EVE General Discussion

oh that's just fine with us, sometimes we like a little dirty WiP stuff


I feel like fanfest is a special behind the scenes peek into some aspects. and some of the presentations or side shows are individual devs or teams showing something cool they did, on a prototype scale. I remember at FF14 seeing a bunch of what looked like prototype sketches off to the side, maybe some of those made it into eve as t3 destroyers, then again maybe it was Valkyrie or dust art? I wish I took pics of some of the stuff.

then again if it gets announced in a keynote perhaps a higher standard should be held

This is exactly my point.. You have a large community of long standing players. We know things will get changed.. we know technical hurdles of tranquility are 100% unique in the gaming world.. and we know CCP isnt a huge company capable of throwing 500 people at something like Ubisoft or Activision.

What a decent majority of us want, however, is SOME kind of roadmap which is more detailed than "stuff is coming".

Even along the lines of a simple list structure like:
Sov finishing>Removing POS and replacing with new structures

Just a basic rolling list of what is currently being done without making it so time consuming as to eat into actual dev time. Even for the art department knowing what ships are on the block for redesign would be interesting.

We're eve players.. we are conditioned to wait years for things.. but it would be nice to know more of the direction CCP is taking the game other than "trust us stuffs coming".

they have this road map, or have you not been paying attention? Here is the current roadmap as of eve vegas last year (note it did not change at fan fest) Map

A road map is a general overview of whats coming. not a step by step guide. You have your road map. They are in the mist of replacing sov, replacing pos' and improving corp and alliances tools before adding new stuff. There is also a separate road map that works along side this for the art team as they get split into making cool stuff. This is essentially all we will get as that is the main road map. I expect we will see an updated version either at eve vegas or fan fest, and not before

Read the comment again. I'm asking politely if CCP would consider a more detailed roadmap even accepting the fact that it will be changed as to provide a more definitive definition of the direction CCP is taking their company and their product.

This is a pretty normal request in business. Additionally roadmaps come in all shapes and sizes. CCPs tend to be vague with no actual narrowing. It would be like Toyota saying "Hey we are releasing a truck next year!.. and maybe some cars. Blue ones!
These are examples of a roadmap which gives progressive detail without going into an absurd amount of time:
http://www.teitanso-toyota-city.com/en/imgs/img_roadmap/roadmap_graph.jpg
http://www.frost.com/prod/servlet/cio/226755697

In addition lets pick apart that roadmap you linked.

"Industry science teams"
Whats being changed? Would it be terrible to list "Adding indexing, removing queues, datacore rebalance"?

"Sovereignty & warfare"
Again.. whats being changed? Blanket statements are terrible.
Would it have been terrible to say "Removing HP Grind. Spreading conflict to more than one system. New mods/mechanics for SOV capture" ?

"Stations outposts and starbases"
This ones the worst.. This is major art and code investment.. you know months out about ideas like citadels and new sov structures. Even a comment about "redoing the whole thing to get rid of spaghetti pos code" is acceptable.

These types of still vague but direction filled commenting let us, the bankrollers of the game, WANT to invest and hype the game. Right now you get bad press as the only press. If someone asks me about aegissov what do i realistically tell them? "It's not done yet."

Lack of information is a terrible idea for this specific community which likes to plan, speculate, and argue everything.

the public road map is an over view map. what you want is a detailed map, and as started already, when they have that information set in stone, they release it. there is a sov road map which is here:

Sov map

Structue map which is here:

Smap

Thats all we got so far. anyway this is pointless, the answer you will get is 'when its ready we will show it'

God I hope not. One of the major problems CCP has is constantly chopping and changing its focus. Just stick to the plan and roadmap CCP Seagull talked about a couple of fanfests ago. Otherwise your devs do all this work and then someone highup tosses the plan away and they need to start from scratch again..

Gunjack is a mobile game which equals to tiny revenues, and then builds up on that by being a portable VR game. Probably will get to earn back the salaries of the 3 or 4 devs involved in it and little more... but whatever CCP Shanghai learned, and learn, from it, surely will be worth it for CCP. They can just write it as "R&D" without batting an eyelash even if it barely pays itself back.

Of course, this whole VR thing would make more sense if they had a game suited to VR, at least one which could be played in first person view... maybe one with people walking in places...?

Thank you for taking the time to try to answer without really answering. At least that is something and something is better than nothing... lol...

With that said, tell the Dev team that if they can manage to pull off the localized damage and other graphical eye candy like that. I will send the entire team some of my wife's famous cheese cake muffins!

That's as true in software development, as it is in architecture...

I'll just note here that because the localized-damage feature was implemented in textures, it might have been delayed by the tremendous amount of work that CCP has done overhauling and improving the default ship textures. There's no point adding lots more textures to every asset in the game until the underlying engine is where you want it. And, at some point, T3 cruisers are going to have to stop being the great exception to every retexturing announcement. They seem to have been a thorn in the art department's side for years.

I would imagine, from my perch in software development, that enhancements like this will enter the pipeline beyond some random 20% time work once the art department has beaten all the bugs out of its models and V5++ textures (which the new SKIN feature is great for, incidentally).

As for bloodline merging, the avatar sounding board a while back made it very clear that the whole character creator/clothing side of the game is being maintained by a very small team who roll in small but steady enhancements. The whole codebase is old enough, and the tools primitive enough (one developer mentioned that they make hairstyles one hair at a time) that I wouldn't be surprised if they're thinking of keeping the current engine under maintenance until they have the personnel and the time to either comprehensively overhaul and enhance the current system or build a new one.