WEBVTT 00:00:00.020 --> 00:00:03.660 Every ship in EVE Online eventually undocks and leaves the station. 00:00:04.420 --> 00:00:05.860 This time, it's the whole game. 00:00:06.500 --> 00:00:09.420 EVE is run on Python 2 since its launch in 2003. 00:00:10.260 --> 00:00:17.360 All 2.4 million lines of it on a custom stackless interpreter that stopped at Python 3.8. 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:20.620 And stackless Python was mothballed last year. 00:00:21.080 --> 00:00:23.920 Now it's destination Python 3 for EVE Online. 00:00:24.660 --> 00:00:28.660 The route runs through 6,500 lines of division that decide who wins a fight 00:00:29.060 --> 00:00:33.840 and 100 gigabytes of pickled Python objects that have to survive the jump intact. 00:00:34.440 --> 00:00:37.320 Kristinn Sigurbergsen was on the show 10 years ago, 00:00:37.590 --> 00:00:39.740 and he's back, this time with Jamie Bannister, 00:00:39.990 --> 00:00:42.500 who is flying the EVE Online migration right now, 00:00:42.960 --> 00:00:46.300 and Thomas Darling, who took EVE Frontier through the jump first. 00:00:47.000 --> 00:00:49.320 In EVE, a destroyed ship is gone for good. 00:00:49.920 --> 00:00:54.400 There are no do-overs, and the universe has to stay online the entire time. 00:00:54.860 --> 00:00:55.800 That's a serious migration. 00:00:56.380 --> 00:01:02.000 This is Talk Python To Me, episode 564, recorded Thursday, September 10th, 2026. 00:01:20.280 --> 00:01:24.620 Welcome to Talk Python To Me, the number one Python podcast for developers and data scientists. 00:01:24.960 --> 00:01:26.540 This is your host, Michael Kennedy. 00:01:26.980 --> 00:01:30.460 I'm a PSF fellow who's been coding for over 25 years. 00:01:31.100 --> 00:01:32.220 Let's connect on social media. 00:01:32.540 --> 00:01:35.620 You'll find me and Talk Python on Mastodon, BlueSky, and X. 00:01:35.870 --> 00:01:37.800 The social links are all in your show notes. 00:01:38.580 --> 00:01:42.080 You can find over 10 years of past episodes at talkpython.fm. 00:01:42.260 --> 00:01:45.460 And if you want to be part of the show, you can join our recording live streams. 00:01:45.820 --> 00:01:46.300 That's right. 00:01:46.600 --> 00:01:49.740 We live stream the raw uncut version of each episode on YouTube. 00:01:50.320 --> 00:01:54.760 Just visit talkpython.fm/youtube to see the schedule of upcoming events. 00:01:54.990 --> 00:01:58.640 Be sure to subscribe there and press the bell so you'll get notified anytime we're recording. 00:01:59.700 --> 00:02:02.240 This episode is sponsored by Sentry's Seer. 00:02:02.520 --> 00:02:04.980 If you're tired of debugging in the dark, give Seer a try. 00:02:05.540 --> 00:02:09.220 There are plenty of AI tools that help you write code, but Sentry's Seer is built to 00:02:09.220 --> 00:02:10.759 help you fix it when it breaks. 00:02:11.340 --> 00:02:17.080 Visit talkpython.fm/sentry and use the code talkpython26, all one word, no spaces, 00:02:17.440 --> 00:02:19.220 for $100 in Sentry credits. 00:02:20.560 --> 00:02:23.440 And it's also brought to you by Talk Python Courses. 00:02:24.020 --> 00:02:26.280 Course completion certificates are now live. 00:02:26.460 --> 00:02:30.700 If you finished a course, there's a certificate waiting for you on your account page right now. 00:02:31.180 --> 00:02:36.920 Download it as a PDF or add it to your LinkedIn profile with one click under licenses and certifications. 00:02:37.480 --> 00:02:38.680 Same section as your formal degrees. 00:02:39.980 --> 00:02:43.820 Visit training.Talk Python.fm slash account to see what you've already earned. 00:02:45.220 --> 00:02:49.220 Kristinn, Jamie, and Thomas, welcome to Talk Python To Me. 00:02:49.520 --> 00:02:50.440 Kristinn, welcome back. 00:02:51.020 --> 00:02:51.800 Jamie Thomas, hello. 00:02:52.310 --> 00:02:52.840 Welcome to the show. 00:02:53.160 --> 00:02:53.440 Hello. 00:02:53.900 --> 00:02:54.260 Hello, Michael. 00:02:54.620 --> 00:02:54.760 Hello. 