[Buckaroo]

Anyone play Eve-online? It's a spaceship kind of game. It only plays on Windows. I'm part way through the tutorial. Since the only action game I've played prior to this is Myst (that is if you want to call Myst an action game). Anyhow, anyone else play this game? And how do you like it?

[OwlBoy]

This game is on it's way to Intel macs.

-Owl

[starman]

This thread is on its way to the gaming forum.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by starman 

This thread is on its way to the gaming forum.

You don't say...

-t

[Cipher13]

EVE Online is possibly the geekiest game you could ever play. It's awesome.

I only started playing about a month or so ago. Currently got about 1.4 million SP, flying an artillery Hurricane (soloing level 3 missions at the moment), as Minmitar of course.

I'll post a pic of it when I'm on my PC.

The thing that's really great about it is how gamer-driven it is; the entire economy is the result of players. Very cool.

[goMac]

Eve Online plays decently on OS X via Croessover Office.

[Buckaroo]

Originally Posted by starman 

This thread is on its way to the gaming forum.

I didn't even know we had a Gaming forum.

[turtle777]

Quite expensive, isn't it ?

-t

[Cipher13]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

Quite expensive, isn't it ?

-t

Typical MMO price really.

[starman]

Originally Posted by Buckaroo 

I didn't even know we had a Gaming forum.

Yeah, well, I've gotten sh*t for accidentally posting gaming threads in here.

[nonhuman]

Is it at all related to the old EV games? I loved those...

[Cipher13]

Originally Posted by nonhuman 

Is it at all related to the old EV games? I loved those...

Not directly, but I imagine they got a lot of inspiration from the EV games. Imagine an EV MMO in a gigantic universe, in 3D with direct control over your ship. Very cool.

[nonhuman]

Originally Posted by Cipher13 

Not directly, but I imagine they got a lot of inspiration from the EV games. Imagine an EV MMO in a gigantic universe, in 3D with direct control over your ship. Very cool.

Yeah, I've been reading up on it. Very tempted to dust off my old gaming rig (old is a relative term, it's got a GeForce 7800 GT in it...) and give this game a whirl. Although I'm not sure I've even got Windows installed on the thing right now... That would be a pain in the ass... Also it currently has no wireless and there's no ethernet running into the office...

Maybe I'll try it in Boot Camp on my MacBook...

[Cipher13]

The game runs pretty well on minimal hardware. My system is fairly aged now (P4 530 / 3GHz with a Radeon X600 256), and maxed out it runs fine at 1280*1024, with a second screen running off the same card (not used for the game). It should run easily on either of those systems... it's worth checking out, though the game has quite a steep learning curve if you don't have someone to show you the ropes. Luckily, that ends up keeping a lot of noobs away.

[Buckaroo]

So, this is the gaming forum. wow.

[PaperNotes]

EVE consumes too much time and the Russian clans on there will **** you up bad. They play it 24/7 for money.

[mr. burns]

it's only time consuming if you're a miner or something. sure it takes a long time to get a decent character trained for pvp but being able to train a skill while not playing the game makes it possible to have a life, or play another game while your character keeps progressing.
ever since team fortress 2 came out, i've pretty much been playing that exclusively. but i'm still training towards using heavy assault ships in EVE at the same time.

oh, and as far as the game is concerned: being someone who played the escape velocity games back in the day, EVE is what i'd always wished those games would become. a crazy, huge, cut-throat world of multiplayer space combat. i had been playing WoW when i discovered EVE and put it on my bootcamp partition. a couple months later, i canceled my WoW account.

the graphics engine is really outdated, but it is being completely overhauled and will be updated next month. everything is going to have TONS more minute detail, and the game may run even faster since it'll actually use the GPU. the current engine uses very little of the video cards power and mainly relies on the main processor for the graphics.

[Buckaroo]

Originally Posted by PaperNotes 

EVE consumes too much time and the Russian clans on there will **** you up bad. They play it 24/7 for money.

Why or how could anyone play it for money? I just thought it was cool. I'm not into games like WOW, but I suspect I could enjoy this.

I know it sounds silly, but an important part of most sci-fi's that I like are the really cool space ships.

[Buckaroo]

Anyhow, I had a real Eve-Online question.

Because of the fires, it's hot out here in California. Anyhow, every time I launch Eve-Online, within minutes an alarm in my computer goes off. I'm not sure if it's part of the game or the computer over heating.

[PaperNotes]

Originally Posted by Buckaroo 

Why or how could anyone play it for money? .

They buy and sell ships, weapons, etc. They also fight for money on EVE. If bets are not honored it could start a war so there's lots of order and code of honor. And pirates argh.

[mr. burns]

Well, the mac version is out now, but i haven't felt like downloading it yet. i've been playing the game through bootcamp for a while so i'm interested to see how this performs.

[ajprice]

Got it running on my MacBook (2.16GHz, 2GB RAM) lastnight. Goes ok if you keep the graphics turned down, because as we all know, the GMA950 is the pinnacle of graphical power .

PS. Yes I know a MacBook isn't a gaming machine, thats what an Xbox is for, but as an Escape Velocity addict back in the day, I want to give this game a go.

