Update #13 - Enlarged Char portrait

First off, if you didnt know, you can now mouse over anyone's portrait on eve gate and click the little magnifying glass symbol to get an enlarged version which is quite nice. Below is how big it comes out, which i think is around 512x512 or something near that.

Also Im impressed with the new contract system. I have to admit that it does have a few bugs or anoying thing but hey, its a beta. I havnt checked out all its new features but one thing i like is that pop-up box has gone away where you had to select what exact item you were wanting.

Anyway thats really all for today. There hasn't been many Dev blogs or much news floating around. if you have something interesting be sure to let me know :)

Update #12 - Beetles...

...and bugs

The past releases, Team Best Friends Forever has been working on large features, our latest being Incursions. Next release will be different though; next release we'll be trying to track down all the small things that annoy you and working to correct them.

 I am really excited about this update. It fixes a lot of small stuff that was getting on my nerves. Heres a brief overview of the upcoming bug fixes and changes.

Incursion 1.2  15th February 2011

Remote Destruction of Jump Clones
Remote authorization has been added, allowing players to dispose of unwanted or unneeded jumpclones directly from the character sheet.

Improvements to Buying a New Clone
When buying a new clone, options with insufficient skillpoints will be grayed out as a warning.

Region & Security Status Displayed When Buying a Clone
When moving your active clone to another station, the list of possible destinations will contain the region and security status.

Sell/Buy Window Settings
The state of your sell window (normal/advanced) will persist (remember your last used setting) on a character basis.

Market Window Displays Outpost Information
Market orders in player-owned outposts will now display the system name as well as the station name on the order.

Asset Search by Distance
Your assets list can now be sorted by number of jumps so that you can easily view your proximity to locally stored assets.

Drag and Drop Into Closed Containers
You can now drag and drop items into closed containers without having to open them first.

Character Portrait Saves Return
Say "Cheese!" It is now again possible to capture portraits of characters in-game.

Improved Overview Settings
Priority modification in Overview settings now has drag and drop functionality.

Agent Removal Confirmation
To safeguard against accidental removal of needed agents, a new confirmation message has been added which pops up when players attempt to remove one.

Starmap Autopilot's Tab Now Easier to Adjust
The 'Autopilot' tab in the Starmap now has drag and drop functionality for sorting waypoints.

Clearing All Waypoints from Space
A new right-click menu item has been added to the route label in space, so it is now possible to clear all waypoints without opening the Starmap.

The ones I am most looking forward to are as follows. Remote jump clone removal, clearing way points from space and also the changes to the autopilot tab. With these i will finally be able to delete some clones that are locked away in hostile space, not have to waste time hitting f10, waiting for the map to load then right clicking to clear my waypoint and planning waypoints will also be a breeze! what are you looking forward to?

Also one last thing. A quote from a recent devblog about incarna:

we're happy to say that we're coming to a place where we can begin dialogue about actual features and gameplay that's been in development. We’ll kick it off with a blog from the team working on captains quarters next week that should lead quite nicely into several presentations at Fanfest. 

This is so exciting! It will be pretty sweet if you can customize your quarters ect. It will just be something cool to tinker around with on a rainy day :)

Update #11 - CSM

With Council of Stellar Management due to leave office on April 6th, it's almost time for the candidacy period for CSM6 to open up. The dates for the next election period are as follows:

• February 9th to 23rd – Candidacy application period opens
• March 2nd – Publication of the list of approved candidates
• March 9th – Voting opens
• March 23rd – Voting closes
• March 30th – Results announced
• April 6th – CSM 6 takes office
• April 2012 – CSM 7 takes office

When applying for candidacy in CSM6, we will require that at least a basic campaign message stating what you are campaigning for and/or who you are representing is provided.

So there are only a couple of changes to the CSM application process. you will now need to provide a message stating what you are campaigning for and who you represent. this will make it easier for voters to identify the candidates. The other change is to with the schedule and will result in a reduction of the amount of time between the publication of the list of approved candidates and the beginning of the voting period.

If you have not already tried the new PI interface (which is quite different) this guide will get you up and running in no time at all.

In other news, the corp i just joined is at war in high sec. Pretty much what happened was the alliance didnt want our corp in the alliance any more but never kicked us. the alliance was falling apart so Merciless reckoning asked our CEO to form a new alliance with them. We agreed. Our CEO sent over 350mill to start the alliance and left the previous alliance. As soon as we had left, Merciless reckoning declared war on us. Most of our players aren't that experienced at pvp however the people who war decced us are. Isnt that great :)

What I wonder is, were merciless reckoning ever going to form a new allaince with us or had they planned that as a way to get our isk and kick us out at the same time. Also one of our players killed one of them and then they were bitching about it. So maybe they thought since we were mostly care bears they could steel our isk, kick us out and get some easy kills.

Fly safe, Dont war dec people for no reason.

Update #10 - Character recustomization

The Future
We will be introducing the ability to repeatedly recustomize characters in a future release. The current plan is to introduce this at the same time as we release tattoos, scars and piercings so players can take advantage of these new assets. We are still in the early design phase, so we don't have any more details at present. Expect a devblog explaining more in the coming weeks. 

