Breaking Through The Dawntrail 7.2 Gear Wall

Well, I did it. I am now eligible to enter Final Fantasy XIV's patch 7.2 trial, Recollection. I reached item level (IL) 715 on Sunday night. Of course, reaching the minimum item level of Recollection did not initially help me run The Underkeep. After melding my newly dropped gear, I managed to defeat the first two bosses cleanly but took 25 minutes to kill Valia Pira.

While not finishing well, my 9th run of The Underkeep did result in the drop of three more pieces of the healer's Underkeep healers set, giving me 7 out of 10 gear pieces at IL 725. My weapon, however, was still IL 710. Still, I could try to push on and get a first week completion of Recollection. But for my greater goal of crafting the Ceremonial healing set, I kept grinding away.

A funny thing about crafting the best armor sets in patch 7.2. The biggest hurdle is acquiring the Allagan Tomestones of Heliometry required to purchase the rest of the goods I need. Yes, patch 7.2 introduced 5 new legendary nodes whose materials are also acquired, but after two hours or so I had more than enough, even though the nodes only spawn twice every game day. I already had purchased the required Tomes of Regional Folklore in patch 7.1 so no speedbumps encountered in that respect.

The preferred crafting food for high-end crafting apparently switched to ceviche. The big pain is fishing the main ingredient, cloudsail. Not really hard, but I found a YouTube video that really sped the process up. As in going from catching 17 my first hour to catching 34 in 30 minutes.

So off to The Underkeep I trudged on Monday night. And then, something clicked. For my first run of the night I defeated all three bosses without dying once. I do have to credit my newly acquired dropped gear for giving me just enough health points to keep from dying to the second boss. Include a newly acquired instinct to self-heal immediately upon taking unexpected damage and I survived. Perhaps more importantly, I completed the dungeon in under 30 minutes. The 30 minute mark is key because without free company buffs food effects only last 30 minutes.

Interestingly enough, I almost didn't make that first deathless run. I had for the first time in my time playing FFXIV hit the weekly tomestone cap. I had reached my 450 Allagan Tomestones of Mathematics cap for the week and the reset wasn't until Tuesday. But as I really don't plan on grinding out the IL 750 Historia set so the "lost" tomestones didn't bother me so I decided to just run the dungeon twice to get the drudgery out of the way.

For those trying to get through the dungeon at my skill level, here's how I managed it. For the first two bosses, follow around G'raha Tia. But I was playing white mage. I'm not sure what to do for tanks.

The final boss was difficult because I couldn't follow G'raha around. Instead I tried to stay in space as much as possible. Entering the arena I dive directly to my right to the corner. From there I was able to observe what to do for the first minute or so. The first real problem mechanic is when the boss spreads out pie slices. Don't try to find an uncovered spot. Just stand in a dark red slice. From that first corner I could basically run forward to find a spot.

Another problem I had was the bosses half-arena attack. I did key off G'raha, and later on Krile, to know which side of the arena to run to. But that was probably after 50 pulls and only a handful of successes.

This isn't a walk through of the dungeon. Maybe I'll do something later, but for now I'm concentrating on gearing up my max level jobs. After another setting a personal best of 28:30 in completing The Underkeep last night, I'm looking forward to getting the final 171 tomestones needed to let me begin crafting my Ceremonial gear. That is only 3 more runs of The Underkeep to go.

All of the cutting edge raiders had arranged to get their Ceremonial gear to begin running the new Savage on Tuesday. While I technically don't need to do the same to continue on with the MSQ, I figure I need all the help I can get. The main difference is while crafters are out working to gear up their friends and FC mates, I'm making the gear for myself.

Cloud Imperium Records Record Sales in March And The First Quarter Of 2025

Cloud Imperium finished off a record quarter yesterday by finishing the month of March with $10 million in cash shop sales for the first time in the company's 13 year history. The $10 million, according to the CCU Game dashboard, represented a year-over-year increase of 40.2% over the $7.3 million in sales recorded in March 2024. For the first three months of 2025, CIG finished with $25.5 million in sales, a 47.3% YoY increase over Q1 2024's $17.3 million.

