One of the newer additions to the EVE universe is the EVElopedia – a big ol’ wiki full of helpful information.  I’ve spent some time over the last few days perusing the EVElopedia and catching up on all the changes since I stopped playing.

Today I stumbled across something truly amazing…  Wormholes!

So, they work a lot like stargates.  You go into a wormhole and pop out some vast distance away.  What makes wormholes interesting is that you never know exactly where you’re going to wind up, or how long that wormhole is going to hang around.  You might pop up somewhere in known space, or you might wind up somewhere completely new and unexplored.

And if you wind up in unexplored territory, with no stargates to use, then your only way to get home is to find another wormhole.  The game is designed to ensure that there is another wormhole available…  But you have to locate it with probes.  And if you run out of probes, you’re screwed.

Once having travelled to uncharted systems, one of the primary concerns for most pilots will inevitably be how to get back to known space.

In some instances, the wormhole you came through will still remain, and you can return back to where you came from through the same wormhole. However, there can be instances where the wormhole will collapse behind your fleet and in those cases, you will need to probe your way out. There will always be a minimum of one wormhole in an uncharted system at a time, but there can also be multiple wormholes in any given system at any given time. These wormholes can connect back to any system in known space, but they might also take you deeper into uncharted space, often into more dangerous territory.

In the event that your ship runs out of probes and the wormhole you came through has collapsed, there is not much that can be done. You could theoretically wait around for rescue from others, but most pilots would choose to abandon their ship and self destruct their capsule to wake up in a new clone in their medical bay. Always make sure to bring many probes along on an exploration expedition into uncharted space.

You can, literally, get lost forever!

I don’t think I’ve ever played any game before where it was truly possible to just get lost.  Every game I’ve ever played has had the playable space very carefully defined.  It was possible to wander off to someplace you’d never been before…  Someplace you didn’t recognize…  But it was always possible to find your way back.

Maybe by using some kind of in-game map utility…  Maybe by asking other players for directions based on your coordinates or local landmarks…  Maybe by being teleported or summoned back to safety…

Despite the sci-fi setting, EVE’s world is more like an old map…  With blank spaces here and there, and dragons hiding in the gaps.

I gabbed EVE Online again.

Downloaded it, installed it, activated my old account…

I fired up EVE and created a new character…  And that’s where I started noticing the changes.

There have been a couple major updates since I last played EVE, and one of them significantly changed the character creation process.  Used to be that you’d choose your faction, then your race, then your bloodline…  And each of those choices would slightly influence how you started out.

Different races had different starting statistics – maybe a little extra charisma, maybe a little less willpower.  And you had five attribute points to spend wherever you wanted.

Now that all appears to be pretty much cosmetic.  I didn’t see any attributes or skills listed anywhere during character creation.  It made the process of creating a character much simpler and quicker, far less intimidating…  But it also seems fairly superficial.  Like all I’m doing is choosing which model looks best.

The game itself has had substantial changes as well…

The initial tutorial is fairly different.  It seemed a little more forgiving, a little harder to mess up by looting something I shouldn’t have.  The voiceover was gone, but the text was a lot more concise and easier to understand.  And the big pop-up bubbles indicating what I should be looking at were very helpful.

The graphics look better than I remember.  I don’t know if they’ve updated the engine, or the models, or maybe I’m just imagining it all…  But the little Minmatar ship I started out with looked very nice.

They also made it much more obvious where the various career path missions were…  There’s a whole new “career funnel” thing that all-but pilots your ship to the appropriate station.  Much easier than digging through contact lists, forums, and wiki pages to figure out where someone is located.  Hopefully that’ll remain useful even after the initial 10-mission arcs are complete.

There’s a new skill queue.  You an queue up a bunch of skills for training, play around with the sequence, and kick it all of.  They’ll train, one after another, with no intervention.  It only covers the next 24 hours so it won’t help much with those multi-week skills…  But it does mean that you don’t have to worry about a skill finishing up while you’re alseep or at work.

The UI in general looks different…  More polished, more modern.  A lot of it is fairly gratuitous – a little more shine here, a little more transparency there – but it looks good.  The fitting screen is a dramatic improvement over what I used to see.  There’s also new buttons for things like Certificates, which I don’t know anything about yet.

The same in-game browser is still there…  Which kind of surprises me.  It is certainly handy to have a browser available in-game, but the IGB is feeling very dated.  I figured they would have given it a fairly significant overhaul by now…  Or maybe replaced it with hooks into a real browser…

Also, the jukebox is still completely useless.  You can only play a few bits of ambient music built-in to EVE.  There’s absolutely no way to add your own music.  So, once again, I wound up simply muting the in-game music and playing my own MP3s in the background.

I’ve only been playing for a couple hours now, and I can’t wait to log in my old character.  I’m dying to see what my old character is like now…  What my old ships look like, what new missions are available to me, things like that.

I’ve canceled my WoW account again.

It won’t actually run out until the 15th or so, which will give me plenty of time to participate in the upcoming Children’s Week thing.  I’ll be able to get a couple more goofy pets for my characters.  But, beyond that, I’ve really got no incentive to keep paying for WoW.  I’m not even logging in these days.