00:02:55.220 --> 00:02:55.740 Great to be back. 00:02:56.000 --> 00:02:56.420 Yeah, yeah. 00:02:56.580 --> 00:02:57.380 Great to have you all here. 00:02:57.820 --> 00:03:01.700 So I'm really excited to be talking about EVE Online again. 00:03:02.860 --> 00:03:03.580 When was it we? 00:03:03.720 --> 00:03:06.000 I think it was 2016, 17. 00:03:06.070 --> 00:03:07.160 It was a while ago. 00:03:07.480 --> 00:03:09.660 I think it was 2016. 00:03:10.570 --> 00:03:15.920 And I think we did even brought up the discussion point of the Python 3 upgrade. 00:03:16.320 --> 00:03:18.040 So it's been on the table for a while. 00:03:18.120 --> 00:03:22.200 Well, we're here to talk about upgrading EVE Online to Python 3. 00:03:22.740 --> 00:03:26.860 Well, Virgin, are you going to start at 3.0 and work your way through all of them, 00:03:26.860 --> 00:03:28.780 or are you going to do a little bit of a skip ahead? 00:03:29.520 --> 00:03:32.260 So we are going to Python 3.12. 00:03:33.340 --> 00:03:34.240 That's what we updated to. 00:03:34.560 --> 00:03:38.080 We first did a step in between to stackless Python 3.8. 00:03:38.440 --> 00:03:43.500 But when we did the work, 3.8 was already end of life, so to speak, 00:03:43.800 --> 00:03:45.400 and stackless Python didn't go any further. 00:03:45.460 --> 00:03:53.400 So we decided to go to 3.12 and have now worked on our infrastructure pipelines a little bit that any upcoming updates are a lot easier. 00:03:53.780 --> 00:03:56.840 So we have plans to go to 3.15 later this year, for example. 00:03:57.100 --> 00:04:00.660 Oh, fantastic. That's really neat. I'm going to be excited to hear about that. 00:04:00.860 --> 00:04:08.580 Probably some cool performance benefits there and profiling and other types of benefits that you get from those last few versions there. 00:04:08.860 --> 00:04:12.180 We're going to dive into why stackless and all that. 00:04:12.340 --> 00:04:15.680 There's a lot of history here, and it's a really, really big project. 00:04:15.940 --> 00:04:20.540 Before we get to the project itself and the upgrade and so on, 00:04:20.900 --> 00:04:24.040 let's just start with a quick introduction for each of you. 00:04:24.260 --> 00:04:25.380 I'll let you do that for yourselves. 00:04:25.660 --> 00:04:26.600 Kristinn, you go first. 00:04:26.830 --> 00:04:28.940 We'll go around the squares on the screen here. 00:04:30.040 --> 00:04:30.180 Okay. 00:04:30.790 --> 00:04:32.060 My name is Kristinn Seupersson. 00:04:32.300 --> 00:04:35.900 I'm a director of gameplay engineering for eFrontier, 00:04:36.060 --> 00:04:39.940 which shares the same technology stack as eOnline. 00:04:41.040 --> 00:04:51.340 I've previously been everything from a game designer to software engineer to technical director of E1 Line and later technical director of platform or SEAR technology segment as well. 00:04:51.630 --> 00:05:03.380 So I was part of the team that did the migration for 2.5.3 for Frontier and now I'm the primary benefit from it. 00:05:03.600 --> 00:05:10.000 So I'm Jamie. I've been an engineer on EVE for about 16 years, mostly on gameplay. 00:05:11.160 --> 00:05:15.160 But that has let me work across almost all the different aspects of the game, 00:05:15.760 --> 00:05:18.040 from the front end of the client all the way through to the back. 00:05:18.240 --> 00:05:22.700 So I've kind of seen all of the guts and the glory inside EVE. 00:05:23.440 --> 00:05:27.920 So I'm at the moment working on the actual migration project for EVE Online itself, 00:05:28.540 --> 00:05:31.080 building on kind of what the others have done previously. 00:05:31.880 --> 00:05:32.620 Excellent. Thomas? 00:05:33.720 --> 00:05:39.520 Yeah, I'm Thomas Delling. I'm a principal programmer on the platform segment for Fenris 00:05:39.700 --> 00:05:45.700 Creations. And I have been leading the initial Python 3 transition for Carbon, like getting 00:05:45.840 --> 00:05:47.340 us out of 2.7 onto Python 3. 00:05:48.900 --> 00:05:53.440 Amazing. What a big project, y'all. What a big project. I think where we should start 00:05:53.820 --> 00:05:59.980 is just what is EVE Online? And I have, of course, EVE Frontier pulled up. But tell us, 00:06:00.060 --> 00:06:02.100 what is EVE Online? Whoever wants to take this one. 00:06:03.720 --> 00:06:08.500 So Eve Online, it's an MMORPG in the classic sense. 