Lords of Space

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 at the bottom of this post!

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!

Ok I’m a new blog that doesn’t mean I can’t start participating in the blog-arena with the other eve-celebrities, and so I’ve decided I’ll start participating in the blog banters . This topic really strikes a cord because I’m an Iphone owner who hates Apples, in fact I’m a macbook and iPhone owner who hates Apple (don’t ask it’s a long story). But the fact is I sincerly think people are underestimating the power of modern phone gaming. Look at the iPhone 3GS and even the ZuneHD (it’s not a phone but I can almost gaurantee we’ll see a phone version eventually of it with similar hardware).

We’re talking small devices with the power of small computers. yes eve is a big game, theirs no doubt, but the fact of the matter is its doable. Yes right clicking is an issue, but really eve on the iphone wouldn’t be for those people that want to go ganking in highsec and need lightning reflexes it’d be for traveling a bit or doing a trade run while on the train with your 3G. Lower res textures, lower poly models and the new hardware being released on the latest smart phones, could easily handle a eve-micro platform. Things would have to be different for sure it wouldnt be just a shrunken copy of eve. You’d have to make collapseable chat tabs and work on a multitouch input to make control as easy as possible.

Connectivity is an issue, but to be honest, I live in the caribbean and our cellular internet is about as stable as our home internet trust me I work for an ISP. So why not? All online games have to deal with their environments, ya you can loose ships from internet cutting but thats the same at home, and really if your using a mobile client chances are your going to play a bit safer in highsec even.

People tend to shoot lower than they need to when they look into their imagination of whats possible, sure porting cosmos and an IRC style chat for talking to friends, and even skill maintenance would all be doable and probably easily deployed to the most hardware platforms, but i stand to visualize the farthest something like this could go with the state of the latest technology, why not have a eve-client on the iphone properly done with opengl, with optimized textures and sounds and models to reduce load and size, i dont see why it wouldn’t be atleast feasable and for those Capsuleers like myself that sit around 23/7 thinking about eve it’d be awesome!