Test Server Feedback

Hello Wonderful Players!

For the next few days we will be testing the migration of EVE's universe data on Duality. It would be great if you could help us to make sure that we did not miss any bugs in our internal tests. This patch should include nearly no player-facing changes, but it is a very big change in the backend and it contains for example a complete new path finder.

And why should you do this, I hear you ask (Other than out of the goodness of your kind kind hearts of course ). Well fear not, CCP Habakuk will provide every player who helps us with 2m skillpoints on Singularity, to allow them to try out new things before committing to them on Tranquility. These skill points will be awarded when he returns from his vacation, so expect them early in January 2014.

Patching to Duality:
Currently, the most recent iteration of the launcher is not running on Duality and as such the process for getting onto Duality is slightly different:

• Copy your Singularity client first.
• Create a shortcut to repair.exe and add "--server=duality" to the target of this shortcut.
• Run repair.exe using this shortcut.
• Now create a shortcut to \bin\exefile.exe and add "/server:Duality" to this shortcut.

You might want to know a few more details about this patch:

What is this universe data and how are you migrating it?

The universe data contains, for example: the positions for all systems, planets, gates, asteroid belts and the asteroids in these belts. In the old systems this data was authored directly in the DB and most of the data only existed in the DB. In the new system the data is authored in files in our source control system together with our game code. Most of the data is then inserted again into the DB, when the server is updated. This gives us much more flexibility for changing game data.

Why Duality and not Singularity?

It is not easy to revert this change (A new mirror would be easiest, but would take a lot of time) and we need Singularity for other testing.

When will this reach Tranquility?

The current plan is to deploy this in February, but these plans may change if we find unexpected problems.

What do you want us to test?

Everything and anything! There are many systems in EVE which use the universe data in some, sometimes unexpected, way. The path finder, for example, is also used in the market! As you would expect, most of the obvious examples have already had a fair amount of time dedicated to them by our internal testing, but maybe you will find something broken in a weird corp function or when trying to use a titan portal. This change is huge and touches almost everything, so that's why we would love your help

This change seems pretty huge, don't you think you need more than a few days of testing?

Excellent risk assessment my friend! If everything goes to plan we will be doing more public testing closer to the release date of this patch, and hopefully for considerably longer than a few days. However, every little helps and we are doing this now to get the earliest possible public testing, and therefore give ourselves the maximum time to fix any problems we run into

I found a new bug, what do I do now?

Congratulations! Please write a bug report (F12 - Report Bug) and also report it here in this thread. Thanks!

I'm missing my mass test SP / stuff on the market:

I'm sorry, but CCP Habakuk is on vacation and he had no time to fix this. We hope that you do not experience undue suffering as a result.

If you have any other questions regarding this, please post them below and we'll do our best to answer them but otherwise, thanks again and happy hunting!

The universe data build for the Mac is not quite finished yet, but we're working on getting it out to you for testing as soon as we can.

So we just login and verify out stuff transferred and screw (test) around as usual until something breaks and we get to press F12?

I'd imagine we can't interact much with moving a star-gate :/

I assume this the next stage of the migration to .yaml based structure for the static data that started with the graphicIDs ( http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/changes-to-toolkit-exported-data/ ) back in May 2012.

Will these changes also be affect the static toolkit/dump for third party developers, and will we get prior warning of this going live on TQ?

if you're having any problems with this step:
because windows doesn't like the target (or for any other reason), do the following:

• Navigate to your Duality Folder
• Go one level up the filepath (If you're keeping all your eve copies together and using the default install of Tranquility this should be C:\Program FIles(x86)\CCP)
• SHIFT right click on your duality folder, this should bring up a right click menu with more options than usual (default stuff like cut and copy should still be there, if you don't see these, try again.
• Click on "Open Command Window Here" This will open a CMD window that has been pathed into your duality folder
• Type into the window "Repair --server=duality" and hit return/enter.
• The repair client will now patch your game
• Continue as normal

This is what windows does when running the repair client with the edited shortcut. This should work every time unless CCP changes the argument syntax, so keep this list on hand if it helps you

Observations:

Game took longer to load then it normally does from the character selection screen might be server might not.
Switching ships is also longer.
Market specifically Perrigen falls and did not open. The spire market was open when i gate jumped into its area. Started working finally.

Bugs:
Search is not working in the World Map Control panel. Bug reported.
The camera bug resetting to inside your ship is back in this build.



Which channel will the devs be watching? Moveme is inactive on the server currently.

I had an extra space in my rewritten string in the repair tool short cut. I would recheck.

Just did, no space.

If CCP breaks the SDE that people use to create third party tools, and say makes it harder for GTS to import map changes... ugh, one more step towards the death of this game.

Depends on how stable the start up script is or if they even have it set up to run. Cant remember when dualities down time is. Should be up till Monday if the automatic stuff works.