00:06:09.180 --> 00:06:10.940 It's been going since 2003. 00:06:12.080 --> 00:06:16.860 So it's a massively multiplayer online game set in the far future 00:06:17.450 --> 00:06:20.720 where humanity has gone through the wormhole to a new system 00:06:21.570 --> 00:06:24.800 and society has kind of collapsed and then rebuilt in a new form. 00:06:25.960 --> 00:06:29.580 It's a very, what we would call in gaming, an open world sandbox. 00:06:30.420 --> 00:06:37.560 So we support all sorts of gameplay professions from mining, trading, piracy, a lot of combat. 00:06:38.480 --> 00:06:43.680 I think the distinctive factor is the game is full, kind of full loss. 00:06:44.540 --> 00:06:47.000 If you kill someone's ship, that's a ship removed from the game. 00:06:47.900 --> 00:06:50.300 There's no kind of getting things back. 00:06:50.920 --> 00:06:51.540 Nothing lasts forever. 00:06:51.780 --> 00:06:54.060 So the game is built on creation and destruction. 00:06:54.380 --> 00:06:59.460 A big part of it, if I understand it right, is kind of the economy and just the society. 00:06:59.640 --> 00:07:03.140 Like there's a society that forms from the players. 00:07:03.580 --> 00:07:05.880 Yeah, the economy I think, 00:07:06.200 --> 00:07:09.760 and before I joined to work on the game, 00:07:09.850 --> 00:07:10.920 I was a big player as well, 00:07:11.100 --> 00:07:12.600 and the economy was a big part of it for me. 00:07:13.639 --> 00:07:16.820 It's been used by, or been studied by economists, 00:07:17.170 --> 00:07:18.940 because it's, if you think, 00:07:19.260 --> 00:07:20.860 the data that we have on a big, real, 00:07:21.420 --> 00:07:24.720 on our economy is more accurate and detailed 00:07:24.900 --> 00:07:26.840 than you can kind of get from studying 00:07:26.890 --> 00:07:27.680 the real world economies, 00:07:27.920 --> 00:07:29.300 where you've always got imprecise data. 00:07:29.660 --> 00:07:31.620 So we have every single transaction. 00:07:31.780 --> 00:07:33.060 We know everything that's going on. 00:07:33.640 --> 00:07:36.060 You see all the money as it moves around the game. 00:07:36.720 --> 00:07:37.420 That's super interesting. 00:07:37.940 --> 00:07:39.200 Yeah, very, very rich simulation. 00:07:39.600 --> 00:07:44.080 What if we lived in a society where there was zero privacy and 100% data sharing? 00:07:44.520 --> 00:07:47.820 It would be creepy from a human perspective, right? 00:07:47.940 --> 00:07:51.980 Just like governments and alt-territarism and all that kind of stuff. 00:07:52.280 --> 00:07:56.160 But from an economics perspective, you have perfect data, right? 00:07:56.500 --> 00:07:57.060 Yes, yeah. 00:07:57.160 --> 00:08:03.280 and it's interesting how real world things have come up in the game like there's no formal mechanic 00:08:03.310 --> 00:08:09.740 for banks for example but players themselves have built banks they've built uh kind of loan schemes 00:08:10.860 --> 00:08:18.280 organizations have got their own way of paying their members for turning up to operations so they 00:08:19.020 --> 00:08:24.339 they have all the equivalent of like we have welfare groups we have um very centralized 00:08:24.360 --> 00:08:30.100 democratic groups, communist groups, all those kind of different social phenomena have reappeared 00:08:30.120 --> 00:08:37.900 in the game kind of organically. So interesting. And many online games are, you go here, you find a 00:08:38.020 --> 00:08:43.719 server, you join 40 people, and you go have an experience, right? But this is a single, unified, 00:08:44.520 --> 00:08:49.420 one world that everybody is in. They can all interact, all that kind of stuff, right? Yeah. 00:08:49.480 --> 00:08:52.420 So we take place where we call it a single shard. 00:08:52.530 --> 00:08:54.120 So yeah, like you say, it's one universe. 00:08:55.130 --> 00:08:57.680 Any two people in the game, if they go to the same place, 00:08:58.420 --> 00:08:59.580 they will meet and see each other. 