One of the long talked-about features coming to EVE is ambulation, and this one has the player base pretty polarized. Some additional information was given at this year’s Fanfest by the uber Torfi Frans.

Historically EVE’s motto has been “you are your ship”. When you log in, you’ve got a character portrait, but your presence isn’t your person, it’s the big hunk of tritanium you see rotating around in the station. Ambulation is set to change all of that, letting you step out of your ship and wander around in station.

First, some new bits. And a note that hey, Ambulation’s not final, so these details are probably subject to change as CCP evolves the design.

To begin, station areas are limited to 65 characters as a maximum. That means you won’t see fifty thousand Goons blobbing a particular station, or doing the galaxy’s biggest line dance. This is a start, and would be raised at a later date. One would hope, because a 65 character limit is pretty useless if this is to be anything interesting.

One idea presented at the Fanfest seminar about Ambulation was how you as a player could create items for people. You’d rent a slot of some kind at a station, and build yourself (or get one built) a store, for instance. Install it, then go put your wares in it for sale, even having a NPC avatar standing there hawking your stuff to passers by. Items such as clothing, accessories, facial reconstruction, you name it. Imagine becoming a famous plastic surgeon.

More details stated that your captain’s quarters can be used to store items including your uniform or whatever you want on your character. The point was made that if you lose your ship, you lose those items you’ve got stored on it, just like you currently lose modules, etc. If you want to keep it safe and sound, don’t take it with you.

CCP’s hired an architect to translate the amazing concept art to workable livable spaces, and even a costume designer to make sure all the guys don’t look like storm troopers while the girls don’t all walk around in thongs and white t-shirts. Clothes will be practical, stylish, no doubt a bit risque, but nothing that looks like it’s done by a bunch of sex-starved otaku.

You can change your body shape, refining what kind of character you’d like to be. Beanpole or beanbag, and everything in between. You can set your current emotion, which affects the visual emotes. Wave while sad and you’ll wave in a sad way. Set yourself to happy and you’ll wave all enthusiastic like.

At some point CCP’s going to have to bridge the gap between our current stylized looks and the new more realistic looks (think Mass Effect’s character generator). Presumably when ambulation goes live we’ll be presented with a converted avatar and have the ability to tweak as we see fit, then start life as a new and improved resident of New Eden.

Sounds pretty nifty, but the seminar was pretty light on the point of why we would jump for joy for this just yet. None of this affects the pewpew, or does anything for our current internet spaceships. I like social interaction in EVE, but typically have done this at the end of a gun or some shrewd market dealings. It’s obviously looking at the Second Life market, seeing if it can snag that segment which likes to have their MMO grounded by something with two legs and a /dance emote.

I’m still iffy on this. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s amazing the level of attention and detail that’s going into the design of this thing. There’s a passion there that we see in the current EVE. I like the approach they’re taking – it doesn’t support people running around like idiots dressed like clowns. And I for one would love to not only fly around in the world of EVE, but also to walk around in it. Only time will tell whether Ambulation will be a worthwhile addition to the game when considering it’s intended to have no impact or direct benefit to the systems currently in place.

Just lazing around my hotel lobby right now, got another hour and a half or so to go until my taxi shows up to take me to the airport.

Put up a few pics last night before I hit the sack, just of a small wandering excursion I did in the area around the hotel. I’d wanted to see more of the sightseeing type things, but I managed to come down with a cold here on my last days so I haven’t been up to much. At least that waited until after the party was done. Oh well, next year I’ll plan things a bit better. 🙂

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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.