The Waiting Game…

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My stint in the militia had been brief before being called back for corporate duty. I sat patiently in an uncomfortable chair, awaiting the approval of a new corporate charter.

“Yes, everything looks in order.” The Gallente official looked up from behind the pile of paperwork and smiled. “The federation now recognizes you as the CEO of your new corporation. Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” I said, somewhat agitated. “I presume this corporation, being that I’m in charge, will be in good standing with the federation.”

“Uhh, yes, of course,” he said, nervously, “we’ll need to do some background checks first though, standard procedure.”

“Background checks! You can’t be serious,” I stood up angrily. “After all the crap I’ve done for the Federation…”

“It’s standard procedure,” he interrupted, his hands gesturing either for me to sit down or in an attempt to protect his face, I couldn’t tell which. “It takes about a week, there’s nothing I can do madame.”

“A week? Do you not have computers,” I took a deep breath, “fine, do your checks.”

I left the room, still trying to calm myself down, and activated the private channel on my neocom.

“It’s going to be a week before things are ready to go. Background checks or some nonsense. Is everything ready to go?”

“Hmm… well that’s ridiculous. Yeah, things are ready. We’ve negotiated the charters for anchoring and purchased a month’s worth of fuel… Damn, a week… what are you going to do with yourself for a week?”

I walked down the corridor toward the station center, a pink neon sign offered half price drinks after 7.

“What time is it?” I asked Rhys over the com.

“About half eight,” he replied, “why?”

“No reason,” I replied as I opened the door to the bar. “I’ll figure out something to do with myself. Talk to you in a couple days.”

Generations

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“I wanted you to have these,” he said, handing me the thin wooden box with both hands.

I received it with both hands, bowing my head. I felt the grain of the polished oak touch my fingertips. Despite my mixed feelings toward my father, I was honored by the gesture. I was careful not to drop it. Wood containers were for precious things.

“Open it,” he said, gesturing as if to a child.

I did as I was told.

The box opened smoothly and silently. The hinges nearly invisible, the dimensions exact. Craftsmanship that only a machine – or an artisan slave – could provide. Inside was plush black velvet, a soft cushion for the serious contents. I placed the box on a nearby table and removed the pair of daggers.

“Only soldiers of God carried these daggers,” he said, “centuries ago, in the land wars. Ceremonial to be sure, but the symbol is still relevant. We are so proud of you.”

I withdrew the daggers, the cold golden hilts seeming to conform to the shape of my palms as if the weapons had been crafted specifically for me. They were beautiful, masterfully crafted, the stories of the ages inlaid in intricate detail in their gold and silver hilts.

I examined them both. Both identical in weight, in shape, in purpose. Identical shards of zydrine in the pommel, identical designs in the golden hilt, and identical curved tungsten carbide blades – cold, harsh, undecorated – extending outward from the artistry of the hilt.

Murder only tolerates a certain degree of beauty.

“Thank you,” I said, putting the pen down on the table and standing up.

“Welcome to the Federal Defense Union soldier, you’ll receive your assignment soon,” the recruitment officer smiled and gestured for the next in line to come over.

I stepped out of the office, the green insignia of the federation weaving itself into the nano-patch on the shoulder of my flight suit.

I rubbed my thumb down the worn hilt of the old dagger on my belt and began the trek back to my hangar.

The First Jump…

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“Your office is packed up Madame,” came the voice of the corporate hangar manager over my portable neocom, “good luck out there.”

And then the corporate feed went black. I was officially a freelance capsuleer now, for a few hours anyway, before I put in my application for the Federal Defense Union.

I considered logging into the Endland public channel, just to see if it was working, but then realized that I was stalling and disconnected the wrist-jack from my neocom, placed it in the crate containing my clothing and jewelry next to me, and then lay back in the glass tube that I was sitting in, feeling the clear viscous fluid cover my hair and the back of my head.

This had to be done, better get it over with.

