than one unique EVE installs, and open each separately. What I would think that is made possible with this is the ability to have a single "global" EVE client, that can have the ability to open multiple instances yet still only running a single application. Like Chrome's tabs are all unique threads but running in the same app. Hope that makes sense!

Really excited to see what this makes possible!
Sable Moran
Moran Light Industries
#211 - 2014-12-18 20:12:57 UTC
Gave it a spin, did not end well. I encountered two major problems.

1. When I click the cog icon in the upper right hand corner which opens the launcher settings windows the client dies a miserable death every single time. Mind you this is a miserable death not a TötalHellDeath so windows was able to detect that and uploaded a bug report to where ever, hopefully they have ended up on your desk.

2. After clicking the Launch button the client simply hangs up, it doesn't do anything. I can see the exefile.exe process in the Task Manager though happily (presumably) chugging along but I can't see anything happening on my screen, no client, no nothing. I let it run for 15-20 minutes but it didn't make any difference it still stayed hung up.

Fix these issues and add the 'let the user tell where to put the shared cache' feature and I'll give it another spin.

Sable's Ammo Shop at Alentene V - Moon 4 - Duvolle Labs Factory. Hybrid charges, Projectile ammo, Missiles, Drones, Ships, Need'em? We have'em, at affordable prices. Pop in at our Ammo Shop in sunny Alentene.
CCP Darwin
C C P
C C P Alliance
#212 - 2014-12-19 01:34:17 UTC
Sable Moran wrote:
Gave it a spin, did not end well. I encountered two major problems.


Sorry to ask for more help, but do you think you could submit a bug report either in-game (preferably!) or via our web bug reporting tool for this? The additional info (particularly if you do so in-game!) might help narrow down what's causing the problems you experienced.

If you're willing to do so, be sure to indicate that you were running the Download-on-Demand client on Duality!

CCP Darwin  •  Senior Software Engineer, Art & Graphics, EVE Online  •  @mark_wilkins
Soden Rah
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#213 - 2014-12-19 01:42:10 UTC  |  Edited by: Soden Rah
CCP Gargant wrote:
The way the EVE Online client is deployed is set to change next year. Instead of me trying to paraphrase how it works, I highly suggest you head on over and read the details in the dev blog written by CCP Snorlax.

It is found here.

Feedback will be highly appreciated as the starts rolling out so make sure to try it out!



Does this pave the way for the possibility of super high-res' textures?

EDIT: on further reading I see that it does... good show, thumbs up and all that.
Sgt Ocker
What Corp is it
#214 - 2014-12-19 04:23:45 UTC
There is a few QOL options I would like to see added to the client/ launcher.

1) The ability to switch characters on the same account without having to quit game and go back to the launcher.
Maybe next to to the "Quit Game" could be a 2nd option, "Character Selection" ?

2) The option to save passwords in the launcher would simply be a quality of life thing for multiboxers. I rarely forget passwords but having to type them in multiple times each day becomes tedious.

3) For multiple monitor setups, having the client open in the window you have the launcher in rather than the main (monitor set as "1"). So placing the launcher in monitor 2, that is where the client will open.

- - - - - - - - - -

My opinions are mine.

  If you don't like them or disagree with me that's OK.- - - - - - Just don't bother Hating - I don't care

It really is getting harder and harder to justify $23 a month for each sub.
Salpun
Global Telstar Federation Offices
Masters of Flying Objects
#215 - 2014-12-19 07:33:32 UTC
Launcher is not allowing install button to highlight for me for some reason. I used the link in the dev blog.

If i dont know something about EVE. I check https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/ISK_The_Guide

See you around the universe.
Hannott Thanos
Squadron 15
#216 - 2014-12-19 08:52:44 UTC
Downloaded the launcher. Install was smooth, 100MBit line, took me a couple seconds before I could play on a fresh install.

I had autoplay checked, and it started automatically.

However, the character selection was just a black screen, but the cursor changed icon when I moved around, so I just pressed the leftmost area with that cursor, and a few seconds later I showed up in station in my ship.

No problems with undocking or anything else.

while (CurrentSelectedTarget.Status == ShipStatus.Alive) {

     _myShip.FireAllGuns(CurrentSelectedTarget);

}
DoToo Foo
Garoun Investment Bank
Gallente Federation
#217 - 2014-12-19 08:52:58 UTC
Ok. so after my previous failed attempt ( https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=5314792#post5314792 ) failed, I came back and tried again.

