While Andie Nordgren and her team works on putting more content into the universe of New Eden, there’s another that’s hard at work on pulling stuff out. These features, however, aren’t being thrown into the dumpster, but will instead be shared across every EVE game. Named the EVE Universe group, it’s their task to find capabilities that would be useful to other upcoming games and projects, and make them available. Heading up that search is EVE Universe Architect Kjartan Emilsson.
“What I’m basically looking at is anything that is above the games that contributes to the EVE universe at a meta level, and identify both the commonalities that exist between the games in terms of certain principles, and make sure that each game, when they’re designed, doesn’t break those principles. It’s trying to identify the framework to allow each game to freely design the experience they want, without violating, either conceptually or mechanically, another part”
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“My role is really more on the feature or concept requirements for on these things, and then the EVE Universe group is more of a developer group, except they’re service oriented towards the projects. So it’s really the projects that are our clients rather than dealing directly with customers. So we listen to what they want, and also tell them what they could have, because we can see it.”
Binding the Universe Together
At a simple level, it’s easy to think of this as a centralized account management system – you log on with the same credentials regardless of the game you want to play, chat with the same people and send in-game mail the same way. You might even have a shared inventory and wallet, allowing you to buy missiles in EVE Online that you can then fire at others in Valkyrie. But the purpose behind these shared services runs much deeper, and has a much greater potential. Emilsson gave me the example of a Valkyrie player wanting to shift cargo from one system in New Eden to another.
“It takes time to move stuff around. You cannot automagically transport matter across huge swathes of space. You can imagine, if you suddenly had a game that would allow that, it would completely upset the balance of EVE, where you rely on the balance of transport, logistics and so on. So it’s important for the game designer of say Valkyrie, if they’re planning to have such features, they know they cannot do that kind of stuff.”
Depending on how it’s implemented, we might see Valkyries creating logistics contracts for EVE players to take advantage of. It keeps the fabric of EVE cohesive and consistent as a universe, but it’s a very new element of unified game design, borrowing from the shared services model used in the wider technology industry. But even this is just scratching the surface of what might be possible.
“I was involved in when we started the integration of Dust 514 into TQ [Tranquility, EVE Online’s server cluster], and how that would work in the backend. That’s where we began to identify the problems that needed to be solved, and that we needed some kind of framework to be able to do it properly, especially if you’re going to be adding a third game like it is now. So that’s where we took a step back and formally defined the EVE universe as a thing that needs to be thought about, not in isolation of each game, but there are certain things that we can extract to that meta-level and make all the projects adhere to it.”
Those shared services would no longer reside on Tranquility, but instead on the EVE Universe platform – a resilient piece of shared infrastructure that’s designed to be available all the time, without any downtime for updates or changes. It means that the servers powering EVE Online can spend more processing power on crunching the game.
Elastic Trickery
There are also benefits when it comes to looking at legacy code. “If you have stuff that hasn’t been moved for years or has grown in a semi-chaotic way for a while, and people maybe not so pleased with it any more - code that people don’t want to touch because everything will fall apart if you touch it - it’s not very good to have that kind of stuff lying around, especially if you’re planning to have this running for many years more. So this is a good excuse to do some spring-cleaning, and you can do it in a gradual way: isolate certain parts and functionality, take this and do bypass surgery around the old stuff. Maybe the new projects will use the new thing and the old projects will use the old one for a while and move to the new ones when they’re ready.”
That versioning - supporting new and old ways of doing the same thing – also helps to reduce dependencies between game updates and new projects, as they can both coexist together. It also reduces schedule clash – where an update is needed on one game before something else can be implemented. This level of elasticity is absolutely crucial if CCP ever ventures beyond the PC with future titles.
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“We try to lessen the dependencies between the projects. If you take Dust 514, we had a very different type of release mechanism than Tranquility. There we have much more freedom – we’re on our own cluster and platform. For Dust we have to go on PSN, certification, regions must go through a synchronized step, and the fact that if you’re running against the same database, all the releases between the two games needed to be synchronized in a very careful manner.”
“This is something we want to change to a point where projects can be more independent in updating their own stuff, and that’s only achievable by either separating the functions, or extracting common functions to a separate service without having to disrupt everyone else.”
Even though the EVE Universe group has only been up and running for a short amount of time, some of EVE’s functions are already being run as services in this way, in a process that’s largely invisible to players. As further functions get drawn out from the bowels of Tranquility and shared with other projects, the possibilities for CCPs game designers grow hugely. There are even potential benefits for third-party developers, as some of these new interfaces might be opened up externally in time.
Ultimately though, there’s a vision behind the work at CCP, and it’s aptly demonstrated by the trailer shown at FanFest this year. If the goal is to make an expression of EVE that is truly united, it’s through EVE Universe that they’ll achieve it.