00:09:00.700 --> 00:09:05.500 And so we have, I think our largest kind of player group 00:09:06.020 --> 00:09:08.660 is about 15,000 characters. 00:09:10.120 --> 00:09:12.320 And so all of those potentially could get together 00:09:12.410 --> 00:09:15.620 and go to one place at one time and have a huge fight. 00:09:15.800 --> 00:09:19.140 I think we have two Guinness World Records for the most, 00:09:19.480 --> 00:09:26.980 uh people taking part in a pvp fight wow how do you coordinate that as a as a group you know what 00:09:26.980 --> 00:09:32.480 i mean like how do you coordinate just the conversations amongst the people without it 00:09:32.500 --> 00:09:38.480 just being a cacophony um between in turn ourselves i mean with the players i mean with the players 00:09:38.560 --> 00:09:44.799 if there's 1500 people in like uh some sort of action how can you have conversations and 00:09:44.820 --> 00:09:50.540 communication without it being they built built their own solutions for a lot of this um so they've 00:09:51.000 --> 00:09:55.840 replicated a lot of a chain of command that you get from from real kind of real world and some of 00:09:55.840 --> 00:10:02.240 the bigger groups they have their own it departments uh that take care of of things a lot of groups use 00:10:02.440 --> 00:10:08.180 uh discord for kind of coordination but they have and various other kind of voice uh systems they 00:10:08.300 --> 00:10:14.159 have uh what's called an fc which is like a fleet commander so that's the person uh giving the orders 00:10:14.320 --> 00:10:15.440 and kind of directing the troops. 00:10:16.340 --> 00:10:19.060 And then it kind of, there's a hierarchy, if you like, 00:10:19.100 --> 00:10:20.480 of communication that goes down. 00:10:21.300 --> 00:10:23.040 So yeah, the bigger groups have built 00:10:24.399 --> 00:10:28.380 very complex kind of command and control systems 00:10:28.720 --> 00:10:28.940 with themselves. 00:10:29.500 --> 00:10:30.800 I guess that makes sense, but wow. 00:10:31.080 --> 00:10:32.800 And you think of a real army, 00:10:33.200 --> 00:10:34.120 if there's a thousand people, 00:10:34.180 --> 00:10:36.960 they don't all just get onto the same audio channel. 00:10:37.160 --> 00:10:39.280 They do have certain people who talk to each other 00:10:39.380 --> 00:10:41.440 and then they give commands down the line. 00:10:42.000 --> 00:10:42.380 And interesting. 00:10:42.860 --> 00:10:46.520 They replicate the processes like scouts filtering information up. 00:10:46.840 --> 00:10:50.200 They'll have then some people gather that information and feed it into the FC, 00:10:50.580 --> 00:10:54.180 who makes the calls of where they're going to go, what they kind of do next. 00:10:54.480 --> 00:10:54.620 Yeah. 00:10:54.980 --> 00:11:00.160 Kristinn, Thomas, you guys want to add anything to that overview before we dive in? 00:11:00.160 --> 00:11:03.500 Yeah, I would say that this doesn't really happen by its own. 00:11:03.700 --> 00:11:11.120 There are a lot of people that play EVE online that spend an incredible amount of time orchestrating all this. 00:11:11.360 --> 00:11:16.920 not only just the fights themselves, but the reasons behind the fight, gathering everybody up. 00:11:17.690 --> 00:11:22.300 So it is really fascinating to see. And to some extent, these people are playing the game, 00:11:22.310 --> 00:11:26.900 but they're not actually in the game because they are managing the spreadsheets and 00:11:28.870 --> 00:11:34.779 the communications and all of that. And to some extent in certain circles, like people have 00:11:34.980 --> 00:11:41.880 put their experience in managing these larger corporations in EVE onto their CV and it has 00:11:42.040 --> 00:11:49.560 helped them get a job. That's a level of commitment there. Yeah, I can now function as a full 00:11:50.510 --> 00:11:55.560 logistics operation person because I've done it for a thousand people in EVE Online. 