OK, so Apocrypha (took a few goes) is now out on TQ.
First off- well done CCPers, you got it out without deleting any INI files and fairly smoothly. Next: WTF, CCPers?
rant do { What the heck is wrong with you? What made you keep the horrid, why-did-they-do-this BITS patcher? Why would you change from a single simple download over HTTP to a broken protocol implemented on top of HTTP that you can’t download using anything but a propietary client? Why, after a huge chunk of the players on Sisi reported huge issues with this patcher and complained like there was no tomorrow, did you keep it in? I’m honestly stunned by that bit of madness.
On a side note, here is a real patch (1.5 gigs), and here‘s the full client. On the topic of gripes (and the reason why I’ve just posted two links instead of one)- CCP, please stop using llwnd. Their CDN is throttled by various ISPs (including BT in the UK), so downloads are terribly slow. Even on calm days downloads cap out at 40kbps, whereas mirroring using wget to my server does at around 2 megs a second and I can download from there at around 800kbps. At least provide some choices, or provide an official torrent of the patch. }
Now, the meat of the topic: Yes, the wormholes are awesome. It’s great to see them finally hit TQ, and the deployment was smooth as anything. Not as much in the way of awesome storyline moments, though- planets exploding managed to be boring in the trailer and the news feed wasn’t anywhere near as edge-of-the-seat as Empyrean. Still, it was a solid effort and didn’t disappoint. It’s good to see most of the bugs got fixed, and some of the more annoying UI gripes are cleaned up.
Also great to see is the welcome introduction of XML import/export of overview settings and fittings. I’ve written a few Ruby modules to parse, edit and write these files which I’ll be publishing as part of my EVE tools gem in the coming days. I finally figured I should roll up all my libraries and tools for EVE and pack them together with appropriate tests, so the overview/fitting parsers, the killmail parser and one or two other neat libraries will be appearing as a package soon via Github. I’m also planning to implement at the least an overview sharing system in EVE Metrics, and possibly fittings later on. The uploader may even get expanded to allow you to submit fittings/overviews quickly and download new ones from the site via a URL handler. So that’s all good.
Looks like the other projector is a dead end. I’m borrowing a more serious multimeter/oscilloscope than what I have to do some further debugging, but the lack of docs is worrying to say the least- hopefully it’s fixable (the power-up issue was a loose connector between the IEC PCB and the power supply PCB, now I get a ‘circuit error’).