First quarter 2025 cash shop sales

The $799.5 million displayed on the Roberts Space Industries funding page at the end of March was not a comprehensive accounting for all of CIG's revenue since the project's Kickstarter in October 2012. Overall, the company has recorded $898.1 million in confirmed revenue (the funding page & the 2022 financial report).

• Sales/Pledges: $799.5 million (through 31 March 2025)
• Subscriptions: $33.0 million (through 31 December 2022)
• All other sources: $65.6 million (through 31 December 2022)

In addition, the company has received a total of $63.25 million in outside investment. According to the 2022 financial report, $4.8 million of the amount was returned to investors in 2020. Including the outside investment money, the total amount raised by CIG to create Squadron 42 and Star Citizen is $961.4 million, or $956.6 million when excluding the returned funds. An additional $5 million in shares sold in January 2025 are not included in the total.

The Funding Plateau - Over the last three years, Cloud Imperium has faced a sales plateau in the company's sales of virtual good like internet spaceships. Sales have fallen withing 3% of the average of $115.9 million between 2022-2024. I believe the shakeup of upper management that began in Q4 of 2024 is designed to break through and increase revenue for the company. So in addition to providing year-over-year metrics I will also comparing the sales figures from 2025 to the average sales for the years 2022-2024. I believe if sales continue to fall within the range of $112.4 million and $119.4 million the C-Suite at CIG, if not the board of directors, will not be happy.

In March the Marketing Masters In Manchester had a lot to smile about. Not only did sales rise 40.2% for the first quarter YoY, but increased over the previous 3-year average for the quarter by 31.4%. Sales really benefitted from both the continued effects of the release of Alpha 4.0.2 on 28 February and the final sales associated with the launch of Alpha 4.1 on 27 March.

March 2025 cash shop sales

Over the first seven days of March, the company recorded $1.6 million in sales, a $790,000 increase over sales in the first seven days of March 2024. Over the final five days of the month CIG received $4 million in sales, or an increase of $3.1 million over the same period in 2024. These two periods offset the disappointing performance of the annual Fortuna event which only brought in $3.4 million, a $1.4 million YoY drop from the event's sales in 2024.

New Account Creation - From 2022 to 2024 CIG saw the number of new accounts created each year fall by 44.5%. I'm assuming that part of the shakeup is aimed at improving that performance as well. So I came up with a simple predictive formula to estimate how big of a drop in new player account creation is expected based on historical trends. For the year, my formula comes up with a 19% drop in new user accounts created in 2025, which is twice as much as I predicted at the beginning of the year.

Q1 2025 new account creation

Overall in Q1, the number of new accounts created fell by 29% year-over-year, from 121,088 accounts in March 2024 down to 86,008 last month. I often get asked how sales revenue can increase to record heights while the game itself attracts less and less new people. The answer, as always, is any correlation between sales numbers and new account creation is purely coincidental. The marketing team is concentrating on sales to long term players with a proven track record of spending a lot of money (aka "whales").

March 2025 new account creation

However, for the first time since August 2024 CIG experienced a year-over-year growth in the number of accounts created in March. Account creation increased by 6.1% to 25,496 last month. While not a large amount compared to the over 40% cash shop revenue increase in March, the rise does represent the first uptick in the metric for the new leadership team.

Ongoing Concerns - March has come and gone and we do not have any indication if the Calders exercised their put option during the quarter. As the only remaining period to exercise the option is Q1 2028 the submission of Cloud Imperium's accounts to UK Companies House should provide a clue.

Speaking of UK Companies House, CIG had not submitted its financial accounts to the government body as of the writing of this post. From past experience a 7-10 day lag does exist before the paperwork will show up on the site. But as of today, the fine for late filing increases from £750 to £1500. If the accounts are not filed in April I'll begin to think something suspicious is occurring instead of just the regular Cloud Imperium shuffle.

We do know that the Cloud Imperium page is active on UK Companies House as back in February the company posted the required information, on a timely basis, on the allotment of $5 million in shares to as yet unnamed purchaser. The company probably will not reveal the buyer's identity until required by Companies House. The next deadline is in September.

