EVEmu – An EVE Online Emulator
github.com
github.com
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.
[0] https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/realms [1] https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Realms#Minecraft_version_h...
The companies would never allow that.
At an abstract level, that sort of cooperative team-vs-team supply chain building plus faction warfare isn't new either or unique to Eve. Eve's scale is impressive, don't get me wrong, but it's still a lot of grinding.
War is at your fingertips 24/7, this is the purpose of faction warfare. You didn't see that because you never left high security space. I'm not judging, but I'm also not patting your butt while explaining this either. I was like you at one point.
I don't want "safety", I want "lack of monotony". They're different things. Eve is like the Foxhole of space games, vs something like Elite Dangerous where even lone-wolf privateers can see meaningful action/combat without much investment.
I would love to play Eve more for the social aspects, but it takes too much time commitment to be able to meaningfully participate unless you join a big guild and they help you up. That's because of the grind.
If an emulator makes the grind much easier (much faster skill progression, higher material drop rates, easier ISK, etc.) I would love to check that out. I'm sure that will also cause communities to be less tight-knit (lower investments in time and social dependence), but that's a tradeoff I'm willing to accept in exchange for being able to experience some of the time-locked parts of Eve...
I get what you're saying and why you'd feel that way. I'm sure you already know what I'm going to say, and that I disagree because there's a lot of things you're saying that a newbro would say that are not as true as they seem at first glance once you've been going a while.
When I was a kid I used to think about my idols or the people who had things I wanted and it was so inconceivable to think that we're the same people and they they dared to reach for the thing we both wanted. Them being there first made me wrongfully feel like they had something I didn't, when in fact it's been there the whole time and just had to grab for it.
I think we both have some points, and we both have some experiences, but a thing I see a lot of Eve vets doing is badgering the fuck out of a newbro on the internet who just wanted to make a spreadsheets-in-space meme and get some upvotes on r/Eve. I think I'm teetering on the edge of being that guy, and that's counterproductive because I hope some day you come back so some person like myself can show you the finesse of being a digital space-terrorist.
Seriously, if you set up the emulator try out the smart bombs, it's frickin great. Just gonna have to ramp up the imagination without anybody to blow up :/
I don't know that it's immoral unless it's pushed to the extreme with like pay-to-win gambling (and targeting kids, at that). And heavy-handed censorship (like how China limits game time) isn't great either.
Sometimes these artificial communities are the only meaningful social interactions for some of their players, and having them cooperate on challenges as a team can be good social training (compared to total isolation)...
Gacha games have entered chat.
>(and targeting kids, at that)
Same. Also see the subscription scams rampant on walled gardens.
>And heavy-handed censorship
I’m not arguing for censorship, money isn’t speech nor are psychological studies. I think the line is crossed when video game companies bring phd psychologists in house to help design and study game design to drive sales. While I think fomo is a shitty tactic it shouldn’t be illegal. However, if psychologists are collecting data about users and drawing conclusions then not only do the companies need to acquire informed consent the results and data should be required to be published.
Again, video games have been great for socially marginalized people. Lately, these people have become piggy banks for the roaches designing systems with the explicit purpose of maximizing profit, ethics and externalities can be blame shifted elsewhere and guilt can be stifled with extravagant lifestyles.
Having higher exp and drop rates also makes the game more fun when you don't want to invest hundreds of hours into a game.
Nevertheless I deeply admire your effort and skill invested to emulate game servers. Incredible.
https://thestackreport.xyz/dashboards/tezos/contracts/KT1WQ1...
(*because it is paid for by transaction fees)
(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.
NFT's are a waste of time and the sooner they die out like the digital beanie baby fad they are the better
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.
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).
Wanna go ratting? Oh the BRM tanked because someone else uses the same system.
Wanna go after npc sotiyos? There's a monopoly on them and your alliance probably has deals with the guy involved in RMT
Wanna go hauling? You hunt for public contracts against other haulers or join a private company and someone takes all the lucritive stuff. Or you have to compete to be the hauling company for your null-sec alliance
Wanna manufacture? Someone else started manufacturing the same ship and tanked the market
Wanna do reactions? The index is going up and taxes are eating into your profits because someone started using the same system as you.
Wanna mine r64s? Yeah so do other players. It's a race to get there and the guy multiboxing 30 hulks is hogging it all.
If you want to liquidate an investment you have to becareful with not crashing the market. And then someone else just dumped all their Isogen on the market so your net worth just got a big haircut.
Almost everything other players do are hurting you. Yeah there's unlimited npc missions which give low isk rewards, but for the good stuff there's always competition.
o7
Oh and I had a station container with a massive amount of corpses. Not my preys but rather the dead opossums from the road.
I want my first time experience back from 2002/3 where I started with an Ibis, worked my belt to gain enough for a krestrell because of the additional hardpoints just to get eventually my tristan with an 10wd booster to crack the lightspeed record. What a nice time..
Today I have no time to play it anymore, yet I could fly almost anything and have a lot of isk on the wallet.
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.
I guess it is also what makes it one of the most hardcore games in existence... Right next to OGame
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.
Real life doesn't work that way, you will first have to work 20 years under the previous emperor.
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?
