Technology Update

The 1.6 incursion patch is something I've been waiting for a long time.  A patch where CCP vissibly removes old defunct code and assets from the client.  Things have evolved since CCP first made EVE online.  Various parts of the artwork have been addressed over time (the Trinity series of updates).  But the framework on which it all hung together was written back in the day (I suspect certain programmers have been horrified when they refactored some of it to discover that parts were "prof of concept" code (with all the shortcuts that entails) pressed into service as production code.  This update is finally replacing a lot of that older code with a much more thought out structure.  We can see this by the fact that the download is about 550 megs but the client won't appreciably increase in size.  Putting in the new but cleaning out the old at the same time.

There's no shiny doodad to show off the new code this time.  But framework changes are rarely flashy in and of themselves, it's the future stuff that makes them good.  Hopefully now the UI designers have the tools to upgrade the interface to something we can be proud of that's intuitive and powerful.  This is the kind of update that can keep a game going indefinitely.

Mind you it's not always the best time to do such things just as you have MAJOR content upgrade barreling down the pipes, but it had to be done.  I suspect CCP will be rather glad when both DUST 514 and INCARNA are out the door and we're back to more regular expansion territory.