EVE Online's Carbon engine is now open source: Fenris Creations explains why

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• Hacker News
• I used to have a character named Fenris in EVE. Probably shouldn't have recycled them all those years ago.
  by MrDresden
• interestingly they support multiple graphics APIs (Dx11, Dx12, and Metal) through an abstraction layer: https://app.sourcebot.dev/chat/cmrcbnd6u00cvwa5bup88jf0j
  by msukkarieh
• Seems like a huge chunk is missing there, these mostly seem to me like a bunch of smaller reusable components with nothing really tying it together.
  by lyu07282
• Makes sense, they probably don’t want to leak _the_ secret sauce driving the game itself.

  I saw some eve-specific logic in Destiny repo, like warp enter condition and warp velocity math, or entity visibility between grids.

  (Also, it’s full of std::(unordered_)map/set. Surprised they didn’t try squeeze some more perf there.)

  by adrian17
• Can I use this to release my own games, and does this release includes everything needed to build games like EVE online?
  by sushidev
• All of it is under MIT so probably.

  Not sure about if it includes everything to make EVE online though

  by ____mr____
• I followed and forked it on GitHub. When Eve Online first came out, the graphics were stunning. I'm planning to dig into the code and take a close look at how the graphics renderer was implemented.
  by jdw64
• I have a cheeky idea - imagine you're a company (especially a games company, whose engine is a small part of the whole product). You want to cut dev costs by AI - problem is your 100k codebase is completely unknown to most LLMs. So you release all your code, and labs will gobble it up and train on it for free.

  So come a year maybe, suddenly ChatGPT or Claude will know the code like the back of its hand.

  by torginus
• Corollary: get other people to spend their tokens on PRs
  by y1n0
• For a long time I was convinced they used Erlang for handling all the distributed, concurrent state. I guess not.
  by taybin
• at least while ago they used Stackless Python
  by strobe
• No but I used to read their dev blog and if there was a n app that needed Erlang it was Eve. They would announce the latest strategy they had for big battles and it was always reinventing part of Erlang.
  by hinkley
• Last I checked (and remember right) they used Stackless Python. Very interesting, it can serialize tasklets and send them to another machine to continue executing. Seems no longer maintained though.
  by ManBeardPc
• Github link: https://github.com/carbonengine
  by j-bos
• I used to play EVE on and off for years (decades?) and as many people here I loved more the idea of the game than the reality of it so I couldn't handle it for long periods.

  I would love the possibility of setting EVE servers where we have like instanced pre-loaded scenarios (battle for a structure for 50v50 preloaded fits, alliance tournament style fights, etc.) and can do open source. Of course they'd need to open source quite a few more things, I wonder if they could franchise the game itself this way so people setting the servers pay a bit or something (or rent the capacity, cloud style?).

  AFAIK, EVE is very profitable and EVE's mother company have been trying to use this cushion to branch out into other games and exploit the IP. I believe this has been mostly failed attempts and they've been bought, sold, etc. Maybe franchising EVE itself would work better? CCP plz?

  by lz400
• I'm picturing something like RUST servers, where the admins get to set their own rules and resource multipliers to facilitate the particular part of gameplay that they want.
  by TomatoCo
• I've wanted to try out EVE Online for a while now. Never found the time, and it seems to be a bit of a time sink. Since I have no idea if I'm actually going to enjoy it or not, it never took priority.

  These kinds of news make me want to find the time. Good job!

  by cassianoleal
• I spent a lot of time playing Eve and it's without a doubt the greatest MMO I've ever played but I would never play it again. It will happily eat up as much time as you want to give it. I wouldn't be happy if I wasn't playing it for 8+ hours a day and I can't do that anymore.
  by MrMember
• The new player experience is quite nice now a days. The PvE campaigns has also been improved over the last few years.

  To go deep into it I feel like social gameplay is required but there are plenty of opportunities to consume Eve Online in short bursts. Even when connected with a Corp or other player organizations like Red vs Blue. I found there is also a lot of mechanics that can be enjoyed solo or with light socialization.

