Greetings Capsuleers!
We are Team Stargate, the people behind the EVE Launcher.
If you haven’t had the chance, we highly recommend reading the accompanying news item for an overview of the new launcher beta.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to join us in the EVE Launcher beta. The path has been laid by the CSM delegates and ISD volunteers, as we received indispensable feedback from them early on in our closed alpha phase.
We hope you will give the new EVE Launcher a try, and we would love to hear your feedback. Should you encounter any issues, please file a bug report from within the launcher, and should there be something blocking you completely from starting the game client, you can of course switch back to the current launcher for the time being. If you do we would truly appreciate if you would let us know why either with a bug report, or a reply to this forum post.
Let us briefly go over some of the feature changes
Installer (Windows)
One of the first significant changes that you will notice is the new and revised installer for Windows. Rather than having to navigate through a step-by-step installer, a new one-click install system will get the EVE launcher installed and ready to go in similar fashion to other popular applications such as Discord and Slack. You also no longer have to have the game client located beside the launcher, as you will be prompted to choose the directory where you’d like the game files to be installed. It will automatically detect your existing EVE Online installation, so you only have to confirm this location.
Native ARM support for MacOS
The EVE Launcher can now run natively on M1 MacOS machines, eliminating the need for Rosetta 2 dependency.
Launcher updates
One of the main behind-the-scenes changes we have been working on is enabling a rapid release cycle for the launcher. This approach enables us to respond more swiftly to feedback, allowing for quicker bug resolution and more frequent updates. A significant contributor to this efficiency is the newly implemented update system for the launcher.
The launcher will automatically update itself in the background, without having to ask you to restart the launcher to finalize updates. When a new version is downloaded and installed, an icon will be visible in the title bar to signify an update is ready. Clicking this icon will force a launcher restart to activate the latest version. If you do not want to do this, this will simply happen automatically the next time the launcher is started.
Note: On MacOS the updated launcher is applied after the application has fully closed, clicking the launcher update icon will close the application, apply, and then start the new launcher version.
Character information
A long standing feature request has been to be able to see which characters reside on each account, and this has been one of the key elements in the design of the new launcher. Not all information that we would like to have visible in the launcher is ready at the time of the beta launch, so you will see a fair bit of “Coming Soon™” in this initial beta release, but this will be released gradually as the functionality for this is ready.
Launch groups 2.0
The “launch groups” feature has been overhauled and allows you to better organize your startup of the game client. Some of the key functionalities of this feature are:
- Launch groups can be created or renamed
- Adding user accounts to a group, with each account able to be assigned to one or more groups. Each user can optionally be assigned a character found on the account or a client profile. If a character has been assigned to the launch group, it will be automatically selected on the character selection screen for you, taking you directly into the game. Without one assigned, the game will wait on the character selection screen until you choose a character to play.
- Determining the startup order of user accounts within a group. Accounts will launch in the order they appear within the group, and can be reordered by dragging the reorder icon to the left of each username.
With this feature, we hope you can better manage the startup of your fleets.
Enhanced Support Features
Filing a bug report has never been easier – you can now submit one directly from the launcher, with all pertinent support information attached automatically. Keep in mind that a username is necessary, so you must be logged in before filing a bug report.
For other needs, such as requests from our Customer Support, you can generate a “Support Payload,” an archive containing relevant logs, crash dumps, and other valuable data for our investigation. These support functions can be found under Settings → Tools / Cache.
News in the launcher
The news section has been flipped on its side in this new launcher, quite literally. In the default layout the amount of news items shown has remained the same compared to the current launcher, but once resizing the launcher is enabled again it will behave better with the amount of news items shown.
The keen-eyed among you will also notice that - by popular request - the launcher will now also include the New Eden News feed.
Migration
We have included migration of your accounts from the current launcher into the beta, so once you have installed the launcher and confirmed your shared cache location, your user accounts should be loaded in and ready to use. In case your accounts have not seen use in over 30 days, they may appear grayed out with a red triangle. Clicking on the account will prompt the login form with the username pre-filled for re-authentication.
Looking to the future
Over the past few weeks, we have run a closed Alpha test, including CSM delegates and ISD volunteers. The feedback from these two groups has been amazing and we have already started working on implementing some new functionality based on that feedback. Additionally, we are still implementing some features that are in the current launcher, that are not (yet) in the new launcher.
One of the main points of feedback by the CSM and ISD testers has been about the way EVE Online is launched. Directly logging into a character is not always wanted, especially not when you’re in hostile space or planning a log-in trap, so we have already added means to disable this. We are also looking at iterating on this even further as we want to make the experience from launcher to in-game as smooth as possible.
As mentioned in the Improved New Player Experience dev-blog, new players help grow the game, strengthen the community, and keep stories in the world interesting and engaging. In that same spirit, we are looking at improving the on-boarding experience for new players, giving them information on their journey into New Eden while they wait for EVE Online to be installed.
As the song goes: the road ahead is empty. But instead of miles of the unknown, we are looking to pave it with your feedback. As mentioned in the [dev blog], we are looking for your feedback, which you can give us either in this thread or on the [EVE Online Discord] server.
Known hurdles
- I don’t want to login to my character, I just want my daily login rewards
- You can create a launch group where you assign accounts, but leave the character deselected
- You can enable always go to character selection screen in the launcher settings, under Game Client. Enabling this will prevent launch groups from selecting any assigned characters.
- I can’t resize the launcher
- The window size is fixed, but we recognize the importance of being able to resize it and are working to provide a flexible and adaptive window experience in the near future.
- I created a new character / I biomassed my character, but it is not visible in the launcher yet | I changed my corporation, but launcher still says old corporation | I bought omega but it’s not showing in the launcher
- To begin with we’ve introduced a delay between fetching, and updating, account/character information. As we progress, we aim to reduce this delay considerably.
