[Devblog] CarbonUI and EVE Online: Incursion 1.6

[Rakshasa The Cat]

My vag is so sandy you have to book it six months in advance for Spring break.

On a serious level, we all want to know exactly what this corification means to us, the non-technical player. Is it a good step, or a compromise? I care little about the answer to this question. Mostly, we care about changes that better the game environment, like getting bookmarks in the overview.

Why should I care?

When EVE was launched some 8 years ago, the UI looked pretty much on par with other games. Times have changed, but our UI hasn't really. Even though projects such as CarbonUI are difficult to pull through, they are absolutely essential if we ever want to move beyond what the current technology allows for. Even though players won't see much visual difference once we launch CarbonUI on to TQ, we can promise you that our UI designers are already hearing a lot more of "sure, no problem" when they deliver their regular batch of crazy ideas to their fellow programmers, ultimately resulting in UI that's fittingly awesome for our lovely little space game.

Well, you could start by reading the devblog with an open mind, instead of one that is closed by the fears of CCP IS LYING TO US!!!

I have no idea how so many of you could have read through that rather good and informative devblog and not grasped even the basics of what it was supposed to be informing you of. That devblog and all the others that have touched on coreification have all been rather clear on the point that it is a good thing for EVE, not just WoD.

[Liang]

Seems like the textbook approach would have involved deprecating the old UI in favor of the new one. Seems like they aren't taking that approach, and really it may not have been practicable as a first step. Overall, I hope it to be an eventual improvement.

Either way, I'm mostly concerned we'll end up with another round of ridiculous UI bugs when they roll this out..

[Rakshasa The Cat]

Seems like the textbook approach would have involved deprecating the old UI in favor of the new one. Seems like they aren't taking that approach, and really it may not have been practicable as a first step. Overall, I hope it to be an eventual improvement.

I don't know what textbook you've been reading, but 'Refactoring for Dummies' doesn't sound like the best of sources. No one sane would have migrated 200k lines of UI code to a new and untested UI framework in one large release.

Any textbook that doesn't call you a retarded poohead for doing such a thing was written by a retard.

[Shin_getter]

200k UI ported in 6 month? That'd be insanely epic the way the new forums were epic.

[Reed Tiburon]

All I want to know is:
1) Will this stop the UI from sucking up my FPS. seriously I get 10-20 FPS more by hitting tab to minimize windows. that is :ccp:
2) Will this require the new fangled graphics reqs. Seriously EVE claims my graphics card doesn't support Shader Model 3.0 (even though Google says different) so this is kind of a big deal

[Gix Tyrionn]

Incarna: the great nerf to docking games (lol loading) and interface usability

[Lana Torrin]

All I want to know is:
1) Will this stop the UI from sucking up my FPS. seriously I get 10-20 FPS more by hitting tab to minimize windows. that is :ccp:

People that have tested it on sisi say its sucks less GPU (so yes but not 10-20 FPS worth of yes)

2) Will this require the new fangled graphics reqs. Seriously EVE claims my graphics card doesn't support Shader Model 3.0 (even though Google says different) so this is kind of a big deal

No idea. Try duality on your existing card and see if it works?

[Reed Tiburon]

[quote=Lana Torrin]

All I want to know is:
1) Will this stop the UI from sucking up my FPS. seriously I get 10-20 FPS more by hitting tab to minimize windows. that is :ccp:

People that have tested it on sisi say its sucks less GPU (so yes but not 10-20 FPS worth of yes)

2) Will this require the new fangled graphics reqs. Seriously EVE claims my graphics card doesn't support Shader Model 3.0 (even though Google says different) so this is kind of a big deal

No idea. Try duality on your existing card and see if it works?[/quote:2lgx1mst]
cool, the interface is by far the biggest resource suck on my system

[Don Pellegrino]

Here's a diagram of the UI changes:

Please excuse my poor photoshop skills

[Xiang Jiao]

Thank you, Don, for putting that in terms my pot-addled brain can handle. The follow-up question to this timeline is what new possibilities does CCP have in mind for their crack team of UI designers? They are supposedly hearing more "Sure, no problem" responses from the developers. Regarding what, I wonder?

