'EVE Online''s space survival spinoff uses realistic simulations and algorithms to build a whole new universe (exclusive)

EVE Online has been around for what feels like forever. Launched in 2003, this sci-fi MMORPG has played host to epic spaceship battles and intergalactic heists on a scale that most other multiplayer games can only dream of. Now, the spin-off title EVE Frontier is on the horizon, aiming to take EVE fans on a whole new adventure.

EVE Frontier is an in-development space survival MMO where players will be able to explore a brand-new galaxy, collect resources, unlock more advanced spaceships, and build extensive bases.

Last month, we had the opportunity to chat with CCP Games' Helgi Freyr Rúnarsson and Guðlaugur Jóhannesson, who are both software engineers at the studio with extensive academic backgrounds. Rúnarsson has led "world generation and resource design" in the project and got a PhD in computational astrophysics from Aveiro University while specializing in black hole simulations. As for Jóhannesson, he developed the "physics and backend systems." He also holds a PhD in astrophysics and is a Stanford University postdoc in cosmic-ray and gamma-ray research.

How does CCP Games' new title compare to EVE Online when it comes to simulations and its cosmic scope? How does all that work in tandem with the 'gameplay needs' of a project that is prioritizing fun? They told us in depth about all this and more.

The following interview has been editorialized and trimmed for better flow.

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As a bunch of huge space nerds, the hot topic we were dying to learn more about in relation to EVE Frontier was how the team applied the Barnes-Hut algorithm to successfully simulate a three-galaxy merger, which players could freely explore and take over.

"We're using a full-scale version of that code," Rúnarsson confirmed before going really deep with his explanation of the process: "We have the Hernquist prescription to generate the initial conditions of the galaxies. It's a three-decade-old prescription done by a physicist called Lars Hernquist back in the '80s... He basically came up with nice probability density initial conditions for galaxies to construct them numerically, both their positions and velocities, and all of that stuff."

The second step involves calculating the forces with the Barnes-Hut algorithm: "If you know numerical integration, you have to calculate the forces, and then you have to do the timestamping. Repeat that as many times as you want until you get a nice image..."

While there are more sophisticated ways to simulate a galaxy merger, using a Barnes-Hut simulation does have its advantages, as Rúnarsson explains."This is not like cutting-edge research or algorithms; those are usually around on supercomputers. We ran this on our workstations here at work."

Of course, this is all very impressive and gives EVE Frontier extra credit, but what does the actual game gain from this sort of work? "The only thing that the game actually needs is just the positions of the stars or the particles because we're working in basically a fork of EVE Online. It uses the same hierarchy of a game world where you have a universe with some regions and constellations, and solar systems."

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Unsurprisingly, a popular sci-fi movie came up as a big point of reference: "After some brainstorming sessions, I think they came up with this idea where they're saying 'We've all seen Interstellar; there's this really cool gravitational lensing image. If you Google it, you can find a similar image, but for two black holes. Can you do it for three?' And I say I'm going to look into it... I had some ray tracing codes from my PhD which I changed and hacked into being able to have like a fake three-black-hole solution... I gave some images from that, they threw it to our artists, and a lot of the key art (seen above) from the game is based on that," Rúnarsson explained, noting that there are "quite a few observations of galaxies where three supermassive black holes are at least close enough."

At the center of EVE Frontier, there's an exotic material called 'crude' which must be mined for fuel and other things. It comes from 'rifts' in the EVE universe, but it wasn't inspired by dark matter, or any other known substance. Jóhannesson explained how it's introduced inside the game and what it's used for: "Part of the lore is that the origin of 'crude' is not entirely known. There are special occasions where they poke rifts with these special lasers and get it. It's very unstable but also has a lot of energy stored in it, so we can use it to fuel our spaceship. It's also connected to what we call the 'Stillness' (a sort of quantum field covering the entire Universe). If you're able to connect to that, you can get to faster-than-light travel and communication."

