CCP Atropos
C C P C C P Alliance
324
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Posted - 2013.06.24 15:25:00 -
[1] - Quote
Regardless of the tone of your posts and your flat out disregard for the actual implications of what would be necessary to do this, I'll bite and explain how things work.
Currently, the environments for the two servers are like this:
- Singularity = all things development. This means anything currently being worked on.
- Tranquility = release
Whilst some things do migrate through to release that shouldn't, there is a fundamental code difference (based on internal code branching strategies) that help isolate what's on Singularity from what's on Tranquility. In this way, we only integrate changes that we want to, to help reduce accidental regressions where possible.
Now, with that covered, I would like to point out that despite your flippant disregard for my work as dumb, we're not going to add in features to the old, branded login screens since it's our intent to remove that at some time in the future. As such, any such drop down would be placed into the EVE Launcher. I'm guessing you don't use the EVE Launcher, so this will probably mean you wouldn't log into Singularity any longer, but this is all theoretical, so lets just roll with it.
If there is a single version of the EVE Launcher that handles connecting you to Singularity as well as Tranquility, we would have to work out how to handle beta updates to the EVE Launcher. Perhaps something akin to an opt-in beta program similar to Steam's would work here.
With that resolved, we can't really force everyone to download Singularity files, if they're not interested in helping out, so it has to be an opt-in download. This can be done, but it requires us to change some of the assumptions in the EVE Launcher about the relationship between the EVE Client and EVE Launcher (currently 1:1, ideally 1 EVE Launcher to many EVE Clients). After that it's simply a case of downloading and connecting.
Due to the way that the Launcher communicates with the backend logon servers we might still need to start an instance of the EVE Launcher to connect to Singularity, but that would be doable, aswell.
The work is considerable, and is actually something that we've considered, to improve the ease of access to the test server, but there are several edge cases that we don't really have answers for yet:
- How does this jive with installs handled via Steam?
- What about the Mac?
There's still work to do to scope out something of this nature, but it's potentially feasible. If enough people push for it, we might prioritise it, but for now it's not a critical feature when balanced against things like improving multi accounts support in the EVE Launcher. Product Owner, EVE Launcher | Team Special Circumstances |