EVE General Discussion

I would guess that CCP Veritas leaving wouldn't off help.

Shamefull.

In theory this should not of done anything. Unless he was the only one working on that system, which would nto of made a whole lot of sense. As I am sure he had help or someone was asking about the progress. And depending on how CCP runs coding, someone else could of taken over and or worked on it along side him. But i'm not a programmer, so prolly talking out my butt.

It hasn't been called that in months, check your facts or stop being an american.

CCP Veritas was not even on Team Gridlock before he left. He was the technical director for EVE Online. So him leaving, while taking lots of knowledge, didn't change who was working on BiaB/Dogma Rewrite. :)

I know people are still working on it, will try and poke one of them to post an update. :D

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. (He's my uncle who wandered away from the institution grounds.)

Irony blaster cannon II delivers a wrecking shot!

Disclaimer: This post was written by CCP Prism X, not the entirity of Team Gridlock. CCP Prism X is a well known forum warrior and all interactions with him should be well grounded in that observation.

Summary
OMG I HAVEN'T POSTED ON THESE FORUMS IN LIKE YEARS THIS WILL BE SUCH A WALL OF TEXT WOOOOOO!

State of BIAB
In my BIAB sandbox it is functional™....ish. To the point that we know this is possible and beneficial. There is however a lot of work to be done before we can even start thinking about how we can fit this into our deployment schedule.

That being said, it's only the brain in the box that is functional™...ish. A whole lot of other core functionality is broken there because the system we're touching has far reaching and slimy appendages that have latched onto every brittle part of our codebase. For example you can't train skills anymore and I'm fairly certain you guys want to coninute training skills. This is also happening in a sandbox of a sandbox of our mainline, so there's a lot of work to be done before shipping.

Story so far
As Mr. Ronuken briefly mentioned, the Brain in the Box work couldn't be started before our attribute system (henceforth known as Dogma) was rewritten a bit. Dogma could only function on the lines of item attributes affecting item attributes. This doesn't make much sense to laymen but in effect Dogma could not handle multiplying your ships base structure HP by 125%; it could only handle the request of multiplying your ships structure by base structure HP by your skills base structureHP multiplier times your totalskillPoints in the skill run through the skillPoints to skillLevel function. These calculations of course came out to StructureHP*(1.0+5*0.05) = StructureHP*1.25 but they still had to be made because 1.25 is not an attribute associated with an item, it's just a literal. Dogma didn't deal with literals.

So before BIAB was ever viable, the honourable CCP Veritas had to start work on rewriting dogma attributes. That created the first Sandbox of the project, and was the ongoing project when I joined Team Gridlock early in 2014 along with CCP Hedgehog and CCP Merovignian. Since then we've lost Veritas and Merovignian, but we have no intentions of replacing Merovignian anytime soon as the team does not feel the pressing need to do so. So that's good news, we're not lagging behind due to personell problems. We're lagging behind because we're taking much longer than anticipated to familiarize ourselves with the code.

After the REWRITE sandbox had been stabilized, we noticed that we had insane memory pressures. This was expected because we turned attributes into proper classes with all the python internal overhead that entails. We're talking extremely unacceptable levels of memory bloat and after a cursory look at the memory profile of the new code, Merovignian decided to take the new attribute classes to C++ (generally handles memory better than Python). That created a new project sandbox off the REWRITE sandbox but that part of the project has been put on hold again after Merovignian left us.

As the C REWRITE was put on hold, CCP Hedgehog has had to do extensive research on the first level rewrite branch to harden the python code to acceptable levels of memory usage. Hedgehog isn't in right now so I don't want to speak on his behalf, but as I understand it good strides have been made but there's still more to be done before we could release this attribute rewrite.

As the C-Rewrite involved base attribute classes, and BiaB involved skills being precalculated into their end-effect literals and applied as such to items, there was an opportunity to start coding for BiaB in parallell to the C REWRITE without much code overlap. This is why I have yet another sandbox of the original sandbox wherein which skills precalculated into a "brain" and passed around nodes with the character for a quick re-loading of his ship item in new locations. This is however somewhat problematic now that we're no longer doing the C REWRITE and hedgehog is doing massive memory surgery changes to the base REWRITE sandbox I keep integrating from. In retrospect we could have made life much easier for us, but you live and you learn. If you ever find yourself in a similar project, make damn sure that projects are finishined and stabilized before branching projects off them.

To complicate matters even further it became somewhat apparent that we'd need to rewrite how we handle skills for the BIAB project to reach its full potential. This is because as it stands your skills are items. When you inject skillbooks into your head, that's exactly what you're doing: Changing the location of the skillbook item to be your character. Your skills are just an inventory you keep in your character as opposed to your ship and that means they travel around with your characters inventory. This makes all skill handling awkward, especially so when they are being precomputed by your character node which has to get information from the location node and we are trying to offload work from location nodes. I'm not going to go too deeply into this because I need to stop writing this post at some point.

So now I'm doing a SKILL REWRITE as I harden the BIAB REWRITE on the side and Hedgehog hardens the original REWRITE. The skill rewrite is terrible because we've always addressed skills based on their itemID and now we have to do it on a composite (charID, skillTypeID) basis. This doesn't sound terribly complicated, and it isn't in and of itself, but all integrations into these sandboxes, from the MAINLINE where our feature developers are having a coding frenzy, make me cry a bit of blood. For example I just remembered that I forgot to do my Monday integration this week and now I want a hug.

In conclusion:
Stuff is happening. It's happening slowly and painfully but it's happening. I have my personal dreams as to when this could reasonably be...

Have. HAVE!

God. Damn. It.

It's our hope that moving things to C++ is not strictly necessary for this project. That doesn't mean it wont be it's own project. We'd just really really really want to release this in bits, harden them, and then do something more crazy. Releasing seven crazy-projects onto TQ at the same time is.. crazy.