“Okay, Aura… let’s get this over with,” the tube began to seal, I could feel the level of the cool fluid rising. Now touching the back of my neck, now the sides of my cheeks. “I’ll see you in a few minutes or so,” I said as the fluid reached my lips, began to flow into my nostrils.

The sudden fear of drowning.

I sat up in the glass tube, covered in clone fluid and coughed reflexively, but my lungs had been cleared of fluid milliseconds ago. I reached over for my neocom, but the crate was gone. The room was different. The bay window looking out of the station displayed a different sky.

“I fucking hate clone jumps,” I said to no one in particular as I climbed out of the vat, looking for a towel but finding only a white robe and some slippers.

I took the robe and began to towel the fluid off of my skin only to find that I was already dry. The door to the medical facility opened and a man in a lab coat entered as I continued to towel the non-existent clone fluid from my body.

“Been a long time since you were cloned huh? We’ve got nanites in the fluid, won’t let the fluid leave the tube. Saves on the cost of lost fluid and towels,” he said.

I looked up at him and nodded, “Hmm… that’s a good innovation. I won’t miss waking up covered in goo.”

He placed a small crate down on a table near the door and smiled, “here’s your new neocom. We took the liberty to just implant your current body with the requested implants while it was dormant. Welcome to Halle,” and he left without an odd glance.

I suppose when you work with clones all day you get used to seeing naked people, and as a capsuleer I was used to not caring.

I put on the slippers and robe, strapped the neocom around my wrist and jacked in. “Welcome back Madame,” came Aura’s familiar voice.

“Aura upload the station map to my memory implant, I need to find my quarters,” I said drawing a few strange looks from passersby in the medical wing.

“I’m sorry Madame,” came the reply, audible only to me, “Your current memory implant has insufficient buffer to upload the full schematics.”

I sighed, “Okay, just get me to some clothes and then to my pod, and check to make sure my expensive body is stored properly.”

An hour later I opened the door to the federation navy recruitment center, drawing wayward glances from the assembled Gallente enlisters in the waiting room.

I took my number, sat down, and collected my thoughts.

Taking the Bait

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My Incursus sauntered into the docking array at the academy in Couster, it had been a long night moving assets out of Caldari space in preparations for my sabbatical, but everything was now in order. I stepped out into the hangar and gave the order to have the laughably small stock of minerals I had in system contracted to the corporation. Several of our newer pilots were now stepping up into Dominix and every little bit helped.

I took one last look around, jacked back into my pod and gave the command to initiate undock. Moments later I was one dot in the cloud of rookie pilots that typically swarmed around academy stations. New pilots, just having earned their wings, stepping out into the vastness for the first time. Pushing back the nostalgia I visually scanned the scene, and immediately spotted a cargo container.

“Risk Free Ammunition,” it advertised. I sighed deeply.

“Aura who is the owner of that can?”

A Catalyst, sitting 10km off the can flashed in my attention buffer.

“Scan the local area for corp mates,” I said and set my frigate to approach the container.

“Search returned no results,” Aura replied. He was alone, in a destroyer, and looking for a fight.

“Fair enough,” I said to no one in particular as I gave the command for the mover drones to transfer the 100 units of Antimatter Small into my hold. Seconds later my warning systems lit up as the destroyer initiated target lock.

I returned the lock, fired up my afterburner and set the nimble ship on a spiraling approach vector. Win or lose it would be a good test run. I had been flying the tiny ship obsessively for the past few days and it had not failed to impress. Something about it had caught my interest.

It was odd flying a Gallente hull. The flight controls were components of the capsule, not the ship, so aside from the energy weapon hardwiring modifications I’d made, which had no systems to link into on the Gallente ship, they were no different. It just felt different. The ship felt lighter, more agile… and certainly a hell of a lot more fragile, than my stock Punisher. It was an entirely new experience, and I was enjoying it thoroughly.

