Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Removing the jukebox and playing music based on where you are

This is probably the most controversial thing we are planning for this release. As part of building a cohesive experience, marrying graphics, design and sound, we want the music to play in context of where you are and what you are doing. This means separate playlists for hisec, losec and zerosec. Hisec will contain the more bright and jovial tracks for the eve soundtrack, while losec will contain the more darker tracks from the existing playlist. Zerosec and W-space will be darker and more ominous. We‘ve created new, highly atmospheric musical soundscapes (for this we invented a whole new paradigm – the so called „muscape“ J) for zerosec, that‘s partially procedurally done, with 20 base tracks that have around 500 permutations to them. Those new tracks will change and become even darker and more moody in systems that have seen a number of players ships destroyed in the last 24 hours.

Remember that this is just the first step in an ongoing development of this system. Further iterations may include radical changes – we just want to do this one step at a time.

„If thy jukebox offends thee, hack it off“

For this to work, we will be removing the current jukebox, which allows you to re-order your playlist and import mp3 files to play. To put things in perspective, the jukebox was put into the game early in development back in 2001 when mp3 players were considered very hip and all the cool kids had a slickly custom-skinned Winamp installed to play the latest Nickelback songs downloaded from Napster or hax0r ftp sites. Those days are gone, all proper PCs have media players as part of their base OS install, and the trend is moving towards listening to streaming music on the internet rather than locally stored mp3 files. Plus Nickelback have less of a mainstream following.

Maintaining an mp3 player inside EVE, while there are much better media players out there doesn‘t make much sense to us. Keep in mind that all code in EVE needs to be maintained. UIs are upgraded, codecs need upgrading, code is refactored, defects need to be resolved. By removing redundant pieces of code from our codebase, we free up engineering time to maintain, iterate and develop other features which are more important and core to the spaceship game EVE. As we move forward with EVE development, iterating and adding features, we have to be ready to cut off dead branches and prune our garden so to speak.

By placing the music on Soundcloud, we are providing those that still want to customize their own playlists with the existing EVE soundtrack the ability to do so. We opted for that route rather than maintaining two systems, both the new system and the jukebox, as that is an extra development effort, again, taking away resources from more important things. Like always, your feedback is important to us. Let us know if you agree or disagree with this move. Remember though, by removing extraneous functionality, we have more time to work on other things.

There had been coverage of this for months! Dev blogs, forum posts, even mittensdotcom and en24 had stuff up last week about it.

How have you only noticed after it happened?