Observers are still awaiting the traditional reveal of Cloud Imperium's 2023 financial report on CIG's corporate website. I believe, if not legally required in the UK, is traditionally seen as a bad sign by investors if one is not present. I'm still trying to track that piece of information down. Honestly, I didn't expect CIG to fall behind this late.

Finally, for a quarterly review, I cannot forget the shutdown of CIG's Los Angeles facility. In March 2024 Cloud Imperium CEO and co-founder Chris Roberts issued a "Letter from the Chairman" in which he announced game development work would cease in California but the office would remain a main administrative hub. Last month we learned differently.

Chad McKinney Has Left Cloud Imperium Games

The fallout is just about over for the closing of Cloud Imperium Games' facility in Los Angeles. A few names known to players may emerge and get a mention or two on social media or amongst Star Citizen's content creators. One such individual is Chad McKinney.

Big life update! pic.twitter.com/OZH9VvyK4s

— Chad McKinney (@raycast_curses) March 28, 2025

According to his LinkedIn page, McKinney began working for Cloud Imperium Games in 2016. In 2017 he was named a Lead Gameplay Engineer and then in 2021 promoted to Senior Gameplay Engineer. According to Star Citizen Wikipedia McKinney was involved in the development of many systems in Star Citizen.

He developed and supported many player facing multiplayer gameplay features using Star Engine. This includes among others the interaction system, item health and destruction, the room and atmosphere system, player created missions, energy and power distribution, designer systems for item creation, spline traversal to planetary surface locations, physically moving elevators, inventory, global persistence.

And now McKinney is moving over to Blizzard. At least he's secure in another position in the industry. Just another small story in the epic saga known as Star Citizen.

Hitting The FFXIV Patch 2 Gear Wall

Did Final Fantasy XIV's patch 7.2, Seekers of Eternity, really launch only 2 days ago? So far I've purchased all my level 12 crafting books, crafted all the high level foods I'll need for a week, including fishing a two-week supply of cloudsail so I can keep myself fed with the hot crafting food right now, ceviche. Last night I started the patch 7.2 main story questline. As I kind of expected, I hit the gear wall.

"What gear wall?" I can hear readers who are much better at FFXIV than I am thinking to themselves. Those readers don't think twice about participating in the duty roulette grind and thus don't know about the wall. But FFXIV has a lot of activities I find more enjoyable so I started out the patch wearing a full set of the Archeo Kingdom gear. High quality, obviously, tenderly handcrafted by myself. But not good enough to advance through the MSQ.

The problem I have is the 8-character trial, Recollection. The trial has an iLvl requirement of 715 and my Archeo Kingdom gear only has an iLvl of 710. In other words I can't advance the MSQ until I upgrade my gear. A requirement that wouldn't affect most players, but I'm really bad at the game and don't like running duties with other players.

I do have a solution. I don't even need to run anymore dungeons to get the gear if I want to pay through the nose for the crafting materials I need now. But, I don't want to spend another ridiculous amount of gil. So all roads lead to grinding through patch 7.2's regular 4-character duty, The Underkeep.

My preferred option is to craft the new iLvl 740 Ceremonial set for white mage. Unlike the last 4 duties and 2 trials introduced in Dawntrail and patch 7.1, The Underkeep and Recollection are not item sync'd. A positive since I need all the help I can get. But in order to get the Allagan Tomestones of Heliometry I need to avoid spending all my gil, I need to run The Underkeep. Many, many times. I currently have 296 with each crafting mat costing 20 tomes. I also have 370 of the discontinued Allagan Tomestones of Aesthetics which I can trade in for the tomestones I need. Hopefully the exchange rate is 1 for 1. Either way, I only get 80 Allagan Tomestones of Heliometry if I defeat all three bosses in a run.

Since I have to grind The Underkeep I might as well attempt to get one or two pieces of the new iLvl 750 gear purchasable with Allagan Tomestones of Mathematics. I probably need to do so to prevent running into a gear wall in future point releases. But with a limit of 450 tomestones per week I may not have enough patience to get a full set. Killing the last boss of The Underkeep also grants 50 Allagan Tomestones of Mathematics.