It's all well within the realm of hard science fiction, but Jóhannesson actually pitched the creatives on using dark matter as the fuel for the ships; the problem was that we know too much about it. "We know for certain it's not clumped, and it peaks in the center of the galaxy, and anywhere else it's uniform, so it would not make for good gameplay. That's why we decided to go for a more hardcore sci-fi experience where the origin of it isn't exactly known."

Developing a game based on real science can be a challenge when our understanding of the universe is developing so quickly. Cutting-edge science that you base your project on can be outdated by the time you actually reach the development finish line. That's why Jóhannesson quips that it's "better make something up that's too far in the future to ever be discovered,"

CCP Games' efforts to make EVE Frontier's universe realistic occasionally had to be sacrificed to accommodate the game's systems and mechanics. Jóhannesson was bothered by EVE Online's "very, very low" speed when flying a spaceship, but ended up keeping it in Frontier for gameplay reasons. "In our universe, the physical space has friction; the physics engine is modeled as a Newtonian fluid without gravity. So there's no gravity there, and there's friction. The astrophysicist in me was like, 'This is absolutely insane and stupid, and we can do better.' I started talking to people around me about this, and they were 'Yes, this is unrealistic, but we want the enjoyment of the gameplay.' It also would be very difficult to get faster-than-light travel; you'd have to take relativistic time dilation into account... It wouldn't be much fun, so we implement this very non-scientific frictional movement in space so you can... actually see the stuff around you and can do dogfighting."

Another big one is related to the 'look' of nebulae and other 'space backgrounds', which are jaw-dropping in-game. "When you're within the nebula, that's a very unrealistic image of what it would look like because the space is really low-density material. You need to look through quite a lot of distances before you can actually see all of this nice effect. So I wanted things to look black because space is mostly black, but art decided that wasn't a good idea. So they shut me down again... At least now in Frontier, almost all of the nebulas have some resemblance of a galactic disk in them, so I managed to get that through. But there are a lot of areas where we have to make compromises because we're making a game that should look pretty and be playable."

Rúnarsson, meanwhile, went on to explain "a lot of the universe stuff happens outside the game client or server," revealing a lot is just "static data" that's generated offline and later fed to the server. He brought up an example of the ships' capacitors and how they recharge. The game designers didn't like having the recharge rate tied to the status of the capacitor itself and wanted "a more linear experience."

When Rúnarsson and the rest of the team went in to look at the code to change things up, they found out "it was very obvious that a physicist wrote it because, coming right out of the physics degree, they (physicists) don't use variable names like computer scientists do." Sadly, he said they "had to ruin it basically because our game was supposed to work differently."

Similarly, Rúnarsson and Jóhannesson would've liked to go bigger with the simulation and generation of solar systems: "Technically, with the exact same code that we used to smash three galaxies together, we could have just different initial conditions and run the same code and get some sort of protoplanetary disk that coalesces... That was totally out of bounds in terms of time constraints. We did like a toy model inspired by it... So you're like a kindergartner who's placing planets, making sure it looks kind of nice... What is it that players actually see? It'd be cool if we could've simulated 24,000 solar systems, but the end result is still the same."

Before wrapping up, we also wanted to learn about the 'player-driven systems' and how they work together with all the complexity of the simulated universe. Jóhannesson told us the "base-building component and connection to the blockchain world" means CCP doesn't have "a monolithic power over what happens." There'll be a set of rules in the beginning "to allow people to interact from the Web3 to our game to the game servers and the game itself."

There are rules like gravity to obey, of course, but players can just create systems like hiring someone to move "storage units" across the game universe; this work can later be paid with "blockchain costs or EVE coins, which you can later exchange for something else in-game or outside the game." Generally, the developers are trying to "make consistent rules which players have to obey but can play with."

For the average player, EVE Frontier might just be an expansive space-themed online survival game, but CCP Games is clearly aiming to replicate the success it had with EVE Online when it comes to crafting a believable universe, and it was refreshing to hear about the scientific approach they're taking.

EVE Frontier doesn't have a full launch date yet, but early development builds can currently be accessed through Founder Access packs. The confirmed platforms are PC and macOS.