EVE Online Beats SL to HTML. Discuss

EVE Online Beats SL to HTML.

At State of Play 3, Dr. Kjartan Pierre Emilsson, lead designer at CCP games (creator of EVE online) - mentioned that EVE online had HTML integrated.

Here's the link to the video, his part starts about 26 minutes in:
mms://wm.eastbaymedia-c2.speedera.net/wm.eastbaymedia-c2/eb2/10.7.05-2clip.wmv

An Icelandic MMO game company gets HTML in their 3-D virtual world, at least at a basic level. Why can't Linden Lab?

Discuss.

i hope it is related to security and privacy and not to the loss of technological superiority the United States used to enjoy

also, it would seem to me that EVE is a game (collecting resources), not a platform, although I am ignorant of EVE

a game can focus on creating content, a platform must focus on enabling content, and with that a balance so that new innovations don't muck up older standards

again, I'm an iggy here, just a guess

EVE has had html built into its client for a while now... at least six months.

LLab is starting to fall behind the curve.

LF

Big difference between being able to implement HTML in a game (hell, Everquest uses XML for the user interface themes!) and integrating the Firefox web browser in a development platform.

Ummm... correct me if I'm wrong but Eve didn't exactly embed gecko right? It only supports HTML 3.2... we're better off holding out for the real thing...




No worries... Cory said the Mozilla foundation (and LL) is dedicated to getting gecko to run inside of the SL client... that's good news for all. HTML is around the corner.

The last time I played EVE their support for HTML was very crude. They only supported a handful of tags and most pages would not display correctly unless specifically coded for EVE's "browser." That being said, I did hear that their latest expansion pack improved their HTML support. Perhaps somebody that plays EVE can let us know how much it has improved.

Are you around here Kris?

I wonder too if there isn't a significant difference between the way that EVE and SL are integrating the browser. In EVE the browser is just a pop-up interface widow. I was under the impresion that SL would be integrating the browser in a 3D fashion such that we could have a browser on the side of a prim, for example.

Just like Havok2!

Lf

Ouch!

Right Well only if Havok, the company, gave a damn about SL.

I really haven't given the EVE browser much of a roadtest. I know for a fact it can't just view 'any' website, but not really what the limitations are. It's pretty basic stuff as far as I know, but what I know isn't a lot

It's fine for the pan-galactic news, and Corps have their own internal websites and stuff, but it isnt like you're going to be browsing the web from your spaceship any time soon

Well, maybe we should just ask ourselves the question:
"How in heaven did 'Text on a prim' ever turned into 'embed Mozilla in the client' ?"

I dunno, witht he time it takes to go from one trade destinatio to the other, having a web browser would definitely come in handy.

LF

You have obviously never been to Iceland. They are actually far ahead of the curve on many things.

If only it was possible to use a .jpg or .gif or .png as a texture by using its URL... We'd have browser-on-a-prim already.

I'm thinking one of LL's many visionaries realized that first it was "We want text on a prim", but next it will be "We want formatted text on a prim". There is already a great and widely accepted way to do text/image layout; namely HTML.

Besides HTML kills many pixel birds with one stone... text on a prim is just one example.

I play eve, its browser serves it perpose and can show a lot of sites, there are a fair few that it doesn't support though. The main problem being the lack of flash and some picture files. I also believe it has worse loading times than other browsers because even the eve-online site is fairly plain and pictures are sparesly plased. I'm pretty sure it can't support much other than html though as even eve forums don't display. But it still rocks to be able to read updates and look at extensive rankings(Player built) ingame.

Considering EVE's "gameplay" consists of waiting real time to advance skills (with no action on your part), massive transit time around their huge, empty world (with no action on your part), mining space rocks and economies (with little action on your part), with the punctuating dogfight and IM conversation, it's no surprise this feature is there first.


After all, if not for browsing during gameplay, what is there to do, really? EVE is very pretty, but I consider it at least an order of magnitude behind the curve.

Jeffrey Gomez-
You obviously haven't played eve for any amount of time, you degrade it without showing any knowledge of how it works. You work for you money, not for your stats (although some skills skills cost money to buy). It's a taxing game but it works with tactics mostly. But this is the SL forums, I should not digress too much.

I personally gave it the entire free trial, and was not too impressed besides the starscapes passing in the distance. To be fair, I ran with a crowd that was quite into it at the time.

The closest I've seen EVE described as is a "real time economy simulator," though that does the dogfighting, pirates, et al no justice. EVE's economy is one of the largest and most engrossing I've seen in any MMO, and if that's your cup of tea, that's fine. It's very good at what it does in this respect.

However, my opinion is much of the action was not very engrossing. EVE strikes me as a very passive game. Again, if this is your cup of tea, that's fine. I personally don't find it interesting, or fun, and that's my opinion.

Er, well, from my experiences with it, it most definitely IS done mostly on auto-pilot. Trade routes happen automatically with your ship (simply point and shoot), and can take upwards of TWO HOURS to get from one place to another. That's just in a single region, and there perhaps 100 regions in the game. Ridiculous.

Mining is no better; find an asteroid, click, wait for it to deplete, click something else, click, wait for your hold to fill up, dock at the space station, refine, unload, repeat.

Combat rewards he-with-the-lowest-ping, not due to much skill (similar to how other RPGs handle combat, it's mostly a turn-based slugfest affair).

It's fun to play while you have other things to do, but as a solitary activity it would drive most folks mad.

LF

Wow. What regions are you in that are that large? I regularly travel across 6 regions to and from a couple of my contacts and it never takes more than 20 minutes if I do want to leave it on autopilot - in which case you just set navigation to plot a safe route and go do something else for a bit. (Of course, if you don't go do something else and fly yourself using afterburners or instas you're going to get there a LOT faster!)

Not that you have to travel much at all. I haven't travelled more than 6 jumps in the last week or more of play (And that's across 3 regions, too... I must be in some of the smaller ones ). Sure, if it's your choice to keep travelling from one end of the galaxy to the other, then its gonna take a while!

Personnaly in eve I fight, fighting is not about ping as most fps are in the higher ranks its about what you fit to your ship and the bonunses your ship has. Try one of the harder missions with a player made corporation, its one of the best experiences ever. It requires a lot of teamwork and people have to know how others are setup otherwise you will get wiped out. In combat its all about tactics.


But we really ought to get back ontopic.

Cory said 2 months to work things out with Mozilla, and sounded like it was moving steadily toward completion. With good standards-based rendering, sans-plugins, I think they're doing it right and it's worth waiting for. It'll even support many AJAX sites like GMail.

Im not exactly sure how far they got, but by the first few previews all the options were their for prims, so i guess they got it working, i just heard it was very slow and it needed some time to getting it running at acceptable speeds, i think its on hold now until 1.7 is out of the door