One benefit of grinding The Underkeep is the duty drops iLvl 725 gear. So while I'm striving to get the top sets for white mage I can also gear up my other classes with the drops not useful for my white mage. And, perhaps most importantly, my two white mage retainers. Currently both are at iLvl 670. For bringing back materials the highest effective at the end of patch 7.1 was iLvl 715. If I can get both to iLvl 725 the retainers will bring back 15 Gomphotherium Skins or Gargantua Hides instead of the current 5. A big improvement.

One important feature I haven't mentioned is the difficulty factor. Yes, I didn't finish the duty on my first time through. But I think, unlike the last few duties and trials released, I actually have the ability to learn the fights. Also, the fact The Underkeep doesn't have item syncing also helps. So if I can get my completion time down to 35 minutes or so farming the duty to support my crafting habit I won't mind too much.

I pretty much have 4 weeks in my schedule to get all the grinding done. Once Cosmic Exploration launches and Fanfest is over I want to get away from combat and opening up the stars (or at least moons). Because while some people play for the raiding, this content is just something I have to do to get to the fun stuff.

I Bought Into The Star's Reach Kickstarter

Well, I finally did it. Despite covering the financial situation of Cloud Imperium Games I went ahead and backed a game on Kickstarter. Star's Reach, a game under development by Playable Worlds, finishes up its Kickstarter campaign tomorrow and I jumped onboard last night.

I decided to buy the $30 package, the cheapest I could get while still having the ability to play the development build. That puts me up to the cap on my alpha game budget of $50 (I paid $19.99 for EVE Frontier) so don't ask me to pay for another game. I have too many to play and write about now.

In many ways, the negative coverage Frontier receives led me to check out the Star's Reach Kickstarter. People are losing their ever-loving minds over CCP Games' selling cosmetics packages for $100 (off 30% for a limited time!) and I decided to check out the offerings from Playable Worlds. 

Look, I understand. I really do. Companies need money. But I'm not paying $20 for a SKIN and a pretty portrait for a game still in alpha much less $100. Not even after looking at the prices for Star's Reach Kickstarter packages as a comparison.

Selected packages below $250

Two things stood out to me. The first is pets. I started getting flashbacks to Black Desert Online when Kakao published the game in North America. The pets from the cash shop were so overpowered in looting, making them almost mandatory purchases. Pearl Abyss did tone down the cash shop greed when they began self-publishing BDO world-wide, but the damage was already done to my memories.

The expensive packages

The second was how much people were willing to spend. With about 24 hours to go before the campaign closed here is how many of the most expensive packages were sold.

• Wormgate Trader ($1500) - 4
• Nebula Surfer ($2000) - 25
• Tech Runner ($2250) - 4
• Guild Patron ($5000) - 6
• Galactic Plenipotentiary ($10,000) - 5

Those 44 people combined for $145,000 towards Playable Worlds' goal of $200,000 for the Kickstarter campaign. Overall, those 1% of Kickstarter backers contributed 22% of total funding. Including those who purchased the $995 and $1050 packages, 2% of backers contributed nearly $193,000 or 29% of the funding. A real life example of how whales can fund a game. Hopefully the 99 people who purchased the $800 package aren't offended by not being called whales. Include them and the percentages go up to 4% of backers paid in 41% of the Kickstarter total.

And, I'm one of the people who has contributed to a Kickstarter MMORPG now. My only previous experience was with Andrew Groen's Empires of EVE books. Hopefully my experience with Star's Reach will prove equally satisfying.

FFXIV's Gearset Command Was Solution 8

Final Fantasy XIV is currently down as Square Enix prepares to launch patch 7.2 on Tuesday. I was dutifully preparing for the patch Saturday night until I noticed something I'd forgotten. I still had 2272 white crafting scrips I needed to exchange for an equal number of purple crafting scrips, and I only had a little more than 72 hours to retrieve them.