[Peter]

we need a MacNN Corp.

[mr. burns]

well, i got to say i'm pretty dissapointed. i was skeptical of the whole 'wrapper' thing and how well it would perform. after playing this game for months through bootcamp, the mac version performs significantly worse. i get about half the frame rate. i don't even want to play it and risk having my ship blown up because of some lag i could have avoided, playing on windows, and i'm on a mac pro. i can't imagine how bad it is on other systems.

sure, if all you do is run missions or mine out in the safety of empire space, without a care in the world, it's playable. but in ruthless 0.0 security space and PVP, it doesn't cut it. lag gets you killed, and this isn't the type of game where you just laugh off a death and run back to your corpse from the graveyard.

so, unless you're the typical EVE carebare, you're better off just continuing to boot into winXP because the performance hit isn't worth it.

[Cipher13]

Unfortunately, my account has been cancelled.

CCP have a massive billing system problem right now (and have had it for several months), my automatic credit card payment was refused, and it's been over a week and my emails/petitions haven't been responded to.

Terrible service. I won't be renewing because of that.

[starman]

Originally Posted by Peter 

we need a MacNN Corp.

Yay. Another failed NN-based guild.

I vote no. It never ends pretty.

[mr. burns]

well, just as the mac version gets released, the windows version gets the graphics update. the new ship models and affects are on the test server and everything looks pretty good. i'm not sure if they've totally optimized it yet, because it does take a big performance hit with HDR effects on. they're a little overrated and overdone though so i don't have any problem turning them off. all it does is blow out highlights. with HDR off but shadow effects on, the game performs just as well as the current live version with old graphics. very nice. i'm using a mac pro with a radeon x1900xt by the way. when in warp and in station i get 130-200fps, in belts i get around 80fps and when hanging around the station with 30-40 ships floating around i get around 40-50fps.

here are some screen shots i took and of the vagabond and wolf, my prefered ships.

current vagabond before graphics update: http://go-dl.eve-files.com/media/0711/Vagabond.jpg
new vagabond




various others can be found here:
trinity pics
Picasa Web Albums - El - EVE-Online Tr...

[Helmling]

I gave this a try last night, but the Mac port is really not ready for primetime. On my macbook, there is constant video glitching because the game will not let me keep the 16bit settings. It resets to 32 every refresh and I have to be constantly going to the video menu to make the game bearable.

The gameplay suffers from one notable shortcoming: Combat is pretty dull. There is only context-menu control for your ship. It's a strange blend of too little control and sluggish response with the few commands you're responsible for.

Take my last combat from last night. I had about six small pirate ships to engage. First of all, when I entered the area my frame rate dropped to roughly .5 per second, making it difficult to select targets. Because of my "skill" level, I could only lock on to two targets at a time. So I select two ships, hit my weapons button and then wait while my ship slaughters the lesser ships. But then, when those two targets are destroyed, my ship just sits there and takes fire while I try to bring up the right context menus to select other ships. Very frustrating and against real human opponents, I presume I would have been mince meat.

I'm sure that once you finish up these leveling up NPC-centered missions, there is a lot of charm in interacting with real people by joining corporations and working together in this very, very big universe.

But the only interaction I had with real players was to ask them for help on various chat channels. I did venture into low security space, where you're not protected by nearby "police" ships, and I was not instantly descended upon and slaughtered.

As big as it is, I think the options in this universe are too limited for me. I kept wanting to land on all the planets I flew by or take closer looks at the Saturn-like rings on some of them. It seems like this is a 4X game without the "explore," which was one of my favorite parts of the genre.

This may sound negative, but I really think this might still be worth the money if the macbook or my mini (which was even worse even thought their specs are identical) could run it.

[tomster2300]

This was all on a Windows pc:

I haven't played it since the latest update, but I did give it a whirl for a couple of months last summer (or the summer before, can't remember).

I liked the game when I began, but I didn't like the skill leveling system. It's in real time, with each level taking progressively longer, and you can only train one at a time. So, you could train a one skill to level 1 in approximately 20 minutes, level 2 in three hours, level 3 in eight, and level 4 in three days. Level 5? Try multiple days, with anything above that nearly a month.

That got really frustrating and made we actually want to grind. Tie that in with the fact that you need those higher skills to pilot bigger combat / mining ships and you become forced to either follow the mining path or the pure combat one. If you do both then it takes forever and you end up with a bunch of low level skills which don't really help much.

To pilot the medium mining ship you roughly needed the following: The mining skill to level 5, various ship class skills to 5 (including the mining ship skill), numerous mining laser skills from 2 - 3sh, etc. It took forever.

If they changed the skill leveling process I might would give it another shot. I went from it to WoW, which I really enjoyed for awhile, and am not trying out Pirates of the Burning Sea. I got bored staring at my ship for hours on end in EVE as well.

What I really liked was the fact that everyone played on the same server / sever cluster. If it's still the same, then everyone plays in the same world and can interact with all 1.5 million + players, which is pretty rare for a MMO. It was a nice touch.