Is this the first necessary step before the much maligned POS interface can be revamped? What is the first UI change that will be enabled by this and when will we see it? Warpable bookmarks for Incarna 1.0? These are the questions that I hope are being addressed in the Eve-O thread. I just can't bring myself to reply to one of those threads anymore, because if there's one thing I hate, it's being trolled by CCP.

Regarding performance, does the new framework only make the client more efficient, or will the UI framework improvements cut down on server load within the game? Or both? Basically, will spaceships as a whole see less lag, or is this just about having more browser tabs open while playing with one more client running, possibly increasing some graphics quality settings, too?

[Sponk]

Regarding performance, does the new framework only make the client more efficient, or will the UI framework improvements cut down on server load within the game?

Unlikely to affect server load, but if client side is improved, maybe brackets won't destroy your pvp experience so much.

[LoKiPP]

On sisi a lot of people were reporting FPS increases, lets hope this is true for larger engagements. There should be no way brackets slow down fps

[Al Simmons]

CCP have UI developers? What.

Also betting the reason they aren't touching the legacy code is cos nobody knows how it works.

[Liang]

Seems like the textbook approach would have involved deprecating the old UI in favor of the new one. Seems like they aren't taking that approach, and really it may not have been practicable as a first step. Overall, I hope it to be an eventual improvement.

I don't know what textbook you've been reading, but 'Refactoring for Dummies' doesn't sound like the best of sources. No one sane would have migrated 200k lines of UI code to a new and untested UI framework in one large release.

Any textbook that doesn't call you a retarded poohead for doing such a thing was written by a retard.

Do you even fucking know what Deprecated means?

[Leboe]

CCP have UI developers? What.

Also betting the reason they aren't touching the legacy code is cos nobody knows how it works.

No point in even betting, this is a certainty and probably a direct cause of why things arent iterated upon, only torn down and rebuilt. Of course one can hope that CCP learned this lesson 1-2 years ago and everything going forward is able to be tweaked, but we've yet to see evidence of it imo.

[Kerc Kasha]

not addressed to anyone in particular but ranting and rambling and imagining problems about things you don't understand makes you look like a fucking moron rather than simply clueless in regards to the technical aspects.

every devblog thread is just a bunch of fuckwits babbling on about stuff they have no grasp of and it's getting old

[Liang]

not addressed to anyone in particular but ranting and rambling and imagining problems about things you don't understand makes you look like a fucking moron rather than simply clueless in regards to the technical aspects.

every devblog thread is just a bunch of fuckwits babbling on about stuff they have no grasp of and it's getting old

The problem is that lots of people DO have a grasp of the basics of what is being said. But, there's a whole world between what they tell us (massively dumbed down) and what is actually happening. The things we know is that the CCP devs themselves seem to think the code base is largely a shitty black box, though it combines to produce something truly marvelous - solving problems most of us haven't really had to. Though to be totally fair, most developers think the code they work on is pretty horrendous. ;-)

Ultimately Some of the stuff we about may literally be a good thing - both for the code and for the company. We'll likely never know because we aren't close enough to see what's ACTUALLY happening.

However, some - likely most - of the things we about are legitimately :awesome:

[Nareg Maxence]

One thing I always found annoying to no end was that cursor positioning in edit boxes was completely screwed up, especially after pasting text into them.

I often used a particular template when naming bookmarks for instance, so they sort properly, and when I paste the template into the edit box and position the cursor to fill in the template, characters appear one space to the right of where your cursor appears.

I would hope stuff like this would improve with this new framework.

[Illwill Bill]

Eve has UI designers?!

[Xiang Jiao]

Eve has UI designers?!

I was just as surprised as you were.