I leapt across the several kilometer gap rapidly, and at 5k the Catalyst had resolved it’s target lock and unleashed a volley of plasma striping my shields to 50%. Web and scra…

“God Damnit,” I grimaced in my pod. I had been testing the systems out on the local Serpentis population of late, and had regretfully neglected to fit a warp scrambler. I shrugged, I wasn’t looking for a kill anyway, it’d still be a good test. I activated the tracking disruptor for good measure and felt a jolt as my my warp systems went offline and the destroyer’s webbifier came online. It felt like flying through molasses, but I was still maintaing a good pace.

I settled in to a tight 500m orbit and opened up with my blasters. At this range and speed, even with the webbification, the destroyer was struggling to land a hit. Meanwhile my Antimatter rounds were biting heavily into his armor. I pulsed my armor repair unit for good measure and waited. His armor was falling fast.

As his last shred of armor melted away I set my ship to approach and set my guns to overload. He was going to warp out any second, and with no scram I just had to hope the sudden damage spike and a potential bump would suffice. Three volleys later my guns shut down, as his ship entered warp.

“Nice,” came the reply over local com.

“Good fight. Good luck, I hope you find some decent fights,” I replied as my directional scanner came online, but he was already gone.

I waited the mandatory few seconds for the system services monitor to verify that I was not, in fact, a threat, and then set a course for Charmerout to dock up and get some sleep for the night. When I arrived I was greeted by the night shift deck crew.

“We patched up the guns on the Vengeance Madame,” the head tech said as I left my pod, “Focusing matrix was nearly fused to the photonic condenser!”

I nodded like I knew what he was talking about.

“How you liking her madame? She’s a tough little boat.”

“Yeah, she is,” I smiled, “I think I might get her an Ishkur to keep her company.”

The UI… Where do I begin… (Eve Blog Banter 9)

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It’s blog banter time again.

Welcome to the ninth installment of the EVE Blog Banter and its first contest, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

“Last month Ga’len asked us which game mechanic we would most like to see added to EVE. This month Keith “WebMandrill” Nielson proposes to reverse the question and ask what may be a controversial question: Which game mechanic would you most like to see removed completely from EVE and why? I can see this getting quite heated so lets keep it civil eh?”

The group had been working around the clock for weeks. Exhaustion had set in some several Tuesdays ago and every one of the assembled scientists and programmers were now operating purely on nicotine and Quafe Ultra.

The group had been given the momentous task of reverse engineering the Jovian capsule interface such that pilots of non-Jovian persuasions would be able to successfully operate their ships via the capsules. The quality assurance officers had been clear on the goals: no aneurisms and no bits of partially digested breakfast in the pod fluid.

They had succeeded, almost. There was one last, but not insignificant, hurdle that needed clearing.

“Maybe we could just make the font really really small,” said one of the junior programmers, “they could like, zoom in to read it or something.”

The rest of the room sighed.

“Small font, are you serious? Do you know how many rows of data we’re talking about?,” the head programmer looked around the room for support, but most people were either asleep or playing cards in the corner. He took another swig of Quafe and raised his voice, “Well I don’t know either, but it could be a really really big number. So our font would have to be like,” he waved his can of Quafe around dramatically flinging droplets into the air, “like atomic… quantum font or some crap. That is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.”

The junior programmer shrugged his shoulders, mumbled something unintelligible – even to himself – and turned to focus on Texas Hold-em.

The lead programmer sat back in his chair, drained his can of Quafe and threw it in the general direction of the trash bin. Owing to his lack of trash bin hitting skills, exaustion or the grace of god he missed and instead sent the can spinning end over end, blue droplets spraying in a thin arc, at the face of the currently sleeping Bill, the head of the design department.

As the can impacted Bill’s forehead he jolted upright, his eyes wide and distant, as if viewing another place.

“I’ve got it!,” Bill shouted, “it’s so simple. It came to me in a dream.”

