I've been building out historical sovereignty playback in EO-Map and this was too tempting not to try.
This is New Eden from 23 June 2007 through to today, played back chronologically. Nothing particularly clever was done for the video itself beyond recording the map and adding the music. This is basically just the sovereignty history playback running from start to finish.
I've always preferred the 3D map because jump ranges and the actual shape of New Eden make more sense that way
But people like 2D maps, so I figured I should probably add a 2d button
Turns out watching the whole universe flatten itself is quite satisfying
A year ago today I posted the first screenshot of EF-Map, my map and route planner for EVE Frontier. It was a 3D star field with a search box and three tick boxes, and that was the entire tool.
It only exists because of a scouting problem. I was trying to work out a sensible order to visit a couple of hundred stars and the in-game map is not built for that, so before the map existed I made a thing that had no map in it at all. Just a start system and a radius, and it would grind away in a browser tab trying to shorten the route. I am not a developer by trade, I am a vibe coder, and that project was mostly me learning how to get an LLM to produce something that runs and then how to put it on the internet at all.
The reason I am posting rather than just quietly having an anniversary is that I went digging for old screenshots and found that a couple of the early deployments never got taken down. They still load and they still work, so you can open the first week of it, click about, then open the current one and compare.
The thing that surprised me most going back through it is how little the layout moved. Routing turned up on launch day itself, about five hours after I shipped a feature that measured the distance between two stars, and by three weeks old it already had the rail down the left and the routing panel roughly where it sits now. Almost everything since has been the same handful of ideas getting deeper rather than anything new appearing on screen.
Screenshots in order: launch day, the first week once routing landed, three weeks old, and today. Links to the old builds are in the comments.
Full write-up with the git history is on the blog if anyone wants it: ef-map.com/blog/ef-map-one-year-old-early-builds-still-live
So hair grows at roughly 1.25 cm a month and no patch has ever changed that, which makes FC Goodfella's head the only part of the launch pipeline with a fixed, auditable release cadence. It seemed wrong not to track it.
Each Friday stream capture is run through my proprietary follicular photogrammetry pipeline, which is a fancy way of saying I count hair pixels. The current capture came back at stage 2 of 6, stubble, so mullet completion sits at 8%. I should caveat that we only have a front quarter angle so far, rear telemetry is unconfirmed, so the confidence interval on the party in the back is honestly enormous.
The forecast side converts stage progress into launch windows. A short modern mullet needs 3 to 6 months of growth, which puts earliest possible launch at November 2026. The full rocker is 9 to 12 plus months, and the plus is open-ended, which anyone who has followed game development will find familiar. The windows tighten automatically as the mullet develops, so launch precision improves every Friday.
I've also added it to the site's llms.txt, the file AI assistants read to learn what EF-Map does. So when someone asks ChatGPT when EVE Frontier launches, there is now a nonzero chance it cites the back of Goodfella's head as a primary source. Genuinely might be my most impactful SEO work this year.
Panel is live at https://ef-map.com/?panel=mullet-check with a grow your own tab if you want to run the program in solidarity. Readings update after every Friday stream, and if the hair regresses I will report that too. The data has to be honest even when the mullet is not.
Fenris Creations is based in Reykjavík, so when I rebuilt EF-Map's translation pipeline and added German, it felt slightly ridiculous that Icelandic was still missing. It probably should have been the first language rather than the seventh.
It also turned out to be the hardest language of the lot for the models. It got there eventually. EF-Map now has 2,665 Icelandic strings covering the interactive app, including the map, routing, killboard and the rest of the player-facing panels.
I am not pretending there is massive demand for this. But if you want to fully commit to the bit and fly around the Frontier while your interface tells you about Leiðarleit and Kortalög, the option now exists.
If your browser is set to Icelandic, EF-Map should switch automatically. Everyone else can select Íslenska under Display Settings.
This is machine translated using the surrounding interface as context. It should be reasonably close, but Icelandic was difficult and close is not the same as correct. If you speak Icelandic and find something completely cursed, let me know.
I wrote up the overnight translation exercise here:
https://ef-map.com/blog/translating-six-months-eve-frontier-localisation
There was a discussion today about what travelling inside an Alcubierre warp bubble would actually look like. Somebody had generated an AI video of it, but it was basically the usual glowing sci-fi tunnel and didn't seem to have much connection to the actual physics.
So I went back and read Müller and Weiskopf's 2011 paper on null and time like geodesics in the Alcubierre warp spacetime, by read I mean looked at the pictures, then had a go at applying its results to EF-Map's Flythrough mode
Paper:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.5650
There is now an optional Alcubierre optics checkbox in the Flythrough camera settings - It changes the apparent direction, brightness and colour of the stars as you travel. Light from ahead is angularly distorted, slightly blueshifted and slightly brightened, while behind you the redshift and dimming are much stronger. There is also a Look behind button so you can turn around and inspect the rear field.
The video shows it running at several different Flythrough speeds, with the optics switched on and off for comparison.