  To anyone considering it: I would encourage you to jump in with a free account and try it out! and fly safe!

  by trashb
• It is definitely a social game. You're not going to have a good time if you try to play it solo. At least that was the case when I played it 10+ years ago. No clue if they changed it significantly since then.
  by weberer
• Depends on the way you play can be a time sink, or session-like game. It is extremely deep and complex to learn from scratch though.

  I've made some of the best friends playing it when I had time, friendship formed out of high stakes in this game (you regularly lose hours of grind or real money if you pay for the game - in seconds) and respect you have for each other skill.

  by Dzugaru
• It's a time sink, where much of the gameplay happens outside the game, or with tools outside the game, and at mid-high level it seems that social engineering your "friends" is the only true 7d-chess tactic.

  I'd really like to see a new game in this genre that does things better and leaves room for more ways of play.

  I've followed along this game more than the ~6 month I've played it (and EVE Echoes for a year) and all I can say is that playing as an explorer can be fun. Though so much time wasted scanning solar systems. I would be logging; on travel through wormholes that connect different solar systems, mapped out within a third-party site for the corporation I was part of, particularly to mark shortcuts to the major trade hubs. And in all this time I found only two Ghost Sites[0] (my favorite PvE mission type for exploration), which are hard trials for an explorer that test your situational awareness, maneuvering, puzzle solving skills, and strategy to make the most out of them. If I would have come across more often, I would probably be hooked on the game for longer.

  [0] https://www.eveonline.com/eve-academy/careers/explorer/ghost...

  by mhitza
• I bought the game when it first came out (2003? Boxed, from Target) and played with an online friend for a while. We mostly mined and we didn't really have a corporation, it was just the two of us. There wasn't much else to do at the time. At one point I fell asleep at my keyboard during a mining op. Gave up soon after.

  In 2015 a coworker talked me into trying it again. We joined a small corporation, swore fealty to a larger corp (Brave? Band of Brothers?) and moved to low-security space. We got involved in massive 3000+ ship battles, some of which made the news. These are not as fun as you would think.

  However, the most fun I had was joining 100+ ship bomber fleets that would warp in on unsuspecting mining operations and destroying billions of ISK (in game currency) worth of ships. We'd use Mumble for voice chat, which allows for a hierarchy of chat rooms, so that we could hear the fleet commander giving orders but he couldn't hear us. It was super organized and our fleet commander was really skilled.

  In the end I couldn't keep up with the time commitments. For the fun stuff, you had to be online at a certain time and there was a lot of prep involved (buying the proper ships which changed all the time, getting your ships to the right station, etc). I still consider it some of the best multiplayer experiences I've ever had though. Nothing beats warping in and seeing those huge mining ships and then hearing the fleet commander start issuing targeting orders. It would raise the hair on my arms.

  by colkassad
• What engine? Is not this game played in a spreadsheet?
  by mynegation
• it used to be, but it's been less and less perverse over the past ten to fifteen years.
  by jpfromlondon
• I thought it was played on the forums? That’s where the nullsec alliance game was played in my day.
  by jeremyjh
• Yes, but you can turn a visual representation on by pressing ctrl+shift+f9.
  by Cthulhu_
• I can never tell if these comments are jokes or not because I unironically thought this was a spreadsheet game my whole life.

  For anyone as ignorant as I was, it’s actually a video game. You do fly around in open space, chase or run from ships, and top-level combat is surprisingly difficult to perform. Once you get the hang of flying itself, there’s a whole dance of turning systems on and off to be most efficient with fuel, overheating of ship modules to eke out a bit more performance, and more. Or you can chill out in a high security region, auto-orbit some random asteroid belt, mindlessly mining away with a group of friends while you chat or play magic on Tabletop Sim, or something else equally distracting.

  I can’t gush enough about the game. The learning curve is huge, but if you’ve got a couple of buddies you like playing games with, this is basically perfect to explore together. They just released a new starter zone, too.

  by kulahan
• Jokes aside apparently they've hired economist to keep the game's market's stable.
  by sim04ful
• MMOSS (Massive Multiplayer Online Screen Saver) is what I've always seen it as. Beautiful game. Not for the faint of heart .
  by pugworthy