Sure, I could have purchased 10 crafting materia XIs and called it a day. But the true end game of FFXIV is glamour so I decided to spend them on crafting glamour gear instead. I saw so many good looking glamour sets on Eorzea Collection for crafters that I figured since I had to spend the scrips anyway, why not to fix my glamour game?

Now, I did face a problem. All 8 crafting jobs use the same gear except for primary and secondary tools. Since the glams I was looking at all had class-specific pieces, I would need to manually apply the glams every time I switched classes unless I could come up with a solution.

My solution was to modify the Snap macro I use to change my jobs. The basis of the macro is the /snap emote which lets your character snap their fingers over their head like Emet-Selch. I played around and came up with this macro:

/macroicon "Armorer" classjob

/snap

/wait 1

/gs change 8 4

/wait 1

What exactly does the macro do? Here's a line-by-line breakdown.

Line 1: Each macro can have an icon to identify the macro if placed on one of the action bars. For my combat jobs I use things like Soul of the Whte Mage, Soul of the Dragoon, etc. But the crafting classes don't have fancy items I can use. Instead, the command sets the generic crafting class icon. In the above example the icon is set to the Armorer icon.

Line 2: The command to execute the Snap emote.

Line 3: Set a one second delay before executing any other command. This allows the command to execute cleanly.

Line 4: This is the gearset command. Gearset needs to know what type of action to perform. In my macro I am changing two things, the job/class and the glamour plate used.

The job/class is found by going to character window and clicking on the icon to display your list of jobs/classes. The number on the list is the first number. The second number is more intuitive to find. Just go to the glamour window and enter the plate number. So in the above example, Armorer is the eighth entry on the list and plate four will be active.

Line 5: Set a one second delay before executing any other command. This allows the command to execute cleanly. Without setting the delay the macro didn't work from an action bar.

An experienced macro creator is probably looking at the macro and suggesting ways to make the macro shorter. First, the /macroicon command can be shortened to /micon. Next, the 1 second waits I included can go on the same lines as the slash commands. A cleaned up version of the macro would look something like the below:

/micon "Armorer" classjob

/snap <wait.1>

/gs change 8 4 <wait.1>

I have two arguments in my defense. The first is by making the macro like I did I could more easily explain how the macro works. Understanding usually is better than blind copy/pasting of code. The second is, I got the bloody thing to work and I was in too much of a rush to clean up before logging off for the night. Better to have something in place that works than something pretty you didn't have time to adequately test. Although, to be honest, the cleaned up code above should work.

I did manage to stock up on enough orange and purple scrips and craft enough collectables to fulfill my needs on day 1 of patch 7.2. Perhaps more importantly, with the above script I'll look better playing as well.

Cloud Imperium Games' Los Angeles Office Closes

Yesterday news broke out that Cloud Imperium Games, the developers of the upcoming games Squadron 42 and Star Citizen, closed its office in Los Angeles. I do not know if the story came from the r/starcitizen sub-Reddit or came because the author of the piece is a member of The Chairman's Club.

Image taken from Reddit

In a newsletter to members of The Chairman's Club (customers who have purchased $1000 or more in goods from CIG's cash shop), CIG is closing the Los Angeles office in order to "make sure our developers are right where they need to be for the final stretch, which means moving key staff to be closer to their teams and counterparts in other studios."

The closing of the Los Angeles office was first officially broached by Chris Roberts in his response to the news of layoffs at Cloud Imperium at the beginning of 2024. However, at the time Roberts only referred to development staff. In a Letter from the Chairman published in March 2024 Roberts informed the world about plans for the Los Angeles office.

As part of this development re-organization, we have made a few significant changes. From a personal standpoint I have moved to Austin, Texas from Los Angeles to be closer in time zone to our main development operations in Manchester, Frankfurt, and Montreal. I am spending significant time at our largest studio in Manchester with almost 600 staff, as I sit with Rich and the teams, working towards completion on Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. As part of this, we made the difficult decision to ask the Los Angeles development team, which had increasingly been providing support for the main development teams based in Manchester, to relocate to join other teams, primarily in Manchester, but also in Austin and Montreal. Los Angeles, while shrinking, will still be an important office for the company, but one focusing on a business support role with Marketing, Finance, Legal and HR.