Incursion 1.1.1 addresses several issues and updates to Incursion 1.1.0 and includes the ability to redo ones' portrait in the character creator

So after tonight's update we will be able to customize our characters further but not from scratch (I think). I am not completely sure but it sounds as if we will start from what we have already done and make changes from there. If this is the case I think I will try to smooth out some of serenity's frown lines lol.

In other news some new security measures against phishing attacks will be put into place. All the details are here if your interested at all.

Update #9 - Three Days Till Liftoff

Incursion will lift off on the 18th of jan, three days from now. There are a lot of features I am excited about but im just going to write about the main few here.

The character creator as seen at the top ^ will become available on TQ and we get to re-do all our characters!! I am particularly excited about this because I created my character when I was 11 years old and didnt do a very good job lol :)

heads up for all our players; you will have to recreate your character portrait using the new character creator after it has been deployed. This means that your old character portrait will not be accessible anymore! If you want to preserve the old character portrait in high resolution, you should log into the game and use the capture portrait option while it still exists.

Obviously Incursion will bring us the Sansha PVE content which should be awesome! In this we get to battle off the nasty, spiky buggers below:

This release will also update the contracts sysetm which I wrote about in a previous update post.

Then we come to Eve Gate updates (Which wont be released for a while but I wanted to talk about it anyway). When eve gate was released it acted just like a fat kid on the ten metre diving board; it did an immense belly flop and didnt come up for a while. Till now in fact. CCP will be changing the current Eve online forums to an archived version and will be starting the new forums over on Eve gate from scratch (no posts copied from the current forums). Some kewl stuff they have added includes a sleek design:

Front page

The ability to "like" posts will also be available. The running total of likes received and likes given will be shown under your avatar. Each post will also have a share button and favorites button allowing you to share it with the world outside of Eve gate and "Fave" threads which will make them easily accessible at a later date. There will be an RSS feed for every channel and thread so you can keep up to date on your threads from your favorite feed reader!

Above you should be able to see the new search that will come with the forums. This is particularly good because the current search is way on bad side of things. You will be able to do much more powerful search's and even bookmark your search criteria for later as well as be able to subscribe to an RSS feed of your search criteria so you can see any new threads popping up that may interest you.

Cant wait for all this stuff!

Update #8 - T-shirts

My Jinx t-shirt design

Missed the Boss Fight test on December 17? Get on the test server on January 3 at 15:00 UTC and you will have another chance to try it out.

The final vote for the "create a start ship contest" is happening now. Head over to the voting page and choose your favorite three entries. The winning entry will be added to the game sometime in the future so make sure you vote for a ship that you would fly!

If you like voting you should also head over to the Jinx voting page where artists and enthusiasts have designed eve related t-shits.  I myself posted a design here.  I only found the comp the day it was closing so made this is about 3 hours. It would be great if you voted for it though :)

Last but not least, the contract system is finally getting some love. Read the dev blog on the subject here.

Fly safe,

Update #7 - Facelift

The Neocom is finally having a face lift. Its about bloody time!

As soon as i saw the above picture i thought, "rip off". Its exactly like windows 7! not that thats actually a bad thing, windows 7 looks pretty cool. I just thought it thats all... :)

The thing i dont like about what they are doing is, their releasing a beta version straight to TQ. yes a BETA verison! They said it will be easier to test when you are actually playing. Lets just hope there arent any huge bugs like all their other releases.

In other news as you probably know if you have been reading this blog for any length of time, my alt is training exhumers 5 so i can sell her as an uber hulk pilot. So the night before the patch to take away learning skills it has 20 days 16 hours to go. Guess what it has after the patch? yes... 4 days! That means i will be able to train every ore skill to 5, round out the mining drone skills and maybe even get some production skills, or scrap metal processing.

Also on my main i trained a bunch of engineering (energy skills) to 5 so I have a lot of cap stability now :) That also knocked over 20days of my tengu plan. The one where im maxing all the related skills. Im pretty damn close now :D

Update #6 - Right on time

After a bit of a rant last time about losing tonnes of isk from my mining alt this awesome DevBlog comes along to cheer me up :)

Finally, oh finally learning skills are going the way of the white rhino (sorry I just learned today that they are going extinct). This is so sweet, all the time i spent on learning skills for my main will get reinvested into some other areas that will actually do something useful! and also on my alt i will be able to use these skill points and wont have to buy that extra plex i was talking about.

By cutting out some of the less useful ore processing skills from the plan i have now got it down to around 75 days. The account currently has 72 days left so I will be able to spend the learning SP on exhumers 5 and get the plan to around 72 days (hopefully). Im not sure how much time the extra attributes will cut off the plan but the extra points will up all my attributes by over 50% which is considerable and I may even be able to put those ore processing skills back in!

Udate #5 - Fanfest Incoming

So the latest CCP blog banter is out, once again talking about lag. It gives you some information about what exactly server side lag is and what is causing it along with a pretty graph :) The disappointing thing is, it gives us no information as to how they are going to fix it, what they are doing ect. pretty useless really if you ask me.

