No doubt many of you already know CCP Games, the Icelandic development company that brought you the international hit EVE Online. I played EVE back in the day (beta through early release) and loved it. We had tons of fun in the game but left for Lineage 2. Lineage 2 ended up being the most fun we have had in about any MMO ever so we stayed for a while. By the time we actually quit playing Lineage 2 we all felt it was too late to go back to EVE because of the skill training system, skills train over time so if you are not training them it takes forever to catch up and there is nothing you can do to speed it up.

I had some issues with CCP customer support and billing early on. They billed my card for months after I canceled, they were impossible to get to answer the [hone being on Icelandic time, etc. In the end CCP became one of the development houses out there that I respect the most.

CCP just released an article outlining the framework they use to manage, maintain, and develop their games, this framework is called Carbon. They also discuss the Core technology group, or essentially the development group within CCP tasked with maintaining and developing the Carbon framework.

What is Carbon?

As CCP and EVE continue to grow, it makes sense for us to consider our existing technologies and re-use these if appropriate across our projects as part of the Carbon framework. This becomes more appealing if those technologies are proven (or, as we call it, ‘battletested’) in the crucible that is a game being used by a passionate, resourceful and sometimes devious player base. Furthermore, as our new projects continue to mature, we can take the technologies developed by them and apply them to EVE. This means that the EVE development teams get some great new technologies which it hasn’t had to spend any developer time creating. Having the CTG take the strain making this happen ensures the EVE developers can concentrate on developing EVE and make best use of this common technology.

It also makes sense for a central group (the CTG) to build brand new Carbon technologies which we know can be shared. This group can then deploy and support the technology across CCP to whoever needs or wants to use it.

CCP also released a video in this post that takes a look at some of the cool new Carbon character technology  that uses Nvidia Apex. This video shows some of the new hair and fabric shaders that Carbon uses, video capture or not it looks great. Great article and a great read. CCP continues to be on the forefront and I for one am looking forward to the next game they bring to the table.
You can read the whole article here: http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=788

You can check out the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf26ZhHz6uM