Fanfest 2007: Day Three

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Sorry for the late posting of this, it’s been a day of recovery. 🙂

Day three, the final day of Fanfest, has now come and gone. It’s an important day in many ways, which will come to light as I go through this writing.

Got up at a decent hour, went down to get some breakfast at the Grand’s breakfast buffet (which is pretty decent, but I think Nordica’s was better overall) with my in-game boss. Afterwards we headed to the Venue and met up with everyone. This was the day of all the big presentations.

Reynir was first up for the day, with an awesome presentation on the History of CCP and EVE. We were treated to a timeline, complete with pictures and videos, of CCP’s beginning and EVE’s designing, from the past to the present. It’s was a great presentation for those who haven’t been privy to the story thus far, and was a brilliant retrospective on a unique company.

Next up was the Trinity2 discussion, where the big brains responsible for the engine revamp dished out some details about the improvements we can expect with the first of the engine upgrades. Now, last year’s FF presentation on this subject showed a lot, and there’s not a lot from that first presentation that is repeated here. Instead we were given a rundown of how the project has progressed, and were shown screens showing how the 3D technology improves the visuals, effect by effect. Scaling is being looked at to make sure big stuff looks BIG like it should, hundreds of objects in the game are getting an incredible remodeling and look insanely detailed.

Effects and such are getting tweaked later, so don’t expect turret effects to suddenly improve vastly with this first iteration. But they’re taking a staged approach, focusing their efforts on getting the base enhancements down before moving on. The photos from the session I took should speak volumes.

Oveur was up next, giving a sizable presentation about coming features for EVE. This talk included new tweaks to Heat, including increased module HP and heat attentuation, which allows you to create buffers using deactivated modules to soak damage from overheated modules. This way you can protect other modules from damage. Pretty funky. A pile of new missions are coming including mining missions. Then he showed a series of videos, due to be available online soon, in which various developers describe new coming enhancements while videos of the new engine play behind them. Oveur showed a bunch of outtakes from the filming of these and they’re a riot. He’s such a trooper that the biggest chunk of outtakes were his own screwups. 🙂 Not only did these videos give us some drool-worthy glimpses at what some of the new objects look like in the new engine, but you could really get a feel for how excited the developers themselves are about the whole initiative.

Last but certainly not least, was the big man himself, Hilmar’s keynote address. This was not so much a keynote to go into the various graphical mindblowers that had come before, but more to go into how EVE’s growth has progressed since last year, and give an indication of what the future holds.

Afterwards MC headed to figure out what to do for dinner. At this point the issue of a zillion EVE players hitting the local restaurants at once to make sure they could make it back to the party became an issue, as almost every restaurant was filled with people. We managed to find a spot in a Pizza Hut which has to be famous for having some of the worst service in the world. We noticed as we were leaving that there was a table of Devs, including Hilmar, who were just finishing up and getting ready to go to the venue. I left them a present at the till. 🙂

I worked my way back to the hotel to quickly change and headed to the Venue for the epic Party at the Top of the World. For those unfamiliar with Fanfest, this is the cherry on top of the whole experience, where CCP pulls out all the stops for a gigantic party, EVE style. Great looking beer girls dressed up with EVE makeup, amazing lighting, and of course RoXoR’s amazing performance. RoXoR is the dev’s band, and let me tell you, you will never look at these people the same way again. I had no idea Pann could sing like that. Good God.

As the evening went on, things got fuzzier and fuzzier. 🙂 Much alcohol was consumed. I lost count of how many Tuborgs I downed, and most of MC was pretty messed up by the end of the night. But it was awesome meeting so many EVE people just cutting loose and having fun.

Anyway, this is a pretty brief writeup of what is a pretty busy day, but I hope to go into some more details on specific things in the near future. I’m still in Iceland until the 6th, will see what other goodies I can bring for everyone on this blog before I leave.

In the meantime, check out the Flickr photos, I dumped hundreds up there from the party.