online games

Factional Warfare will soon be upon us. I stopped playing EVE several months ago with the plan to return once Factional Warfare was in (which I figured would be a couple of months since it was suppsed to be part of Revelations. Well the next expansion, Empyrean Age will finally bring it to us. It’s not going to be quite as drastic as my hopes but they were pretty drastic :P

Basically you sign up for FW with one of the four factions - that is Caldari, Minmatar, Amarr or Gallente (they’ve said other factions will probably be added later). You then have kill rights on that factions enemies anywhere (0.0, lowsec, highsec - even Jita, which will be even sillier than it has been). The factions enemies will obviously have kill rights on you. At the moment it seems it’s just going to be Caldair vs. Gallente and Amarr vs. Minmatar.

Joining the fight gives you access to special missions that will involve attacking your new enemies. As one faction wins fights in a system it gains “points” there. Enough points and that factions takes the system. It seems that, at least initially, only lowsec systems will be up for grabs in this way.

Finally, to balance out the fact that Caldari have little lowsec, a new region has been added basically in the middle called Black Rise that is mainly Caldari lowsec.

Well Kali is finally upon us. I haven’t really had chance to play yet. But the first thing I noticed was 29,000+ players online, the most I’ve seen personally (although I was apparently online when they first broke 30,000 - I was stuck in Jita with 700 other players).

They did post a dev blog about yet another cool idea they’ve had for the release beyond Kali - the ability to walk around stations in a nice 3D rendered world. Although they pointed out it will be mainly cosmetic at first. And to be honest isn’t high on my list of wanted features…

A new post has been made in the EVE Dev blog by a guy called Redundancy about the EVE economy. Lots of interesting thing about GDP and stuff. The most interesting is that GDP per capita is on the increase - that is the average amount of money a player earns is going up. In fact is has double since January.

Almost everything in Galaxia is an object. In hindsight this was a bad choice of name (from a programming standpoint I have objects of type Object), but I’m basically stuck with it. And I still can’t think of a better name.

The most interesting type of objects in the game will be vessels. The reason I chose vessel over ship is because not all vessels will actually be ships. Space stations for instance will be vessels that don’t have engines.

Vessels will have components and the components will add most of the functionality. I can’t tell you exactly what these will be or how they will work since this is the next big feature I need to implement. But basically, each component will allow a vessel to be given certain orders. For example engines allows a vessel to move somewhere, guns allow it to fire on other vessels.

The exact makeup of each vessel can be chosen when you build it. This also answers a question that has been causing me problems ever since the original Galaxia: “Why build multiple shipyards?” Well building some of the more exotic components will require some extra facility (Widget Factory for instance) therefore it would be better not to build one with every shipyard (you won’t have room anyway).