On May 6th, 2003 (or YC105), New Eden came to life for the first time. In the more than two decades since, this living universe has steadily grown hand-in-hand with a community unlike any other – evolving through DUST 514, EVE Valkyrie, EVE Gunjack, and striving toward an even brighter future in EVE Vanguard.
When a story must exist in the context of a broader world, the worry that it might constrain its own future to a narrow path for fear of breaking what came before—or worse, deliberately disregard that history—is all too often proven justified. On the infinite horizons of New Eden, however, precedent becomes potential. Rather than prescribing lines that must be carefully coloured within, EVE’s twenty-one years of established story and community provide a palette from which a truly limitless future can be painted. The Vanguard is this idea manifest, resolving elements at the very roots of EVE, DUST, and Valkyrie into a foundation for a new era of Elysian independence. In Vanguard infomorphs, the remnant Sleeper origins of warclone technology have been unified with those empowered by it in a very literal sense by the Arkombine mercenary group’s “Lifegiver” – lighting a path to harmony at last for the first generation within the inner virtual world of the Fulcrum and to self-realization together with second gens through compatibility with a new kind of warclone blank.
In Vanguard clones, the history, technology, and biology of the ever-factious Jove weave together with the vision and innovations of the Deathless Circle’s “Quartermaster” to form a body whose brain and implants are capable of coupling with the Fulcrum’s onboard virtuality at a distance, as if they were Sleepers coupled physically to their crumbling enclaves. • Lifegiver brings the technology and population of DUST to a long-hoped resolution. • Quartermaster innovates paths of pragmatism and progress from the core tech of Valkyrie. • The Deathless and the Fulcrum drag ancient Jovian lore and technology to the surface in EVE Online.
More than simply sharing roots in deep lore, the stories of Vanguard and EVE have interacted directly in the games themselves, and this confluence will only grow as time goes on:
In December YC125 (2023), the First Strike deployment saw the Vanguard make their first appearance on the planet Hevrice III, launching from a Forward Operating Base cast into orbit and descending upon the crashed remains of a Mordu’s Legion Bowhead outfitted with an onboard clone fabrication chamber. This vessel and others like it were evidently designed to provide tactical deployment of an also-previously-unseen mass-production warclone type to the battlefields of Angel and Guristas Insurgencies. A “second strike” several months later in March YC126 brought deeper investigations into the contents of these ships and Mordu’s new toys at the request of Lifegiver and Quartermaster. It quickly became clear that the Legion had found new uses for technology they had acquired more than a decade prior from partnered Guristas-Thukker covert research facilities host to Quartermaster’s involvements at the time. The Solstice deployment—by far the largest to date—took place shortly after the Upwell Consortium’s launch of their
Equinox product line in June YC126 on the planet Auviken VI, which had become the host of Upwell’s prototype Skyhook and a wealth of research infrastructure. Suspected by many to have burned a longstanding zero-day vulnerability in the system’s cynosural jamming network to bring assets into the system, the Deathless Circle provided low-atmosphere launchpoints from several vessels cloaked in low orbit. Vanguard at the target location—a crash site that, like the rumoured insertion, is broadly considered unrepeatable—observed the Skyhook prototype’s near-ground launch zone in the distance.
Though the backends of EVE Vanguard and EVE Online have been developed independently, they share a lot of common DNA. Most notably the adoption of an Event Driven Architecture (EDA), and some common tech choices in the use of Golang, Protobuf and gRPC. EDAs produce highly flexible and decoupled systems that can grow organically while maintaining scalability and resilience. In an EDA, all state changes are captured as “events” and published onto a central message bus. An example event might describe a character undocking from a station, what ship they undocked in, and what modules were fitted to that ship. Once an event type is being published onto the message bus, consumers can choose to subscribe and react to that event. The publisher of the event is unconcerned with the event's consumers, and so new system behaviour can be built independently of existing behaviour.
To link into EVE Online, the Vanguard Backend was setup as a trusted publisher of events into Quasar (EVE Online's backend), and used this connection to publish events about contracts completed in Vanguard. Insurgency services in Quasar listen out for these events, ascribe active insurgency information to them, and aggregate them into the insurgency totals for the appropriate solar systems. When it came to building this connection between Vanguard and Eve Online, the initial challenges were technical. To become a trusted source of events, a publisher must connect to Quasar's internal gRPC gateway service; and to connect to that, the publisher must be within the same private network as the gateway, and be authenticated using CCP's Private Key Infrastructure (PKI) to acquire an mTLS client certificate.
In the run-up to First Strike, the Vanguard backend team re-deployed both our development and production environments into new subnets that could be connected into the wider CCP network without address conflicts. We were then able to connect to CCP's PKI services to sign our client certificate and use that to connect to the Quasar internal gateway! Fortunately a Golang client SDK already existed for interacting with the Gateway, so we were able to integrate that into the Vanguard Backend without too much difficulty.
Now that we've proven out the technical aspects of this inter-game communication, we want to next look at maturing our integration by simplifying the client SDK to bypass the need for a PKI Agent, and building support for bi-directional communication so that the Vanguard backend can react to events coming from EVE Online.
A bi-directional link into Quasar would allow for Vanguard’s game systems to react to events that happen in Eve Online in realtime. This opens up all kind of possibilities for inter-game gameplay and we’d love to hear your ideas for how we could use this! Until next time, o7