By January the information that the Los Angeles office would remain important began to appear optimistic. Two key HR leaders based out of the L.A. office were quietly removed from the About page on CIG's corporate website. In October 2024  Francesca McKibben, the vice-president of human resources in the U.S., left the company, moving over to LinkedTree. Sometime between the beginning of October and beginning of December Eric Kieron Davis, formerly Cloud Imperium's Chief People Officer, was also removed. Since I first posted the news in January, Davis' LinkedIn page was either deleted or otherwise made inaccessible.

In February another Los Angeles-based member of Cloud Imperium's leadership team was removed from the About page. Chief Marketing Officer Elliot Chin is also no longer listed with no replacement listed on the CIG corporate website.

With both the global leaders of HR and Marketing based in Los Angeles departing their roles, the writing was on the wall for the office. While the information possibly only comes from Reddit, I'm going to go ahead and believe it. Hopefully my judgement is correct because I really hate writing retractions.

CCP Games' Carbon Engine Moves To Python 3

With the latest update to the Trinity graphics engine going live on EVE Online's Tranquility server on Tuesday, I thought the time was right to bring up another significant update to CCP Games' Carbon Engine: the move from Stackless Python to Python 3 back in mid-February. But unlike other major technical changes in the EVE Evolved series, the change came from a highly reviled source by some quarters of the gaming media. That's right, the change came from the team making EVE Frontier.

The developers of the Carbon Engine ran into a serious problem: the lack of support for Stackless Python. According to a dev blog from the Frontier team, Stackless Python would not progress any farther than Python 3.8. A real problem as a look at the Python developers guide shows the end of life for Python 3.8 was October 2024.

The end of life of Python's major releases

CCP has a long history with Stackless Python but had reached a fork in the road. Either maintain Stackless Python 3.8 themselves or migrate to the main development line of Python 3. This, of course, presented a major challenge.

Over the years, CCP has been a major contributor to the Stackless Python fork but it has been stuck on a maximum of Python 3.8 for some time now, which gave us two options if we were to continue the development of EVE Frontier as a game for the next 20 years (and beyond):

1.) Maintain Stackless Python fork ourselves

2.) Move towards vanilla Python 3

At this point I should mention the same challenge for development also faced the team of developers working on EVE Online. The upgrade was not an easy, or quick, task.

Around 4 million lines of Python code and 1 million lines of C++ code make up the EVE Frontier client and server. Many of these needed to be updated or completely changed.

Python 3 is a major upgrade but contained a number of backwards-incompatible changes. Many of these have a very simple migration path, such as changes to print statements which transforms to print "hello world!" to print("hello world!") . However others were more complicated, such as division changing from being an integer division to a floating-point division (in this case we can, at the cost of code readability and a small performance cost, do a safe transformation).

Veteran EVE players probably winced at the thought of the effect those small changes potentially would have on the game if not performed properly. Or, at least on EVE Online as those playing in Frontier wouldn't feel the effects as they didn't have experience with changing outcomes of formulas.

In addition, other challenges arose: some things no longer work. For example you can’t compare two types that aren’t comparable. This had historical reasoning but in our development we have come across code where sorting list of tuples sees the second element being not comparable. We also have C++ code that is exposed to Python and that interface changed quite a bit between Python versions. For example any code written and compiled for Python 2 does not work for Python 3.

These and similar issues have already been found and fixed, however there may be more lurking in code that is seldomly executed or only executed in a production environment.

I think with the relaxation of the NDA I can mention I was involved in the test phase in which the developers flipped the switch to run the version of the Carbon Engine using Python 3. Trust me, I'd rather the testing continue on the Frontier servers.

The amount of work was staggering:

• 4 million lines of Python code made Python 3 compatible
• 5840 files modified
• 80,564 lines changed
• 18,461 lines added
• 16,305 lines deleted
• All C++ interfaces to Python now compatible with a Python 3 interpreter
• The developers rewrote a large portion of the network stack
• Implemented a new scheduler to work with greenlets
• Upgraded all of of the developers tools to use Python 3

Finally, the conclusion from the Frontier dev blog.

