[HN Gopher] Eve Online Server Emulator ___________________________________________________________________ Eve Online Server Emulator Author : giancarlostoro Score : 51 points Date : 2022-09-27 20:05 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (github.com) (TXT) w3m dump (github.com) | ndneighbor wrote: | Not related to this project, but one of my fondest memories of | gaming is playing EVE and sitting on a Vent server with my fellow | pilots. Reading about it just makes me nostalgic for those days. | | o7 | aliasxneo wrote: | I still remember the heart-pounding moments when I was putting | millions of isk on the line in some sketchy engagement I | probably had no business getting in. Also, the RP on Eve was | top-notch, I recall one point where I was in a dedicated vent | channel "voting" on initiatives for the corporation. Good | times... | MrMember wrote: | In my opinion EVE is the greatest MMO ever created. I've played | and enjoyed other MMOs like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, a | few others, but nothing else even comes close to the experience | of playing EVE. The very real stakes of losing your ship, | cargo, implants, changes the game entirely. Venturing into | low/null sec can be genuinely terrifying when you don't know | what's on the other side of that warp gate. | | And then there's the enormous breadth of gameplay options. You | can be a high sec carebear and happily farm asteroids in | relative safety or play the market and never even undock. You | can live out your fantasy of being a space trucker and pick up | contracts in your freighter. You can join a nullsec corp in | player controlled space and participate in the absolutely | ludicrous (in a good way) nullsec PvP. You can stalk other | players in wormholes in your stealth bomber for literal days, | popping out and killing them right when they finally think it's | safe. The stories that are generated from its sandbox gameplay | make it very unique in gaming. | | Unfortunately it's also an enormous time sink and I don't play | it anymore. If I could play EVE 18 hours a day I probably | would, but it's a very difficult game (for me anyway) to play | for maybe an hour a day and feel like I made any real progress. | hypertele-Xii wrote: | Seems to me it's mostly empty space with menus on top. | | To me, the essence of video games is that play takes place in | an interesting _space,_ where terrain matters and a variety | of things occupy it. | | It would be trivial to recreate the EVE experience in | literally any MMO by just having permadeath. And then most | other MMOs would be better than EVE because they actually | have worlds with stuff in them. | | Or maybe they don't and it's just a thin facade, in which | case I simply recommend playing better games. | | Am I missing something? | JCharante wrote: | Yes you're missing it. Every item is player made (few | exceptions in recent years). | | This means if you're a warrior in combat you have a ship | with like 20 items that were all hand-made, and to build | the ship itself it went through 6 different stages and the | raw materials probably changed hands 12 times. | | Logistics is everything too. Bad freight logistics loses | wars. | GauntletWizard wrote: | You're not wrong, you're just not the target audience. It's | not for visual thinkers. Eve Online is a spreadsheet | simulator in so many ways, but for the people who enjoy | those spreadsheets, whether they be market buy/sell prices | or times of day that idiots in blinged out ratting ships | are playing, that's what keeps them going. The space theme | is pretty, but not really the point. The harshness of the | universe is the point. The empty expanse is thematically | nice but not important to the enjoyment. | roganartu wrote: | There is a lot of empty space in EVE, but there's also a | lot of activity. The fact that your empty space can rapidly | turn hostile forces you to take a certain approach to | gameplay that I've yet to experience in any other game. I | used to live in wormhole space, which feels even more empty | than regular EVE space as there is no "local chat" listings | of people in the same system as you. Corps that live in | wormhole space generally just assume that there are cloaked | spies everywhere (and they're usually right). | | I also don't think permadeath is a reasonable parallel. | Your pilot's skills in EVE are not lost on death, and these | are required to pilot certain ships as well as gating some | other things in game. XP for these skills are simply gained | over time from a queue. On death, you respawn as a new | clone, retaining all your skills but losing all the | physical possessions you had on you at time of death. These | have an in-game monetary value, which is where the desire | to avoid dying comes from. There are two categories of | possession you can lose this way: your ship and everything | in/on it (called the fitting), and your implants. Implants | augment your skills, and can be rather expensive. Once they | are inserted, they cannot be removed without being | destroyed, so it's quite common for people to go out and | have fun in cheap ships after losing an expensive clone | before later reinserting expensive implants again. | | I miss EVE too, but I also simply don't have time to give | my old characters the justice they deserve anymore. | shultays wrote: | In my experience EVE online was hours (days?) of | boringness for a relatively small amount of extreme fun | meheleventyone wrote: | Yeah all the failed projects that thought they could "just | add permadeath". | | One of the amazing things about EVE is that although it | looks quite bare at first blush there is an interesting | space, where terrain matters and a variety of things occupy | it. Far more so than most games because there is an entire | player run political layer on top of it all. | | The only game that's really felt as close to a second | existence to me has been Ultima Online. | unoti wrote: | > It would be trivial to recreate the EVE experience in | literally any MMO by just having permadeath... Am I missing | something? | | Yes, a few things. Claiming territory and political | hierarchy are other missing elements from essentially all | other MMO's. You can claim ownership of territory in Eve. | You can then set up an alliance or parent/child | relationships between guilds, such that a territory is | owned by a group of cooperating guilds. This political | hieraechy/network controls who shows up as "red" or | attackable. Also you'd need to add full looting of gear on | people you defeat, as well as harvesting of their bodies | for salvage. | | Another aspect missing from other mmo's is transport | logistics. Also the fact that literally every ship, weapon, | and piece of ammo is created by players and transported by | players with buy and sell orders in a maketplace. | | In short, it's radically and fully different from any other | MMO. | awelxtr wrote: | Yup, being an enormous time sink it's one of my major gripes | with the game. | | I guess it is also what makes it one of the most hardcore | games in existence... Right next to OGame | coenhyde wrote: | I've never played EVE Online, but that is a not because I | don't want to. It's basically the game I dreamed about as a | kid. And I know if I play, I will want to win, but you | can't win, you can only dominate; by investing lots and | lots of time. People say I'm not missing much because it's | a spreadsheet in space. Unfortunately that sounds right up | my alley. I love games where I can find tiny optimizations | and compound them into an unchallengeable force. But if I | have the time to build a space empire, I have the time to | build a new startup empire in real life, which I don't. | roganartu wrote: | > I will want to win, but you can't win, you can only | dominate | | It is common for EVE players to refer to quitting as | "winning EVE". I won EVE around 7 years ago after falling | 800-hours-in-6-months deep into the optimisation black | hole you describe and realising it was immensely fun but | unsustainable. | madrox wrote: | I hope we eventually see a truce between developers and server | emulators. Emulation really adds something to communities, and in | a world where we're losing the public moderation war, private | servers seem more and more like the solution for people who don't | want to risk harassment. | | I remember EVE Online fondly, but I was a pretty casual player. I | know this is an educational project, but I wouldn't mind seeing | some private servers run some day that lets me experience aspects | of the game that never would otherwise. | hsuduebc2 wrote: | This reminds me good old times when we all emulate wow servers. I | think that today you can't build such a huge community around it | because people simply have more money to just pay for official | servers. | | Nevertheless I deeply admire your effort and skill invested to | emulate game servers. Incredible. | p1necone wrote: | I think community run wow servers are just less popular now | because of official wow classic. When Blizzard inevitably fucks | that up people will go back to community run servers. | Tenoke wrote: | Private WoW servers have been alive and well all this time - | some of them being pretty massive and mostly for the purpose of | playing old expansions (though Classic is slowly going through | those now) or to play with less grind or free etc. | datameta wrote: | Persistence and impermanence are both what make EVE such an | immense milestone in gaming. You lose a ship in battle? It's gone | forever. Ferrying goods you manufactured out of in-situ resource | gathering, and a pirate ganks you at the nullsec gate? You just | lost weeks worth of revenue. It's the antithesis to "it's fine | I'll respawn". Everything matters, because it only exists due to | players. Nothing is a given. It's a real economy with a real | society. Man I miss that game. | erwinh wrote: | You'd think it would be the ideal candidate for nft | integrations but seems their experiment with minting kill | certificates on the tezos chain was short lived... | | https://thestackreport.xyz/dashboards/tezos/contracts/KT1WQ1... | JCharante wrote: | It would not, it takes new players months to get to 1 billion | in-game currency while it takes veterans logging in for a few | minutes to do that. A friend has reached 1 trillion in net | worth after playing for 2 years (I only reached 300b before | realizing I should grind IRL instead of in-game, but I had an | operation that made it somewhat easy to gain 50B/month). | | So if I can sell my 50B per month for like $100 or $200 I'd | probably do it (because if you're lucky in market speculation | you can make way more) | | So what about new players? Eve is a zero-sum game. You take | resources and other players can't use it anymore. Imagine | playing a game that emphasis that you can sell items for real | world money but playing for a year would only get you $10 or | less. | tedivm wrote: | Eve Online isn't zero-sum, it's a semi-managed economy | where resources are balanced by a team of actual | economists. The goal of the company isn't perfect economics | either- it's about getting as many players as possible. | | There are a lot of levers the company can use to move that | economy. For base resources they can spawn more resources | in easier to access areas, for items they can release more | through their NPC traders or increase drop rates. | | Even outside of that there are a lot of aspects that aren't | zero sum. There are more resources in the game, by far, | than are currently mined. As new players enter the game | then more resources start flowing through the economy as a | result. The only resource that is really limited is | territory, but even that has been increased over time (such | as when wormholes were introduced). | CrazyStat wrote: | What benefit would NFTs provide over storing item ownership | in a database, as games usually do? | erwinh wrote: | I'd say two things: 1. Proof to players that game actions | are actually permanent instead of something that a server | moderator can change at will. 2. A publicly accessible API | layer which does not need to be paid for by the developer* | that can be used for community-driven plugins & third-party | integrations, guild & tournament websites etc. | | (*because it is paid for by transaction fees) | oneoff786 wrote: | 1. Trading card game leagues that have banned cards you | purchased and irrefutably own because you have it in your | hand would like a word | CrazyStat wrote: | You're not making a very convincing case. | | (1) Unless the server itself is running on the | blockchain, which is impractical for anything like Eve, | nothing stops the server owner from ignoring what the | blockchain says about ownership and changing things at | will. | | (2) This is just externalizing costs _incredibly_ | inefficiently. The blockchain transaction fees will | necessarily be greater than the costs of simple database | storage, probably by several orders of magnitude based on | current implementations. Eve already provides a fairly | full-featured API [1], so this would provide little to no | benefit at exponentially increased cost. | | [1] https://esi.evetech.net/ui/ | db48x wrote: | Nfts are unnecessary. You can get those benefits with | just boring old PKI. | hypertele-Xii wrote: | Nothing. It's not like game developers are going to | implement NFTs from _other_ developers ' games into their | own, that's _work._ | IntelMiner wrote: | Not even that it's work. It makes zero sense on multiple | levels | | NFT's are a waste of time and the sooner they die out | like the digital beanie baby fad they are the better | peyton wrote: | EVE, no, but you could imagine a game with a mechanic in | which players may write and deploy code. Some sort of | distributed coordination layer may be the best choice to | enable this mechanic. It may make the most sense in that | context to store ownership inside the execution environment | rather than externally in a database. | shakezula wrote: | I've always thought a cyberpunk game with this type of a | mechanic as a core ethos to the system would be sweet as | hell to both write and play. | naniwaduni wrote: | Emphasis on "hell"? | hkgjjgjfjfjfjf wrote: | mavu wrote: | You know that it still runs, right? :) | waynesonfire wrote: | maybe he don't. | datameta wrote: | Yeah :) I unfortunately don't have the time to put into it | because when I played it would completely suck me in. I have | too many unfinished projects to not work on! | klik99 wrote: | As a former CCPer (not on the backend, though I did touch it from | time