EVE Gate: For those moments when your boss isn‘t looking!
In September last year, in a devblog by CCP Caedmon, we introduced our plan to deliver the „EVE away from EVE“ web application in 2010. The team has been working tirelessly and has devoted themselves to overcoming the challenges of connecting the massive world of EVE with this new out of game web portal. EVE Gate will allow you to easily connect with other players, manage your corporations and alliances, check your EVE mails, plus a lot more besides.
The features that are included in this initial beta version of EVE Gate are:
EVE Mail
Manage, read and send EVE Mail for every one of your characters directly from EVE Gate. Fully integrated mail system allows you to stay in touch and relay important messages to your contacts even when you aren't in game. EVE Gate's mail system offers you most of the features of your in game EVE Mail, including the ability to sort messages using the customizable label system.
Home page
Share messages with your friends and get instant updates from your corporation and alliance. You will also be able to view broadcasts from pilots that have allowed you to view their profile. You have full control of who can view your broadcasts and full profile through the profile settings page.
Profiles
On your character page you can view your character sheet, skill status and all the information on your character that is displayed in the Show info window in game. You can also edit your bio and view your employment history and broadcat log. The broadcast log shows a list of all broadcasts you post on EVE Gate. Corporation profiles include the corp description and alliance history. Information that is only viewable by members of the corp is the broadcast log where the corp CEO and communications officers can post updates to members of the corp and the corp member list. Alliance profiles include description, member list and which systems the alliance has sovereignty over. You can also easily send a message to a character, corp or alliance or add them to your contacts from their profile page.
Contacts
The place where you can manage your contacts to designate your fellow pilots friend or foe. You can add pilots, corporations and alliances to your contact list and edit your standings towards them. When you do you can choose whether to keep the changes secret or send the party in question a personalized notification. These notifications appear in the notifications tab on the left of the screen. Along with the folders listed by standing this helps you to keep on top of who you love and hate and who loves and hates you in return (if they choose to tell you of course!). Because of this new folder structure we have had to remove the ability to organise contacts into custom folders in game. After Tyrannis we will be working on a custom label system for contacts, which will work just like the EVE Mail label system. We plan to release this soon.
Calendar
Tyrannis will see the release of the new calendar in game and on EVE Gate. This is a major advance in helping corporations and alliances organize their activities as well as being a great tool for planning small group operations. You can view events a month at a time and if a certain day is especially busy you can double click it to get a detailed day view. To help you see which events most urgently need your attention there are upcoming events and latest update lists.
A detailed overview of calendar functionality in EVE can be found in CCP Greyscale's devBlog.
New image server and corporation logos
To make EVE Gate as shiny as possible we made sure that the corp logos, unchanged since the initial release of EVE, got a nice revamp. Our ridiculously talented artists have taken the time and redrawn every single layer. The new layers not only have more detail but also render nicely in higher resolutions. We also used this opportunity to completely re-engineer how images are served to the web. Our original character portrait service is approaching the age when you would need radiocarbon dating to determine its age. So we decided to create a whole new system for image rendering that scales better, is more reliable and supports all sorts of images, including corporation and alliance logos. EVE Gate will be using this new image server and we encourage you to change your existing community sites to start using it as well, as we are planning to phase out the old system sometime in the future.
Ok, great! So when will all this be ready?
May 26 marks the day that we open up EVE Gate to players on Tranquility for the first time. We will be restricting the number of players that can access EVE Gate in the first days and weeks. So if you can‘t log in immediately then it will most likely be because the number of users on the server has reached its limit at that given time and you will have to try again in a little while. Please be patient though, we are confident that it will be worth the wait.
EVE Gate is designed to make the EVE universe and community more accessible than ever . The socialization and organizational features introduced in Tyrannis are only the beginning of something truly epic and we will continue evolving EVE Gate by combining our long-term vision with what the EVE community is calling out for. After release we will be working on optimizing the application and polishing EVE Gate’s existing features such as adding block/unblock functionality , a contact label system, mailing lists and more goodies. New community forums will then be our main focus after that.
Our plan is to eventually offer everything on EVE Gate that you can do in game apart from explorations in space and blowing stuff up. We value your feedback so keep it coming and find out for yourself what EVE Gate is all about on May 26th 2010 or get a preview on our Singularity server at //test.evegate.com.
