I've just finished watching CCP's Roadmap Update Stream, and I've got some thoughts. Check out the video below:
Wrapping Up Cycle 2
Cycle 2 brought some really nice changes which I very much appreciated personally. Frontier really came together, starting to feel like a proper game, or at least the very robust bones of a game. Sadly, I didn't get a great deal of time to truly dive into the content of Cycle 2, but things are starting to feel a bit more complete in terms of the general game loop, which is a great indicator that the Frontier team properly locked on target and working on the right things.
The way the art style is developing is pretty mind blowing to me. I've always thought that Eve Online's general art direction was quite solid and I've lamented the removal of the old school iconography of the Eve Online of the past with new icons and color coordination. The new iconography just feel sort of bland and devoid of personality, whereas the art direction of Frontier feels very polished and forward-thinking. Even down to the textures of megastructures and the little hand railing features on ships feel very thought out and well designed. Being in the Frontier is a whole vibe and is starting to become deeply immersive. I often find myself listening to dark minimal techno mixes on YouTube while playing.
What Happened to Redstone + MUD?
CCP has been very vocal over the past few days about migrating to the Sui blockchain, but I'm left wondering what happened with Redstone / MUD / Lattice / whatever-- basically the system built for the EVM. I'm by no means a fan of Ethereum or really any shitcoin platform, but my disdain for these projects is fueled by the same gripes that most people have about the digital asset space. In my opinion, lightning can only strike once when it comes to digital money, but that's a totally different discussion that would necessitate its own article on this site and more time than I have to dedicate to this topic for now.
If you've been following the Frontier project for any significant amount of time, you've probably, like me, had some questions about a few things. For instance, why is it that general graphic design of Lattice is so similar to that of the UI in the Frontier client? Was this the result of Lattice human assets working on the game at some point? Was it just inspiring to the art direction of the game, or was it just pure coincidence? If it's anything other than coincidence, then I would be left to assume that the breakup with Lattice's Redstone / MUD was possibly contentious or at least left the Lattice team fairly disappointed. I feel like there's probably a lot more to that story.
All of CCP's marketing materials about the migration to Sui are celebratory and fail to explain the reason for the migration. Was Redstone not performant enough? Were there relationship problems with Lattice? I and I'm sure many others are curious and have questions about this-- especially the developers who spent time getting up to speed with MUD who are now left with a skillset they likely have to abandon in favor of Sui's Move smart contract language. For what it's worth, on a cursory look, Move seems to be vastly superior to working with Solidity, the lingua franca of the EVM smart contract world.
My suspicion is that there are deeper reasons for the migration than simply performance, and performance is definitely a valid concern. I've noticed extensive issues with smart assemblies in the game with respect to latency, reliability, etc. For instance, many times when I would try to move assets into a Smart Storage S, the client would give me a visual indication that the items were being moved into the container, no doubt awaiting some kind of confirmation on the Redstone network, only to end up back in my ship's cargohold and not in the storage, giving me no sort of indication as to why the operation failed. I'm willing to make allowances for nearly any amount of unreliability at this stage of the game's life because it is an alpha product after all, so don't take this as a gripe as it most certainly isn't. It's more of an observation as to what their reasoning for replacing the web3 plumbing might be. Perhaps Redstone simply doesn't support the kind of throughput requirements that Frontier has.
Upcoming Cycles
To be honest, Cycle 5 is probably the most interesting to me with the Sui upgrade, though I'm going to be very excited about any upgrades or development pertaining to making exploration more rewarding. The Eve Online universe tends to be very homogeneous and repetitive, so a vast and expansive universe with a very wide array of content is something of a breath of fresh air for this particular eve bittervet.
The Sui migration is particularly interesting to me as a developer. The Move programming language appears to be very nice to work with as it has very Rust-like syntax which is something I already adore. It definitely seems like something I'd be willing to build on.
Until next time.