It is an approximation rather than a complete general-relativistic simulation. The paper's calculated range stops at 9c, while Flythrough moves across the map at completely absurd coordinate speeds, from hundreds of millions to more than a hundred billion times the speed of light. I therefore compress the LY/s readout logarithmically onto the paper's 0.5c to 9c range.
The paper obtains its images by numerically integrating null geodesics, frequency shift and lensing, then storing the results in a lookup table. I haven't recreated that full numerical pipeline. EF-Map instead uses simpler analytic functions for angular distortion, brightness and colour shift which preserve the important fixed points and reproduce the same qualitative front and rear behaviour.
The full speed mapping, formulas, source material and limitations are all documented in EF-Map's Flythrough help section. It is intended to give a reasonable idea of the view from inside the bubble, not to claim that this is an exact reproduction of the paper's ray tracer.
It started as a response to a Discord discussion, but I thought the result was interesting enough to share.
Welcome to another episode of EF-Map features nobody asked for but I wanted to build anyway. This one is called the Universalizer. You point it at whatever audio you're playing, a music tab, your whole system audio, even a microphone, and the entire star map dances to it. Bass sends waves rolling out from the galactic centre, every beat fires a ripple towards the rim, and the gate lines move with the stars they connect. The camera stays free the whole time so you can sit zoomed out watching the galaxy bounce edge-on, or dive into a cluster and float about inside it while it moves. That's what the video is.
It's in the Tools Library under Games, or just go to https://ef-map.com/?panel=universalizer Pick a source, and if you're sharing a tab or screen remember to tick the "also share audio" box in the picker or it will sit there in silence. There's a gain slider if your source is quiet. Tab and screen capture only works in Chrome or Edge because Firefox and Safari won't hand over audio, though the microphone option works anywhere.
All the movement happens on the GPU, the roughly 24,000 stars never actually change position, so it runs fine even in performance mode and everything snaps back exactly where it was when you stop. Star clicking pauses while it's running so you don't select something by accident.
So yeah, zero practical value, quite fun to watch. Let me know if anything breaks.
This probably only means anything to people in the UK, but Argos has just been sold for £120 million.
Fenris Creations bought itself back from Pearl Abyss for $120 million, which is roughly £89 million at the current exchange rate.
So broadly speaking, the company behind EVE Online and EVE Frontier changed hands for about the same sort of money as the entire Argos business.
Obviously the deals are not directly comparable. The Argos figure includes deferred payments, while part of the Fenris deal was reportedly paid in EVE Frontier tokens, and neither sale price is a perfect measure of what the business is actually worth.
Still, seeing the two figures beside each other puts the scale of the Fenris deal into perspective. Argos is one of those brands that feels enormous if you grew up in the UK, with stores everywhere and catalogues in nearly every house, but the whole chain has now sold for a figure in broadly the same range as FC!
I now say please to the AI a third as often as I did in September. Sorry has not budged.
I use voice dictation for pretty much everything I say to an AI agent, and the tool keeps a copy of every recording. I went digging through it for something unrelated and realised I had 14,625 recordings sitting there. 2.26 million words, 332 hours of audio, from August last year to this week.
Please went from about 21 uses per 10,000 words in the first few months down to around 8. Sorry went nowhere, bouncing between 5.0 and 8.3 per 10,000 words the whole way with no real trend. The two lines meet in February and travel together after that, so the deliberate politeness faded until it hit the level of the involuntary kind. Most of my sorries are me correcting myself mid sentence, "the routing panel, sorry, the routing window", which I suspect is why they survived.
Both lines are rates per 10,000 words, so this is not just my messages getting longer. They did get longer though, median went from 89 words to 164 over the same period, which was the opposite of what I would have guessed.
Usual caveats. These are literal word counts over raw transcripts, so anything I phrased differently is missed and there are transcription errors in there. Happy to be told I have read too much into it.
I posted an earlier version of this here about two weeks ago, when I had just rebuilt the star rendering and selective bloom for my Three.js map of the EVE Frontier universe.
I apparently wasn’t finished.
Since then I have added a procedural universe-effects layer built around the actual distribution of the 24,000+ star systems rather than using a static background.
The denser stellar regions now drive an unresolved stellar-density glow, with volumetric interstellar dust and gas layered through the galaxy and separate dark extinction structures cutting through the brighter regions.
The part I have probably spent the most time on is getting all of that to behave coherently while the camera moves. The volumetric effects are sampled in world space and the extinction layer needed additional sub-stepping and filtering to stop fine structure visibly changing or fading as the camera moved through different viewing angles.
I also reworked the stellar events. Supernovae, novae and pulsars are anchored to stars in the actual map, and their emitted light now feeds into the interstellar-medium rendering so nearby gas and dust visibly illuminate when an event occurs rather than the event just being an isolated sprite/effect on top of the scene.
The original spectral bloom system is still there as well. Individual stars have emissive intensity derived from their spectral properties, so hotter/brighter stars seed more bloom, but I ended up rebuilding that path too so distant stars retained the same relative hierarchy without all of them turning into equally sized glowing blobs.