The room all looked in his direction. One of the junior programmers took the opportunity to peek over at his neighbor’s hand, and then turned his attention on Bill. It wasn’t cheating, he thought, he was going to fold anyway.

“Arrow things, or… no…” Bill struggled for the words to describe the alien concept, “scroll… yes… Scroll Bars. We’ll have scroll bars! See, if there are more rows of data then the interface window can handle, we just let the user scroll,” he placed extra emphasis on the strange word, “to see the rest of the rows!”

It was the solution, it was genius. Everyone put their cards down and went back to their terminals.

“This is perfect, make it happen,” exclaimed the lead programmer, “damn Bill, you’re a genius.”

“That’s not all,” Bill continued, “see because if the user resizes the window so that they can’t see all of the columns, we can use a horizontal scroll bar! It’s perfect!”

The typing stopped, everyone was looking at Bill.

“Sorry, columns? What was that? You’re losing me Bill.”

Bill considered his words carefully, this was not an easy concept to explain.

“See, if the window is too small to show all of the rows then you can scroll with the vertical scroll bar.”

The lead programmer nodded, “yeah I’m following that.”

Bill continued, “and if the window is too small to show all of the columns then you can scroll with the horizontal scroll bar.”

The lead programmer’s face contorted with puzzlement, “Okay, okay. Hold on now, so you could do this scrolling thing in two dimensions?”

“Exactly!” Bill exclaimed.

“Yeah… um…” the lead programmer waved his hands at the rest of the crew to continue working, “you know Bill, you’re tired… why don’t you take the rest of the day off. The first idea was great but this whole two dimensional thing is a bit crazy. I don’t think space ship pilots are ready to deal with two dimensions at the same time.”

Ten minutes later Bill was escorted from the room by security. His repeated shouts of “Horizontal Scroll Bars”, echoing through the halls.

A User Interface is something one uses to do stuff. In Soviet Russia, user interfaces use you! The EVE UI is like that. It’s something that happens to you… when you’re out in the woods… that you don’t talk about.

“But Ghenna”, you say, “you can’t remove the UI. The game would be unplayable!”

Yes, yes. I know. I also know that the devs keep saying that there is some sort of crack UI team that is taking the UI apart and putting it in little glass boxes to test and redesign. Kind of like those displays in IKEA, where some poor chair gets sat on by a robot thousands of times. I can also admit that the fitting screen is better than it was (it’s still no EFT). Search windows in containers are nice, and the little “how full am I” bar is now blue, and has gone through at least one “blueness/size” revision, but I digress.

In the end I think the best thing for us all is to just scrap the whole thing and start from scratch. Also implement a mandatory “Do you think Excel is the best thing ever?” screening process to weed out the kinds of designers that we don’t want. At the moment when I show people EVE the conversation goes something like this.

Me – See how awesome it is?

Some Guy – Wow that’s really pretty! Go fly around a bit.

Me – Cool, let me undock

SG – Is that a spreadsheet?

Me – No, no. That’s the overview… here let me fly over here.

SG – You had to go like four menus deep into the context menu to fly there?

Me – Yeah, you get used to it… here let me show you the market/industry/science/etc interface.

SG – Wow, that’s a lot of spreadsheets… I’m gonna go get a beer.

“But Ghenna”, you say, “it’s not really that bad. You get used to it and it’s part of what makes EVE so different.”

Or perhaps you say, “OMG carebear! WTF GTFO & GBTWoW lol”

Yeah… well check this shit out. Did you see the titan going down, or the shitstorm of UI elements? I’ll tell you what you saw, you saw a BoB titan getting raped by chat channels, fleet lists and overview. That’s what you saw. Yes, you can tab the UI away so that you can actually view the beautifully rendered game that is playing in the background during those brief moments when you’re not either menu-surfing, spreadsheet monitoring, or trying to click a microscopic moving target in space because you didn’t think to set up an overview setting to only show hostile war-target Gallente interceptors piloted by Caldari with speech impediments.