Slashdot | IE8 Released As Critical Update For XP

Binestar was one of several readers writing in to note that Microsoft is listing IE8 as a critical update to Windows XP. CNet reported a couple of weeks back that Microsoft would be rolling our IE8 to users in a gradual fashion, and requiring an opt-in before installing it. Opinion has been split as to whether IE8 is worth installing or not. Binestar notes delicately, “For those not interested in upgrading to IE8 at this time, the MSDN released information back in January on how to keep IE8 off your machine.”

Personally, I think anything that brings us closer to a standards-based web is a good thing.  I’ve been running the IE8 beta/RC at home for a while now and it appears to function just fine…

But I can’t say I’m terribly happy with this news.  We’ve still got clients running IE6 because some web application they need doesn’t support IE7 yet.  Of course we’ve turned off updates or otherwise blocked new versions of IE from installing on those clients, so they won’t be a problem this time around – but I’m sure we’ll discover new problems as IE8 shows up on computers.

One of the biggest issues we saw with the IE7 rollout was broken installations.  Something would go wrong during the IE7 installation and they’d be left with no functioning web browser.  I certainly hope the IE8 installer is more robust than IE7′s was.

Since I haven’t been playing WoW lately, I’ve been looking for other ways to amuse myself.

I’ve spent a good chunk of time working on my Warhammer 40k models.  If I ever actually get new batteries put into my camera I’ll have some new pictures up.

I re-installed Soulstorm.  I know I have frequently claimed that it is the worst of the Dawn of War games, and that hasn’t changed.  However, it is the only Dawn of War game that lets you play as the Sisters of Battle.  So, crappy as it is, it’s what I’ve been playing.

I also finished up the single-player storyline in Dawn of War II.  Very satisfying.  I only wish they’d let you keep playing in a sandbox-type mode…  It is fairly obvious that the xenos aren’t completely gone.  There’s Tyranids everywhere, and I’m sure there are still some Orks and Eldar hanging around.  It would be fun to keep slaughtering the foul creatures.  But you can’t.  And the only thing left in DoW2 is the multi-player, which I haven’t been impressed with.  So I guess I’m waiting for an expansion pack now…

I re-installed Fallout 3, re-loaded my saved game.  Turns out that finding your father in that vault isn’t the end of the game.  He heads back to Project Purity and there’s still some plot left.  Unfortunately, that plot isn’t terribly satisfying.

It all happens very quickly…  You’re helping out at Project Purity, then the Enclave attacks.  You run away and hook up with the Brotherhood of Steel, who send you off to find a G.E.C.K.  Then you fight your way back to Project Purity with the Brotherhood of Steel, turn it all on, and the credits roll.

Not only does the game resolve itself very quickly…  But there’s no wandering around after the fact.  No sandbox mode.  Nothing.

I found another game that looked interesting – Cthulhu Returns.  It’s some kind of Lovecraftian MMORPG.  Looked like a good way to kill some time.  But the installer wanted to do some weird things in my system32 directory, so I didn’t wind up playing it.

I fired up Left 4 Dead again…  But, despite a number of patches, there really isn’t any new single-player content.

I wound up digging through my pile of old games…  Re-installed Wheel of Time…  I never did finish this game.  I bought it back in the day, when it first came out, back when I was really into the Wheel of Time books…  I made it through Shadar Logoth, but then basically stopped playing for some reason.  I thought it would be fun to actually play through it to the end.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that is going to be possible.  The game, amazingly enough, runs great on my computer even without any patches or updates.  But the graphics are horribly, painfully dated.  The textures are very flat, the effects are very simple, and it is all giving me horrible motion sickness.

Worse, that motion sickness means I’ll probably have a hard time playing through other old games like Thief, Undying, and System Shock 2.

With all the talk of the swine flu in the news lately, Terri decided that we really ought to watch The Stand last night.

Of course, The Stand is a ginormous multi-part made-for-TV mini-series, so we didn’t watch the whole thing.  We just got to watch a couple hours of the world slowly falling apart.  The initial outbreak at the military base…  Campion running for the hills…  The military trying to contain the outbreak…  The slow descent into chaos as everyone dies…

Imagine my surprise when, on a news program in the background of some scene, they commented that the military had quarantined a small town in texas because of an outbreak of swine flu.

Destructoid | EVE: The Unforgiving

EVE is the darkest, most unforgiving universe you will ever walk through. This isn’t some world of alliance/horde characters running around in wheat fields waiting for you to get half health and then ganking you, or playing school yard capture the flag in an arena the size of my bathtub. This isn’t a world of open pvpers killing you and getting NO reward other than just killing you. This isn’t a world where you have your hand held, guided on a wire, or spoon fed all of your equipment and skill. This is EVE, a universe of cold, hard working, and merciless players. This is our world outside of the real, we are a mimic of the War Profiteers and Black Market monsters that effect everyone in real life today. We profit off of your misery, we make advancements by stealing yours, and we take your merciful attitudes, chew it up, and spit it out. But here is the best part: you will most likely mistake us for someone who cares.

Yeah, I’m looking at EVE Online again…  There’s just something fundamentally appealing to me about that game.  Something about the cold vastness of space, and the hands-off approach of CCP.  The freedom to do whatever you want.