EVE Probe

The latest EVE Probe (as of version 0.85.8246) allows playback of scenes other than the ones included in the build, allowing you to create your scene description and play it back. Furthermore, you can use EVE Probe to render a movie from your scene.
The EVE Probe launcher only supports the Probe's main role - gather performance metrics for a fixed set of scenes and upload the results to our server. Other features must be accessed by running the EVE Probe itself directly from the command line.

Running EVE Probe from the command line

The installer for EVE Probe only installs the launcher - the launcher in turn downloads the binaries needed to run the Probe itself, so before doing anything else make sure you've run the Probe once from the launcher.

The binaries are placed in a folder called probe under your EVE shared cache folder. By default it is C:\ProgramData\CCP\EVE\SharedCache - you may have picked a different location when you installed EVE Probe.

To run the Eve Probe from the command line, navigate to probe folder and run the following command:

C:\ProgramData\CCP\EVE\SharedCache\probe>bin\exefile.exe /lib=code.ccp

Simply running the launch script without any arguments runs EVE Probe in full-screen mode and runs through a number of scenes. If you switch away from the app it quits.

/windowed
Run in windowed mode rather than full screen. This is often more convenient when testing, especially if you want to attach a debugger or monitor logs as it is running. By default, the size of the window is half the height and width of the desktop.

/width=desired width
/height=desired height

Set the dimensions of the window (or resolution in full screen).

/ondeactivate=abort, pause or ignore
Controls the behaviour when the app loses focus. Default is to abort - when testing it is usually more convenient to set this to pause or ignore.

/scenes=list of scenes
The app has its own notion of what the default list of scenes is. When creating your own content, you usually want to focus on your own list of scenes, or just one scene. If you want to run through more than one, use a comma-separated list (no spaces).

Creating a scene

EVE Probe sequences are stored in yaml files that you can edit in your favorite text editor. There are commands to control the background nebula for the scene, add planets, ships, place the camera and add simple camera behaviors. There are also commands to move the ships, but for any sort of choreographed movements you will need to use a tool such as Blender or Maya to set up animation paths.

Under the probe folder you will find a docs folder containing some documentation about the scene file format as well as movie creation.

What next?
It depends on the feedback we get from the player community. Is this enough for you to create interesting scenes? Need better tools? Want to write your own tools? What features are missing from EVE Probe to set up the scene you have in mind?

what would be amazing would be being able to record x/y/z coordinates and asset id's from the live server for replay as a scene. that has potentially amazing possibilities especially in terms of showing performance metrics based on real play that typically cannot be truely represented by a bespoke hand made scene.

we already have something similar in the alliance tournament where crest exported the data to people who wanted to build stuff with them and players created the 3d match viewer. for example: http://null-sec.com/atxi/#/replay/105/0

if we could record similar data ourselves, import it to eve-probe and render it with actual in game assets that would be an amazing leap forward.

I'm holding CCP solely responsible for the mess I just made in my pants.

Note that C:\ProgramData is normally hidden by default. If you explicitly enter the path into, say, Windows Explorer, it should be possible to find the files mentioned here.

Bugger. Half a dozen of us spent 4 hrs last night on SiSi being spielberged around by our corp vidmaker. He will be a happy bunny though.

This ^. When running multiple clients I have to remember to face the camera away from any of the POS modules as I see about a 33% reduction in framerate from upper 50s/low 60s to about 40-ish. Gets worse if I forget to do this and open the system map on another client to probe scan.




Otherwise - to OP, great new feature and really looking forward to the things the community devises (I have absolutely zero skill in photo/video editing or composition)

holy **** !

Ok, so I looked at both

C:\ProgramData\CCP\EVE\SharedCache\probe\bin

and

C:\Program Files (x86)\CCP\EVE Probe\launcher

And can't find the Scene files, as stated in the readme:


Yes, I have run probe before searching. The only yaml files I can find are the results files.

The Progam Files (x86) filder hast just a cacert.pem and a logo in the res folder. And the ProgrammData Shared Cache folder has a probe/scene folder, but just with a single yaml file that names all of the scene .. but not the scene files itself.

What am I missing?

You must create res\sequences directories in C:\ProgramData\CCP\EVE\SharedCache\probe\

In other words place your custom scenes in C:\ProgramData\CCP\EVE\SharedCache\probe\res\sequences\

Yep, I found that manually creating that directory and adding the /scenes=demo.yml to the command line allowed playing back the example yaml file that's in the documentation (after copying and pasting the text into a yaml file with that name under res\sequences.)

Now I know where all my free time is going! :D