00:11:56.140 --> 00:12:01.720 Very much so. Yeah, very much. Crazy. Thomas? Oh, I've got nothing more to add there. I think 00:12:01.740 --> 00:12:03.060 they both described it really well. 00:12:03.420 --> 00:12:05.960 It can sometimes be almost more like a job than a game 00:12:06.100 --> 00:12:06.940 if you want it to be. 00:12:07.960 --> 00:12:09.580 You learn a lot of valuable things. 00:12:10.060 --> 00:12:11.840 You meet a lot of great people that way as well, right? 00:12:12.000 --> 00:12:13.980 I mean, over the 20 years, so many people 00:12:14.120 --> 00:12:14.820 that met each other. 00:12:15.520 --> 00:12:18.040 We even had a wedding at one of our FanFests, 00:12:18.060 --> 00:12:18.460 I believe. 00:12:20.120 --> 00:12:21.660 We've actually had a few, I think. 00:12:22.840 --> 00:12:24.020 Thomas, you gave a great talk 00:12:24.020 --> 00:12:25.240 at FanFest about upgrading 00:12:25.940 --> 00:12:27.440 and inspiring the folks. 00:12:28.140 --> 00:12:29.500 That video is online. 00:12:30.460 --> 00:12:31.720 I'll link to it in the show notes. 00:12:31.840 --> 00:12:33.440 We'll maybe get to that in a little bit later. 00:12:33.640 --> 00:12:35.340 So that sounds like a really cool gathering. 00:12:36.160 --> 00:12:37.920 You know, I really, the last couple of years, 00:12:38.020 --> 00:12:40.360 I've really enjoyed just diving into games. 00:12:41.040 --> 00:12:42.640 And my daughter is getting older. 00:12:42.860 --> 00:12:44.640 And one of the things she really likes to do 00:12:44.660 --> 00:12:46.220 is sit down and play games together. 00:12:46.740 --> 00:12:48.800 Not even online, it's too big, 00:12:48.980 --> 00:12:51.360 but sort of cooperative stuff and just sort of exploring. 00:12:51.460 --> 00:12:52.880 And I think that there's, 00:12:53.340 --> 00:12:55.080 well, I know that studies have shown 00:12:55.140 --> 00:12:56.780 that there's more loneliness. 00:12:57.740 --> 00:13:01.620 There's fewer third places that people find themselves at and all that. 00:13:02.060 --> 00:13:07.100 Having something like this where you can gather and be with people and immerse yourself in, 00:13:07.140 --> 00:13:08.400 I think it's really neat, honestly. 00:13:08.740 --> 00:13:11.320 As long as you don't take it too far, you know, still go to work and stuff. 00:13:11.660 --> 00:13:12.080 Yeah, yeah. 00:13:12.220 --> 00:13:21.740 I mean, before I joined and as a player, we would organize meetup events at different places around the UK where I was from. 00:13:22.340 --> 00:13:23.780 And so I got to know a lot of people. 00:13:24.300 --> 00:13:28.600 I travel to a lot of places just for the purpose of meeting up with other EVE players. 00:13:29.800 --> 00:13:34.640 So for a lot of people, EVE or a lot of games like this, 00:13:35.020 --> 00:13:38.240 they can be your primary social connection to a lot of them. 00:13:38.400 --> 00:13:45.640 Let me take us back 35 years or something like that to the days of BBSs. 00:13:46.900 --> 00:13:48.740 Have any of you guys done BBSs? Remember them? 00:13:49.600 --> 00:13:51.220 Yeah, I used to play the MUDs back in the day. 00:13:51.780 --> 00:13:52.960 Oh, I used to play MUDs as well. 00:13:53.260 --> 00:13:54.540 Though that's not what I'm thinking of. 00:13:54.670 --> 00:13:57.840 But actually, MUDs have a really interesting multi-user dungeons. 00:13:58.320 --> 00:14:00.580 They have some really interesting analogies as well. 00:14:00.900 --> 00:14:02.300 But I was thinking of Trade Wars. 00:14:03.080 --> 00:14:05.780 Have any of y'all played Trade Wars from the BBS days? 00:14:06.620 --> 00:14:07.480 I know of it. 00:14:07.600 --> 00:14:08.440 I've never played it. 00:14:09.560 --> 00:14:10.440 It's really interesting. 00:14:10.450 --> 00:14:13.080 It was this multiplayer thing way back in the 90s. 00:14:13.540 --> 00:14:20.520 And you would dial in and you'd have to take turns because only one phone could be connected to the BBS at the time, at a time. 00:14:21.040 --> 00:14:23.960 And it was really, it has some real similar vibes. 00:14:24.160 --> 00:14:25.760 It's, you know, you travel to different planets. 00:14:26.020 --> 00:14:28.300 There's mining, there's an economy, there's trade. 