EVE General Discussion

No we don't need it and it is a waste of development resources to maintain it. Even a mediocre PC these days can handle a large amount of clients without issues, so I'm not in any way convinced there is a real need in the community for this. There is definitely some level of desire for such things, but those are outlier cases.

Oh yes, maintaining 2 different clients is a great use of CCP's resources, just so people who refuse to give up their Tandy Sensation 386 sx1 with the whopping 150mb hd and spacious 4 megs of ram can play eve without upgrading from windows 3.1!

Thank you Op for this wonderous idea!

Maybe next I can outfit my ******* blender with an old LCD dot matrix screen from my busted GameBoy and maybe the circuit board from my Commodore 64 and demand that in addition to blending, CCP must make a 4-bit monochrome client so I can make a milkshake with some Ovaltine, some fresh milk that is delivered in glass bottles every morning by the milkman, and some snow that we pack down from the mountain tops every year and keep in our winter cellar surrounded by sawdust so we can keep the venison cold while pa is out heading to californy to find some work while we stay here in the cabin and read letters from the northern warfront and Mr Lincoln's latest proclaimation as he rides off on a pterodactyl over the freshly separated continents inhabited by fish with feet that just crawled out of the water.. and play eve at the same time.

Hi. Software engineer here with some perspective.

The classic client was dropped in 2009. That was the Dominion expansion. There have been 13 expansions since then. Just going down the Wikipedia article and from my bittervet memory, the changes that would have taken significant coding efforts on the client side have happened:

• Replaced web browser (which has since gotten so old and stinky it really needs a whole replacement again)
• Planetary interaction. All of it.
• Changes to how transmitting information about missiles, drones, fighters, and fighter bombers is handled.
• New "landmarks" and all the assets that come with that.
• Incursions. The whole giant monolithic set of features that encompasses.
• New ships (Revenant, Noctis, new fighter bombers, etc)
• Character portrait editor reworked from scratch. No old portraits preserved, i.e. the old portrait maker is 100% obsolete and gone.
• Walking in stations. Since this still melts modern computers, I presume you'd like to completely skip it, right?
• NeX store (now New Eden Store).
• 4 new battlecruisers.
• New launcher/update system.
• New drones.
• TiDi, and all the client infrastructure to smoothly support it.
• Overhauled war system and UI. Mercenary marketplace for wars. Old war UI is obsolete and gone.
• FW overhaul with new UI and mechanics. Old FW UI/mechanics are obsolete and gone.
• UI and underpinnings change to inventory management.
• Kill mails -> Kill reports.
• Crimewatch and its necessary UI changes for flags, safety settings, and such.
• 4 new destroyers, 1 new frigate, 1 new drone.
• Exploration/hacking overhaul. Mechanics change makes old UI obsolete and gone.
• 4 new (navy) battlecruisers.
• Sec status tags and the new UI surrounding that.
• POS mechanics changes / UI improvements.
• Ghost sites, and all their assets, mechanics, and UI.
• Personal mobile/anchorable stuff, and their mechanics/UI.
• New pirate faction (SoE).
• New class of missile launchers.
• ISIS - entirely new UI and interaction method.
• Updates to new player experience and tutorials.
• New pirate faction (Mordu's Legion).
• New expedition frigate.
• Industry mechanics/UI overhaul.
• Burner missions, and their assets.
• Skill queue mechanics/UI changes.
• Mechanics/UI changes for exploration escalations.

And, coming in less than a week:

• New destroyer, new freighter
• New mechanics for some WH systems

This list? This is a bare minimum of work that the development team would have to do if they picked up the 2009 classic client and wanted to make it work with today's TQ. That is, on top of hundreds or thoudands of bug-fixes that have to be re-fixed, changes that we (as players) are not privvy to, and tons of bug testing / QA. After that, whenever a mechanics change happens, the front-end devs have to do it twice. With extra difficulties too, because the people who wrote that old code are probably not around to ask what "0x5f3759df" means or why it was coded that way.

All this for what? Eve already runs just fine on a crappy Best Buy Special PC. It is already one of the lowest-hardware-requirement games on the market. How many people are there using computers so old that their CPUs' instruction sets are literally not produced or supported anymore by any hardware manufacturer?

There is literally no benefit for doing this. Zero.

we typically only fight in fleets of around max 30-40 pilots and we never take on more than 200 foes....we dont need it

Edit: and screw old PC support

TBH with the sole exception of manual piloting in PvP there is no need for the graphical aspects of EVE at all if we gained a 3D minimap for tactical views. The only other graphical windows necessary would be PI and the F10 maps.

considering a £300 pc could run Eve at high quality its really not needed.

How about YES

ED. I forgot the question, but w/e

no, I just installed eve last night on my asus t200 transformer book, on low graphics I had zero issues going for a spin in wormholes. Classic client is not needed.

HOWVER if they had the HD texture packs... then yes they need a separate client.

I was pleased to see this reference.