[HN Gopher] Eve Online Server Emulator
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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
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(page generated 2022-09-27 23:00 UTC)