This video is a continuous slow orbit captured from the live site rather than a scripted camera sequence. The first minute or so has a little narration, then I just let the ambient track and the simulation run.
My graphics card continues to hate me.
I run EF-Map, a browser-based map for the EVE Frontier universe, and I have spent the last few days rebuilding its cinematic mode in Three.js.
The star colours are based on blackbody temperature, with each star also receiving a spectral emissive value, so hotter stars are given more bloom than cooler ones. Dense clusters use additive blending, while selective bloom keeps the nebula background from becoming washed out.
The camera is running an automated orbit around one of the denser regions of the map. This is an 83-second capture from the live site.
My graphics card hates me, but I think it was worth it.
This is from a routing tool I built for an EVE Frontier map. The problem is not just find a path. It is two related graph searches layered together.
The green pass is finding a permanent infrastructure corridor. It uses Dijkstra over a graph where edges are valid if two star systems are within the range of a buildable gate type. Those gates are range limited, but otherwise straightforward.
The orange pass is then solving the access problem, how do players actually reach the systems where those gates need to be built? That uses a different graph, because the temporary one-way Catapult jumps in game have an extra geometric constraint. An edge is only valid if no other star lies inside the sphere whose diameter is the origin destination segment. In graph terms, it is basically a Gabriel graph / empty-diameter-sphere test over the 3D star positions.
So the first search answers “what should the finished corridor look like?” and the second answers “how do we physically get to the build sites under stricter movement rules?”
In the video, the interesting bit is around dense clusters. The green permanent corridor can span through them because gates do not care about that interference rule, but the orange Catapult access search has to route around blocked direct jumps.
Putting the cat among the pigeons a bit, because this is one of those EVE Frontier topics that could eventually matter to normal EVE Online players.
To be clear, I have not seen any announcement of this. I am asking the hypothetical.
Right now PLEX is basically one way real money value. You can buy PLEX with cash, sell it for ISK, use it for Omega, NES items, services, etc. What you cannot do, within the rules, is go the other way and sell your PLEX, ISK or assets back out for real money. That is RMT and gets you nuked.
EVE Frontier is different. It is being built around LUX as the in-game currency, $EVE as the token layer, and an economy where in-game activity creates demand for things like lenses and fuel. Fenris/CCP has also just gone independent again, and the buyout reportedly included a token-related component. So it does not feel insane to ask whether PLEX and $EVE eventually meet somewhere.
Suppose at some point Fenris introduces a formal PLEX to $EVE conversion, or some other bridge between EVE Online premium value and the Frontier token economy.
Would that change anything for you?
Would you carry on treating PLEX as game time and a store of ISK value?
Would you cash some out if there was a legitimate route?
Would you expect PLEX prices to go mad?
Would you worry about botting/RMT pressure getting worse?
Would you see it as just PLEX doing what PLEX has always done, but with an official exit path?
Or would you hate the idea entirely because it links EVE Online to crypto more directly?
I know the word crypto usually kills the conversation here, but I think the PLEX angle is the interesting part. EVE already has dollars to PLEX to ISK. The missing step has always been a legal ISK/PLEX back to dollars path.
Would that be good, bad, or just another Monday?
A wee 20 second clip from EF-Map, the live map I built for EVE Frontier.
It treats the universe as a graph: 24,000 star systems as nodes, connections as edges, then finds the shortest route between any two points in seconds.
Useful for players, but honestly I mostly just like watching the network light up.
I built this using EF-Map, a third-party map tool for EVE Frontier.
Each point is a solar system. The colour is derived from the system name itself, rather than geography, region or player activity. In this view, systems are grouped by a selected character position in the name, which reveals surprisingly structured spatial patterns in the generated universe.
Data source: EVE Frontier system map data
Visualisation: EF-Map
Rendering: Three.js / WebGL
This is a map replay of every indexed kill from the current EVE Frontier cycle so far.
The cycle started on 11 March and this capture covers 5,293 kills over 98 days, compressed into a 60 second playback. Each red flash is a kill event at its recorded solar system location.
Data source: EF-Map Killboard data, indexed from the EVE Frontier / Sui event stream.
Visualisation: EF-Map, using the in-game solar system map and a time-compressed kill replay.
The feature is live on EF-Map if anyone wants to play with different time windows: https://ef-map.com/
I’ve been working on a procedural Star System View for EF-Map, a map/tooling project for EVE Frontier.
The reason it is procedurally generated is scale. EVE Frontier has over 24,000 star systems, plus a huge number of planets, moons, asteroid belts and orbital zones, so this cannot really be hand-authored system by system. The view is generated from actual game data instead.
The database gives EF-Map the system layout, star data, planets, moons, belts, orbital zones and other objects. The renderer then turns that into a stylised 3D view for each system.
Some of the generated pieces include:
It is not meant to be a perfect physical simulation. The underlying values stay data-backed, but the view is a readable/cinematic map projection so players can inspect a system more easily.
Short video showing the current version below.