Estimating performance improvements in a complex product such as Frontier is difficult. When we do measurements on certain code paths we can see improvements in some and regression in others. However, what the net effect it has depends on how often those code paths are executed.

You could get some numbers if we had consistent load before and after the Python 3 upgrade but that is not the case for Frontier. That being said, what we can clearly see in our numbers is that when we measure more complicated code paths, such as multiple users logging in or weapons being fired we are seeing between 10% to 30% performance increase.

An impressive result, especially when considering we are still developing EVE Frontier itself in a live environment! You could say we have been replacing the engine while the car is running. A massive undertaking the payoff is huge: EVE Frontier is now running smoothly on Python 3.12, setting the stage for all future development.

EVE Online is still to my knowledge utilizing Stackless Python 3.8. One of the items I'm hoping to hear at the upcoming EVE Fanfest at the beginning of May is when the upgraded engine will hit the Tranquility shard. But for now I'll have to settle for logging back into the alpha test for EVE Frontier.

EDIT - 21 March 2025: Someone let me know that EVE Online is still using Python 2.7, which based on a dev blog was implemented 15 years ago. The end of life of Python 2.7 was January 2021.

EVE Online's Trinity Graphics Engine Receives An Upgrade

Yesterday CCP Games introduced a major upgrade to its Carbon Engine. The graphics engine, known as Trinity, now utilizes a GPU-Driven Rendering Pipeline in on EVE Online's global game shard known as Tranquility. 

Revenant just got a major update, and the evolution continues. New Eden now moves faster, flows smoother, and feels more vibrant than ever. The new GPU-Driven Rendering Pipeline is now live, boosting performance and unlocking a more responsive, immersive experience for DirectX 12 and macOS. Battles unfold with greater fluidity, your ship reacts with razor-sharp precision, and the vastness of space stretches before you with even greater clarity.

This is not just an upgrade – it’s evolution in motion. With an average of 10-30% higher FPS in busy scenes, every decision, every dogfight, and every daring escape is now sharper, faster, and more thrilling than ever. And this is only the beginning, paving the way for even more graphical enhancements in the future.

The concept of the GPU-Driven Rendering Pipeline was first introduced at Fanfest 2023.

At Fanfest 2023 a future vision for some of planned changes was presented. One of these features, known as a GPU Driven Pipeline, is a technical change in the way the CPU and GPU work together. Traditionally, rendering a scene involves the CPU figuring out what to send to the GPU, and then the GPU doing the work. While the linked presentation goes into more detail, a more modern rendering pipeline allows the GPU to do more of these calculations overall, reducing the CPU overhead. This is great for a few reasons:

• EVE is often CPU-bound, meaning the CPU is the limiting factor and not the GPU. Freeing up the CPU in these situations can be very beneficial.
• A modern GPU can render more frames with this approach – it’s just simply faster due to the advances DirectX 12 (Windows) and Metal (macOS) offer with modern GPUs.
• It makes adding or changing features in the codebase easier, allowing improvements to reach capsuleers faster. In addition, it simplifies processes for artists bringing new assets to the game.

I've also embedded the video below, which should begin at the 30:04 mark.

One usually has to do a bit of searching for how CCP came up with the computation of a 10%-30% higher GPS as the result of yesterday's changes. EVE players are usually interested in details like this.

When changes are made to Trinity, a dedicated tool called “EVE Probe” is used. It has one job: to allow testing of just the rendering and audio engines. It’s a lightweight application that excludes other systems needed to play EVE Online, such as UI, network stack, or even keyboard and mouse input! This approach enables reliable performance testing outside the chaotic live server environment.

One of our most popular test scenes is called the “Cube of Death,” which has been covered in previous dev blogs. In short, the test features 1,000 evenly spaced and stationary ships. They can also shoot at each other, resulting in mesmerizing visuals! It’s proven effective for clear before-and-after performance comparisons.

The dev blog also provided performance upgrades for a selection of computer setups.