Hit play and gave it a long time. After several minutes of *nothing* I finally had eve start. Note: I have a fairly crappy internet connection which might be at fault, but I really would like some indication that *stuff* is happening rather than having to wait.

I did change c:\ProgramData\CCP to c:\ProgramData\NotCCP as I told the launcher to use the d:\ drive

Autopilot will not let me 'find' a destination but I can still use my personal assets to set a destination.

Resizing a window initially causes that client to freeze for about a minute.
maximize Client 1 window; and then it freezes
maximize Client 2 window and it also freezes
Restore window ?? Ok I think
Resize client 1 : freezes again
wait a bit and resize client 2 : now ok
resize both clinetns and everything ok

Dock in a different station for the first time : presented with a black screen for about 10 seconds (capatins quarters off; but load station environment on; setting optimized for performance, but effects all enabled. (treating a station like it was a fixed background would be better)

General comments; each of the freeezes I am experiencing feel like the client has crashed. One stated purpose is to get newbies in the game faster. so leaving me thinking that I have crashed is not going to inspire confidence in a newbie.


A DXDiag for my system can be found at https://www.dropbox.com/s/wt4n99szqcy2lkm/DxDiag.txt?dl=0



http://foo-eve.blogspot.com.au/
CCP Snorlax
C C P
C C P Alliance
#218 - 2014-12-19 10:03:32 UTC
DoToo Foo wrote:
Ok. so after my previous failed attempt ( https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=5314792#post5314792 ) failed, I came back and tried again.

Hit play and gave it a long time. After several minutes of *nothing* I finally had eve start. Note: I have a fairly crappy internet connection which might be at fault, but I really would like some indication that *stuff* is happening rather than having to wait.

I did change c:\ProgramData\CCP to c:\ProgramData\NotCCP as I told the launcher to use the d:\ drive

Autopilot will not let me 'find' a destination but I can still use my personal assets to set a destination.

Resizing a window initially causes that client to freeze for about a minute.
maximize Client 1 window; and then it freezes
maximize Client 2 window and it also freezes
Restore window ?? Ok I think
Resize client 1 : freezes again
wait a bit and resize client 2 : now ok
resize both clinetns and everything ok

Dock in a different station for the first time : presented with a black screen for about 10 seconds (capatins quarters off; but load station environment on; setting optimized for performance, but effects all enabled. (treating a station like it was a fixed background would be better)

General comments; each of the freeezes I am experiencing feel like the client has crashed. One stated purpose is to get newbies in the game faster. so leaving me thinking that I have crashed is not going to inspire confidence in a newbie.


A DXDiag for my system can be found at https://www.dropbox.com/s/wt4n99szqcy2lkm/DxDiag.txt?dl=0




Thanks for your feedback! Uncovering issues like this is exactly the point of getting this out on a test server well in advance of releasing on Tranquility.

CCP Snorlax - Software Architect - Team RnB - @CCP_Snorlax - http://ccpsnorlax.blogspot.is/
Noriko Mai
#219 - 2014-12-19 14:09:01 UTC
DoToo Foo wrote:
[..]
General comments; each of the freeezes I am experiencing feel like the client has crashed. One stated purpose is to get newbies in the game faster. so leaving me thinking that I have crashed is not going to inspire confidence in a newbie.
[..]

That's why I suggested a loading wheel. So you actually know the client is working on something and not dead.

"Meh.." - Albert Einstein
290xanaots
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#220 - 2014-12-19 14:11:21 UTC
CCP Snorlax wrote:
The download-and-demand feature is removing one roadblock in the way of optional higher-res texture, so please don't be concerned that this is in any opposition of that. There is more to this than the size of the download (which still is a concern for attracting new players) or disk space (nobody worries about that anymore). The build and deployment process did not support any sort of optional content so we already had to make changes to support that, but more importantly, building the full set of stuff files is a time consuming process. A side effect of going to download-on-demand is that we now have a significantly shorter build process, making it much easier to deal with more content.

So, there is no reason to associate this feature with any opposition to ultra resolution textures.



Ok. Good deal. I was just concerned that a push for smaller downloads meant that you guys were still worried we didn't have the disk space/spare processing power to handle whatever you throw at us.

Carry on with the knowledge we're still excited for and hoping for ultra textures!