As a MUD vet - and recognizing how much MMORPG dynamics borrow back from MUDs - I think it's more about the differences in mechanics and social dynamics than "visual thinking". The interface and interactions are about as abstract and obtuse, and the focus on player-driven events in real time over scripted storylines is similar.
But for me, there are MUDs that are more creative and proactive. Between re-rolling and no-PK MUDs, failure/death often has few or no stakes early in MUDs. Remorts recycle the player base, so on older active servers there experienced players are often in new-character zones. Building mechanics are more open-ended but also not mandatory for success.
EVE always plays more linear and reactive. There are and have been MUDs like that, but it's not monolithic - they aren't the only "non-visual" type of MUD. EVE guides players into corps and other orgs, which by design leads to hierarchical play. A new capsuleer is about even with or less than an NPC to most EVE players. There are few incentives to meaningfully help new players or new characters, outside of making them more useful laborers for your corp. Investing time, effort, and optionally money eventually rewards you as a player, but until then you accomplish and contribute very little.
So I'd say EVE is more for players who want to play the proverbial long game, with winners and losers, and stakes of economy and influence above all others. That's not something that can be pinned on the visuals or the spreadsheet UI. In that sense it's honestly more like Football Manager but with real people as the footballers that get shuffled around and appeased in order to help you win.
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.
I assume my characters are still sitting in Amamake a decade later, but getting back into a game only to have it feel like a second job? Narh, I prefer playing Civ6 with the missus instead. Most of the people I played with quit anyway.
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.
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.
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.
It's the greatest MMO ever for people who appreciate high-stakes play, cutthroat communities, and rewarding significant investments of time over a long period.
And it's a boring, empty, ugly, poorly designed slog for new players who duck in for a two-week trial, connect with nobody, accomplish or witness nothing that's player-driven (because almost all of it happens outside of where new players can even reach), have a terrible or dull first <10 hours, and realize they'd rather play something that frontloads more of the rewarding gameplay and punishes failure less.
is it common for people to make emulated servers for games
motivation for EVE specifically
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.
Ragnarok Online is a bit of a special case as some of its private servers are actually running leaked server code (versions of the official server "Aegis" have been leaked multiple times, including right when the game left beta) versus open source emulations.
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.
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).
To learn about the game you have to read entire wikis, the missions are terrible, etc
EVE is a very small game (by playerbase, even though it's not a real number because of alt accounts and bots) 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
Exactly. Not only you're losing your ship, you're losing it to some guy who runs a scout account, a combat account and a logi account repairing the combat account. Not my idea of group play.
... and that person is probably playing for free* because they're doing profitable null stuff with their fleet. They're buying subscriptions with ingame money, while some poor schmucks pay for those with real money then sell them ingame to cover their losses.
* not that it makes sense economically above a certain income.
But I also want to disagree with you as EVE is (was?) enough of a sandbox that it could be enjoyed in many different ways. I've been winning (not playing) EVE for 4-5 years now, but my experiences with EVE PVP were some of the most memorable gaming experiences I've ever had. I owe this to avoiding grinding, large null-sec corps and sovereignty battles as much as possible. 99% of the engagements I participated in had under 50 participants total, with about 75% in the single digits. I almost always flew cheap ships so I never had to grind much- even at my most addicted I was always a casual evening player so had no time for serious grinds.
I flew a lot of frigates- small, fast, delicate ships that took a lot of manual control and quick reflexes to use effectively. I became known as a scout/interceptor pilot, who would fly ahead of the main group, quickly pass intel back to the fleet commander, then engage until the rest of the fleet arrived. I would also do a lot of less formal hunting and dueling, solo or in very small groups. To make money, I would do the "exploration" PVE activity, which involved a lot of travel through wormholes which could send you anywhere across the game's universe. You had to find your way back home through hostile territory, hunted by players for your cargo hold full of valuables.
All these activities involved constant movement, huge bursts of adrenaline and immense satisfaction when your skill and knowledge pays off. The sense of place I felt was also incredible-you really got to know systems as "good and bad neighborhoods" and the habits of various players populating them. I never really cared about progression or building wealth, so I lost a lot, but also won a fair amount and experienced a rush that no game before or since has matched. Some FPS battle royale-type games came close but ultimately were shallower and therefore less satisfying.
Only rarely did I deal with the typical large fleet experience of waiting, following orders and dealing with TIDI (server lag). When one corp I was with started primarily engaging in those kinds of fights, I left them as there were always other groups or individuals interested in the kind of small group content I liked. It's been years for me, but I hope those folks are still out there, whether docked up in Stacmon, camping plexes in Tama, forming a NPSI fleet in NPC nullsec or cloaked up waiting for a ratting super to feel safe again.
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).
But nevertheless, the gameplay is designed in a way to compensate large amount of lags (like most MMOs, but I would guess even more so in EVE) so I am not sure how much lag would matter unless it is a major spike
I agree with your other points though. I heard "great wars" sucks for people that participated as well. They crawl server timescale down so it can handle that many concurrent players interacting with each other and laggy and chaotic as hell on top of that. They are probably only fun to read about
Also someone linked this, but not sure what is supposed to be done with it. https://files.evesharp.dev/cruc/
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.
Eve is famously a single-server [1] game and doesn't officially allow private servers.
[1] outside of China
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.
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