to time and learned a lot from its architecture) this is | pretty interesting - is it common for people to make emulated | servers for games? I can see why people would want to do it for | other games, but what is the motivation for EVE specifically, | since it loses a lot of the appeal when you're not playing with a | massive amount of people. | CrazyStat wrote: | Just a heads up in case you were not aware--the cert on | elasticaudio has expired. | klik99 wrote: | Thanks -_- | shultays wrote: | is it common for people to make emulated servers for games | | Guess so? At least for popular ones. Aren't private WoW servers | like that? And I know Ragnarok Online had similar servers | motivation for EVE specifically | | same motivation as others. You can mod your servers, you can | make playing truly free etc | klik99 wrote: | I can understand WoW, because it's sharded and works as a | playground for your friends without needing a huge amount of | people. Also the game changed so much and people wanted to | still experience the older version (something Blizzard | recognized) The most compelling parts of EVE require a pretty | high threshold and density of users. Using mods or | restricting the number of systems could be interesting | though. | | At any rate, if you're looking at it for you and your | friends, then it's def an achievable goal - The hardest parts | about the eve server is the architecture to support such a | huge number of people, and it's much simpler without that | restriction. | boneitis wrote: | (Did not yet read the publicly stated reason cited above) | | As someone who wishes they spent more time playing videogames | and just pulled the trigger on an RTX 20 series card in these | times of price drops, I was looking forward to trying for the | umpteenth time to get into EVE (I've done the Exploration | activity as my primary source of income for 6-9 months a long | time ago... admittedly a less social activity than most in | EVE). | | But, looking at the state of the game today, two things (among | others) all but dashed my interest: the game's purchase by a | big name publisher with a pretty commercial image and the | subscription model. | | It had not crossed my mind before seeing this submission, but I | can see myself humoring a popular community's attempt to erect | a private EVE server and play around on it. | rexpop wrote: | For those of us unfamiliar with the game, would anyone like to | summarize what this is, and/or why it's desirable? | | Nothing in the Readme, the website, nor the wiki explains what | EVEmu actually does, or why anyone would want it done. That, | alone, is interesting in a world rife with marketing copy: these | developers think their value is self-evident. | CrazyStat wrote: | It emulates the Eve Online game server, so that in theory you | could run a private eve server for yourself/your friends (in | practice it's missing large parts of the game so it's not | really playable). | | Eve is famously a single-server [1] game and doesn't officially | allow private servers. | | [1] outside of China | mavu wrote: | You will have to (and should) look up EVE online yourself, | there are litteral books written about it. (check amazon, you | can buy 2 History books about EVE.) | | Eve is an online game. That means servers and game clients that | connect to them. That also means, if the company shuts down, | the game is gone. Enter: Server emulators. If a working game | server exists in the public domain, someone could run it and | run the game client connecting to this server and still play | the game. | gverrilla wrote: | I have tried to play Eve for 2 or 3 weeks. It was terrible. | | Nobody talking about the "great wars" on EVE will tell you, but | multiaccounting/multiboxing is not only incentivized, but a part | of the business model of the game itself. So you can see 50 | ships, but it's actually 1 guy spending a lot of money. For what | I have seen, these whales are central to the game, as they are | the people leading the corporations etc | | For the gameplay loop it's either engaging socially with the | whole corporate structure, or dealing with the core game which is | pretty boring with it's minigames, it's grind and it's | spreadsheet-like economy. | | Pvp is utterly boring and feels so unresponsive - I think I also | had a lag problem (as eve consists of 1 server only, in the us, | afaik). | | EVE is a very small game (by playerbase) considering the amount | of publicity it gets now and again and the grandeur of it. It's | only alive because they have mastered the whole whale-based | business model a loooong time ago it seems lol | shultays wrote: | EVEmu is an educational project. This means, our primary interest | is to learn and teach us and our users more about C++ project | development in a large scale | | Heh ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-27 23:00 UTC)