Fuzzwork
Just a quick post, jotted down before I go to get some lunch this morning. the Dirty breakfast at the laundromat is calling my name, and it’s quite persuasive.
You can see the sessions at http://www.twitch.tv/ccpdevtrack, just hit the videos link on the right hand side. I’d especially recommend you watch the legal one, starting about 4 hours, 24 minutes into the bigger video from yesterday, especially if you’re running a site with any advertising or donations links. There’s a paragraph further down with some advice, if this applies to you.
You can also see me! The bald looking guy in the middle, about 4 rows from the front, dressed in black, with glasses, a beard, and a laptop (this one that I’m typing on right now) I do actually have some hair, but it’s very short, and not that noticeable at range.
The Overview session was just that. Going over what we were going to be talking about, and the format changes. I was quite comfortable with the changed format, with the devs up the front on couches and seats, and us in the fairly large hall. Might not have been quite so intimate as the roundtable format, but I liked it. Still got to ask questions, and the answers from the devs were more verbose. And the quality of the stream was far higher.
We should be getting a developers site at some point in the future (Soon™), with more technical blogs, the signup stuff for the developers license, the application key setup and so on. Not delivery date, but hopefully very soon.
The first real session was the CREST/API session. The API is under development once more. Mostly for bug fixes, and eliminating annoyances like the 119 error for killmails. Woo! 🙂 It’s been handed to CCP Prism X and we should be seeing some work done on it. As well as a better hand over process, when/if it leaves his capable hands. Until now, it’s been very much a side project, which is less than ideal. Don’t expect many new feature from it, because of what it’s like, and because of CREST, but some stuff may be happening.
CREST, as always, looks great. And there appears to be a commitment to open up as much as game design lets them. And badgering other devs to write the interfaces when they put in new stuff. They’d be happy enough to open it all up, but it’s philosophical reasons not to. Such as: don’t open up the market entirely, as then it will be botted to hell. There’s a few trains of thought on this matter, and it goes well beyond the scope of this post to discuss them all. I’m of the opinion that some areas should be left closed, to prevent the requirement for using third party software to be competitive to some level. Others are ‘Publish and be damned. The metagame will sort it out’. It’s a philosophical debate rather than a technical one, so it’s not likely to be settled any time soon.
The Licensing and Policy session was very much a discussion. A new version of the developer license should be released within 30 days or so.
Under the current, and the public Future, terms, you /cannot/ charge for an application. Right now, advertising and donations are more than a touch iffy (if you’re using CCPs IP, like the art, SDE or api).
Watch the session. I spoke to CCP Seagull after it, and she’s made it very clear they doesn’t want to screw over any sites which aren’t there to make a profit. When it’s just to cover their costs. But from a licensing perspective, it’s a trifle more difficult. Especially as this is using global law, which makes it complicated. If you are having trouble, email them at legal@ccpgames.com and developerlicense@ccpgames.com. Open the dialogue with them and you may be able to get a license which covers both you and them appropriately. This doesn’t appear to be CCP Games trying to crack down on the third party devs. It’s just trying to protect themselves from backlash from their partners (who have to profit share, and can get annoyed (legally) at people getting stuff for ‘free’)
In a shock announcement (it wasn’t on the schedule) it looks like the SDE may well be coming to us as an sqlite file, reversing all the yaml stuff. =D It’s for development technical reasons, one of the main ones being: During the build process, they don’t want to have to spin up any sql servers. So SQL lite lets them create the database as a build artifact without doing so. We should be getting a copy of that. There’s still some restrictions on /what/ will be in it, but those are, again, game design reasons, rather than technical ones. As before, I’ll see about republishing it in mysql, as I’ll be doing a conversion for myself.
All in all, a pretty good day. The legal talk was a touch disappointing, if entirely understandable. If you have any questions you want to ask during today’s session, you can try asking on the twitch stream. Or see if you can get me to ask, through the #eve-dev on irc.coldfront.net
Hmm. Destiny is calling my name. Or is it just breakfast. Either way, I go to answer the call.