Let me try to be constructive:

  • A new targeting system that is intuitive and works well (the overview is not this system, though it could possible be salvaged), that does not involve clicking microscopic targets in space, watching a list for the duration of a fight, or having gigantic, useless icons appear all over the place that you have to avoid double clicking on (it’s like a minigame!) when maneuvering manually.
  • Hotkeys! Hotkeys! Hotkeys!
  • A chat interface option that is easier on the screen real estate. Maybe the option to merge chats.
  • UI elements that don’t require a 4000dpi laser mouse to click (or avoid) reliably. This to avoid the current “click the tiny green strip/microscopic triangle/quantum dot in space” wack-a-mole style mini-game.
  • Don’t even get me started on the in-game “browser”
  • Some sort of consistency in attributes, so I don’t need a calculator to figure out whether 1.75% means 1.75%, 175%, plus 1.75%, 42, biscuits, etc.
  • Did I mention hotkeys?

Scrap the UI and make a new one rather than trying to prop up a dead guy.

Well, that’s all I have to say. This post is too long already. In the event that people think that this is a stupid idea, then I’ll retract my venom against the UI and just cast my vote to remove the Caldari. I know they’re not a bug… they’re a feature… but it’s been a long time coming.

List of Participants:

  1. Diary of a Space Jockey, Blog Banter: BE GONE!
  2. EVE Newb, (EVE) Remove You
  3. Miner With Fangs, Blog Banter – It’s the Scotch
  4. The Eden Explorer, Blog Banter: The Map! The Map!
  5. The Wandering Druid of Tranquility, “Beacons, beacons, beacons, beacons, beacons, mushroom, MUSHROOM!!!”
  6. Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, Kill the Rats
  7. Mercspector @ EVE, Scotty
  8. EVE’s Weekend Warrior, EVE Blog Banter #9
  9. Miner with Fangs, Blog Banter – It’s the Scotch
  10. A Merry Life and a Short One, Eve Blog Banter #9: Why Won’t You Die?
  11. Into the unknown with gun and camera, Blog Banter – The Hokey Cokey
  12. The Flightless Geek, EVE Blog Banter #9: Remove a Game Mechanic
  13. Sweet Little Bad Girl, Blog Banter 9: Who is Nibbling at My House?
  14. One Man and His Spaceship, Blog Banter 9: What could you do without?
  15. Life in Low Sec, EVE Blog Banter #9: Stop Tarnishing My Halo
  16. Cle Demaari: Citizen, Blog Banter #9: Training for all my men!
  17. A Mule in EVE, He who giveth, also taketh away?
  18. Dense Veldspar, Blog Banter 9
  19. Morphisat’s Blog, Blog Banter #9 – Randomness Be Gone !
  20. Facepalm’s Blog, EVE Blog Banter #9: What a new pilot could do without
  21. Memoires of New Eden, You’re Fired
  22. Kyle Langdon’s Journeys in EVE, EVE Blog Banter #9 Titans? What’s a Titan?
  23. Achernar, The gates! The gates are down!
  24. Speed Fairy, EVE Blog Banter #9: Down with Downtime!
  25. I am Keith Neilson, EVE Blog Banter #9-F**K Da Police
  26. Clown Punchers, EvE Blogs: What game mechanic would you get rid of?
  27. Estel Arador Corp Services, You’ve got mail
  28. Epic Slant, Let Mom and Pop Play: EVE Blog Banter #9
  29. Deaf Plasma’s EVE Musings, Blog Banter #9 – Removal of Anchoring Delay of POS modules
  30. Podded Once Again, Blog Banter #9 – Do we really need to go AFK?
  31. Postcards from EVE, 2009.07.02.00.29.06
  32. Harbinger Zero, Blog Banter #9 – War Declarations & Sec Status
  33. Warp Scrammed, Blog Banter 9 – Never Too Fast
  34. More as they are posted!