One item I do wonder about. Would CCP have gone through the labor of upgrading the Trinity graphics engine if EVE Frontier, the blockchain game currently under development, weren't also using the Carbon Engine? With both Online and Frontier using the same game engine, did CCP manage to get the crypto investors to pay for an upgrade to the original game?

Going back and watching the clip from Fanfest 2023 was a reminder than the task took around a year longer than anticipated. Unless the coding was done and the developers took 9-12 months to test and tweak the graphics engine. I like the latter thought a lot better.

I'll conclude with the conclusion from the dev blog from two weeks ago.

The move to a GPU Driven Pipeline required significant refactoring of Trinity, but it sets EVE up nicely for the development of more features, unlocking better performance, and increasing graphical fidelity in the future. You may already have seen some of these improvements in mass tests last year, such as upscaling and raytraced shadows. Although not ready for release to Tranquility yet, these tests validated the approach taken. A huge thank you goes out to everyone who participated in the tests last year and this past weekend. Your contribution really helps!

With the GPU now used more efficiently, more situations in the client will be GPU-limited (even though the overall framerate is higher). Upscaling solutions will enable even higher framerates in these scenarios. More details on that will follow in future dev blogs.

Looking Forward To FFXIV's Cosmic Explorations

Last Friday I learned what I'll spend a lot of time doing in Final Fantasy XIV over the next 12-18 months: Cosmic Explorations. Sounding a lot like Shadowbringers' Ishgard Restoration, Cosmic Explorations not only will provide group content for crafters and gatherers but their enhanced tools for Dawntrail as well.

Content for gatherers and crafters level 10 and up who have completed the MSQ quest Dawntrail, players begin building a base on the moon with the release of patch 7.21 on 22 April, meaning I have a very short time to try out the content before jetting off to Iceland for EVE's Fanfest. But with patch 7.3 scheduled to come out sometime in July I should have time to catch up to most people.

One major improvement over Ishgard Restoration is a separate inventory space to hold the resources used during the event. I was so glad the developers addressed the inventory space issue. Not bad for gatherers, but for crafters? I had to dedicate so much inventory space for the materials I would use in the crafting portion.

The cosmo missions themselves are generally solo affairs. Think of guild leves except without the requirement to go back to the quest giver to turn in the items.

Emergency missions, on the other hand, are done by everyone in the area, sort of like a FATE. When the gauge at the top is filled the emergency ends. Each step in the emergency mission will provide rewards, with additional rewards assessed at the end.

The next type of mission is called Mech Ops. One lucky player will get to man the mining mech while everyone else plays in support. I say lucky because Cosmic Exploration will have a special currency used to bid on getting to use the mech. Those who lose the mech lottery will not only get their money back but an enhanced chance to win the next lottery.

The final type of mission are Critical Missions. I'm not sure if all emergency missions are critical missions, but I know that Critical Missions are brought about by the weather. I'm pretty sure we are not witnessing a return of The Final Days as we took care of that particular threat in Endwalker. But Critical Missions are another type of mission done with others.

Of course, what's an event without a little competition? Every two days players compete for the title of Star Contributor. Winning the title also grants a buff for 14 days along with some sort of marking while exploring. How many people want a hologram of their character in the main base camp?

One problem I foresee for the developers is that crafters and gatherers can begin working on their enhanced tools starting in patch 7.21 while those wanting relic weapons can't begin their grind until patch 7.25 a month later. But the combat players did it to themselves by insisting on having a Bojza-type area. Oh well, I'll need to work on upgrading 11 total tools so I won't have much time to waste listening to the complaints.

One last thing. I probably won't shut down my Island Sanctuary over this, but Cosmic Explorations have at least one new dye color. The color is Metallic Cobalt Green. I look for new dyes and where one shows up can I hope for more? I really would like a nice metallic purpose I can earn from playing the game and not just from visiting the cash shop.

During Shadowbringers I didn't reach the end of the MSQ until patch 5.4 so missed out on the first half of Ishgard Restoration. During Endwalker I became distracted decorating my new cottage and had to hurry to catch up to obtaining the expansion's tools. This expansion hopefully I can play with the crafting and gathering content when not progressing the main story questline and stay involved that way.