Welcome to the twelfth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles on Delicsious at crazykinux’s eveblogbanter12 Bookmarks.
This month’s banter comes to us from CrazyKinux himself, who asks the following: First there was the MMO on the PC, and now with the recent announcement of DUST 514, EVE will soon be moving onto consoles. But what about mobile? Allow your imagination to run wild for a second and describe how you would see EVE being ported to mobile devices, whether the iPhone/iPod touch, Blackberrys or Android-based devices. Dream the impossible for us!
Well, some time a while back, I remember seeing a video by Chribba of how he was using a remote desktop control program to connect his blackberry to his desktop computer to mine veldspar. It looked cool, but the screen was just too small to look at for a long period of time.
EVE running on mobile devices has been something that has been toyed with for several years now. EVE Online in it’s current form is simply too complex to fit on an such devices due to available processing power, screen size and of course, bandwith for these applications to communicate.
However, there are certain aspects that could be easily put onto a mobile device. An great example of such applications is the current evolution of the Capsuleer (http://capsuleer.evesuite.com) for the iPhone/iPod Touch. For those of you who are not aware, it’s a wonderful application that lets you keep track of your characters and which skills they are training. it also allows you to read the EVE Blog Pack as well as current CCP news and dev blogs. I would have to say it’s the best EVE application for a mobile device yet.
Would we see PvP on a mobile device or other space flight activities? Would we want to? I don’t think so. Such screen are very small and making game play almost painful. Imagine being in a fleet fight and trying to target lock someone. Just trying to read all that information on such a small screen is simply not realistic to say nothing of the bandwidth issues. Imagine trying to use voice communications and play EVE on an iPhone. There is simply not enough speed there to handle all that information in a timely manner.
No, I see mobile devices filling the real life role of the rendering of a personal datapad as demonstrated in the many pieces of EVE Online fiction from CCP and many others. It would be a mobile device that interfaces with the EVE Online world in almost every way except for actually flying your ship.
- Imagine being able to sit on the train while commuting to work and testing out ship fittings with a mobile version of EFT, then save that fitting to your personal library/corporate ship fittings library in game from the mobile device.
- Mapping out your next roam with a mobile version of the universe map, save the planned route, send it out to your corp/alliance mates for review.
- Check fuel levels for your deployed POS’s, selecting a check box that automatically alerts everyone in the corp with refuling roles that POS xyz is in need of fuel or create a courier contract on the fly for fuel delivery and add it to a corp/alliance “task list”.
- My favorite one, a corp member needs something out of the corp hanger, you can contract the item to them while sitting the back yard, eating that cheeseburger fresh off the grill. No running into the house, logging on and doing that one thing.
- Reading corp/alliance mails.
- Mobile chat clients.
- EVE Online CCG game, mobile version.
- Play the in station games from the Walking in Stations demos.
- Read the latest battle reports from your corp/alliance and/or your Dust514 Merc teams.
- Mobile market orders control.
Yeah, I think it would be cool and fun and I can see it as yet another hook for our obsession with EVE Online. Bring it on!!!
All the other EVE Blog Banter posts can be found on Delicious, crazykinux’s eveblogbanter12 Bookmarks
September 29th, 2009 at 11:55 am
The fitting screen would be great although you can already map your ruote via dotlan maps which works on the i-phone. Like you I think new uses of the contracting system would be great.
September 29th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
I would kill for that first point. EFT on mobile hooked into eve fitting library!? *drool*
September 29th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
The line between a human and a bot when communicating in xml is very small! MARKET BOTS FTW!
September 29th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
We will all be assimilated!
September 29th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Yeah, I want this!
September 29th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Personally, I use the EVE Stragegic Maps along with Dotlan and Ombey's maps, depends on the situation I am in and whether or not I am at home or on the road. Having the maps on an iPod Touch/iPhone would allow me to plan things a tad better when I have downtime at a meeting.
I do like to wander you know…
September 29th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Grats on another cool post Galen! Look like a lot of us had the same general ideas…not EVE on a mobile, but just extending EVE to your phone. Frankly, sounds awesome
September 29th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Yeah. Many of us have been talking about this on the EVE forums, back when there was a working prototype of an EVE Mobile client for Windows Mobile smartphones. It was a project developed by some university students, but it fell to the wayside when the next expansion came out. CCP tinkered with it but changed focus to the expansions and the Mac and Linux client support instead. It did work….sort of.