The next mass test on the Singularity test server will be on Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 20:00 UTC and is scheduled to last for 1.5 hours. The test will focus on handling of ship deaths and general performance improvements. We would like to see between 400-600 players participating in this test. All participants of the test will receive 2 million skill points on Singularity.

In other news the Eve Fanfest is incoming! The website is up over here, so stay tuned and grab your tickets when they come out soon. It is taking place on March 24 through March 26, 2011 at the Laugardalshöll Convention Center in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Update #4 - Gadget curiosity

I just read the eve online newsletter vol.48 and there is a new survey! Sorry, I just love doing surveys for some reason :) This survey is obviously (I think) in response to the uproar from us pod pilots about capsuleer's death. They say "Smartphones, iPads, PSPs, netbooks... do people still use PDAs? We're interested in what kind of games and gadgets EVE players use, so the latest survey is on exactly that." So head on over and give CCP a piece of your mind!

Also if you were thinking of getting another account now is the time to do so. $50 for 6 months is as cheap as it gets, seriously its a great deal! Check your Eve online account management page for full details on the power for two.

The sixth optional patch is out on the 28th of October. wow seriously there is a test server for a reason CCP!!

Oh and in other news how awesome is the samsung galaxy s! yes i now own one :D

Thats all for today. Fly safe,
Serenity

Update #3 - Incursion

OK enough raging, time for an update!

I am actually extremely excited about the upcoming expansion. revamped shortcuts, planetary interaction changes, new character creator and a few items getting revamped are just some of the things it will bring.

Planetary interaction is looking down the barrel of some major changes. These include, new extraction scheduling interface which will allow players to create extraction programs that span anything from an hour to 14 days! (great for going away) Upgradable Command Centers will allow players to increase and decrease the CPU/Power capabilities of their colony without having to tear it all down (existing undeployed command centers will be migrated to the new system). Extractors can now be moved when in program creation mode which is great if you train scanning skills later on.

The items being improved are t2 ammo getting some negative effects removed, rockets gaining a bonus to explosion velocity and the Hawk, caldari assault ship, gets some extra missile damage and a little extra power grid to work with. I think i might have to buy one now :)

The war on lag rages on. Fighter bombers will now shoot "fake missiles". Instead of each fighter bomber shooting a torpedo and the server having to track them these fake missiles remove the need for this and will reduce CPU and memory usage dramatically in large capital ship fights. 

And last but by far, not the least, the new Character creator. Here I am demonstrating making a female Gallente and trying to make it look like one of my alts. It turned out pretty well for spending just 5 minutes on it. Of course i will spend hours doing my main on TQ though :)

Update #2 - Finally!

More API changes. Pretty much what CCP are doing is changing all the item ID's from 32bit integers to 64bit, type ID's from 16 bit to 32 bit and flag ID's from 8 to 16 bit. This will give them more room to move in the future when more items are created and need a unique ID.
In the devblog by CCP prism x, he says "this is all done to future proof Eve Online for all the incoming awesomeness..." [because] "For years now we've been teetering on the brink of running out of unique ID's and it has put a lot of stress on maintenance... as well as development constraints on new features. To see what this affects and find out what it all means, read the devblog here.

As stated in another post of mine, the "incursion" expansion set for winter 2010 (simmer in Australia) will bring in a replacement for the static 10/10 complexes that were taken out of eve due to corporations and alliances farming them. The replacement complexes are aimed at group PVE. I personally cant wait to try these out because u find any PVE activity is exactly 6.5 X better in a group!

Theres an eve store sale ending in 3 days (on sept. 30). Popular ship models are down to $99 and you could grab a tee for as little as $15!

Also on September 30 there will be an extended downtime (roughly 3 hours) while Tyrannis 1.1 is deployed. Changes will include back end changes to the user interface and planetary interaction and best of all several mac client issues have been resolved, finally! (Half the time i play on a mac and some of the bugs are really irritating). The mac fixes include client crash issues, mailer cache error and the one affecting me, font rendering in the in game browser. That picture at the above is what my in game browser looks like at the moment lol.

Fly safe,
Serenity one

Update #1 - Api Improvements

CCP Prismx, CCP Stillman and the operations team have been busy for the last month or so improving the overall performance of the API. On one of the reserved API servers an application was causing long response time from the API. After they removed this the average response time dropped dramatically. They also moved the API onto a brand new set of disc arrays again reducing response time. On Monday, September 27th all existing API logs will be deleted so download any that you need. The logs are being deleted because a more efficient table to record the logs in has been made and it would take roughly 4 hours to copy the exiting logs across. From that point only logs for the previous 7 days will be kept. read the full story here

The next mass test taking place on the singularity test server will be on Saturday, September 25 at 20:00 UTC and will run for approximately 1.5 hours. read more about it here

In other news my corporation [Metalworks] just finished their huge construction project and onlined the "powered by vegemight" station. Yes, we are Australians :D