00:14:28.820 --> 00:14:32.060 Anyway, I feel like this is like, what if it could be real? 00:14:32.380 --> 00:14:33.920 Instead of just a little sort of simple game, 00:14:33.980 --> 00:14:36.740 what if you could make it real with all the nuances 00:14:37.160 --> 00:14:39.120 and intricacies of reality and multiplayer? 00:14:39.380 --> 00:14:43.260 And it's just the realization of what that thing should have become. 00:14:43.800 --> 00:14:43.860 Yeah. 00:14:45.200 --> 00:14:48.780 Because Eve was heavily inspired by a game called Elite, 00:14:49.060 --> 00:14:52.440 which was one of the very early 3D space games. 00:14:52.510 --> 00:14:56.460 And that had a big world, a big universe of systems. 00:14:57.020 --> 00:14:58.160 Trading was a big part of it. 00:14:58.350 --> 00:15:00.760 And so there's definitely links from there. 00:15:01.320 --> 00:15:03.720 And also classic role-playing games as well. 00:15:04.200 --> 00:15:07.260 Our character stats have similar kind of perception, 00:15:07.540 --> 00:15:09.800 intelligence, charisma sort of stats. 00:15:09.880 --> 00:15:10.000 Interesting. 00:15:10.870 --> 00:15:11.980 Almost a D&D sort of. 00:15:12.020 --> 00:15:12.600 Very much, yeah. 00:15:13.100 --> 00:15:14.500 Yeah, you can tell there were D&D players 00:15:14.570 --> 00:15:17.000 in the very early EVE designers, for sure. 00:15:18.640 --> 00:15:22.480 This portion of Talk Python To Me is brought to you by Sentry and Sear AI. 00:15:23.060 --> 00:15:25.600 There are plenty of AI tools that help you write code, 00:15:25.920 --> 00:15:28.840 but Sentry's Seer is built to help you fix it when it breaks. 00:15:29.380 --> 00:15:30.440 The difference is context. 00:15:31.040 --> 00:15:33.260 Sear isn't just guessing based on syntax. 00:15:33.640 --> 00:15:35.660 It's analyzing 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--> 00:16:19.380 Thank you to Sentry for supporting Talk Python. 00:16:20.680 --> 00:16:25.680 We're going to also talk about this thing called Eve Frontier, which is a little different, 00:16:26.260 --> 00:16:28.540 but very much inspired, shares a lot of the code base. 00:16:28.900 --> 00:16:33.340 So give us a quick comparison to Eve Frontier, which I'm sure fewer people know about. 00:16:33.920 --> 00:16:34.640 Yeah, sure. 00:16:34.820 --> 00:16:41.340 So what matters for the tech is that we've essentially forked Eve Online, the code base, 00:16:41.500 --> 00:16:43.960 and are sharing a lot of the underlying tech. 00:16:44.200 --> 00:16:45.560 We've made a lot of modifications. 00:16:45.920 --> 00:16:52.760 We haven't been kind of pulling in stuff lately because it's just, it's become too different. 00:16:53.180 --> 00:17:00.160 Where it differs from EVE Online is maybe if you play EVE Online, you very much come into a society. 00:17:00.540 --> 00:17:05.280 Part of it is definitely player built, but part of it is also kind of NBC built. 00:17:05.280 --> 00:17:07.800 The environment is there's a police, there's everything. 00:17:08.319 --> 00:17:12.959 Whereas in Frontier, you're more coming into like an unbuilt, uninhabited zone 00:17:12.980 --> 00:17:15.680 and you're the first kind of writers in that universe. 00:17:15.770 --> 00:17:19.939 And it's up to the players to build that society up 00:17:20.020 --> 00:17:22.600 and kind of build up all of that infrastructure. 00:17:23.780 --> 00:17:29.220 It doesn't really differ from even a lot of like the design paradigms. 00:17:29.220 --> 00:17:34.100 I think both games aim to give players as much player agency as they possibly can. 00:17:34.520 --> 00:17:41.900 But this also allows us to make like a lot more dramatic changes in the gameplay itself. 00:17:42.080 --> 00:17:47.080 it's very hard to change the gameplay on evil line for example very drastically because honestly 00:17:47.220 --> 00:17:51.380 like after 20 years that's the game that people are playing they don't really like they didn't 00:17:51.410 --> 00:17:57.740 play it for 20 years to change all of it so uh we've been doing that it's more survival 00:17:58.400 --> 00:18:05.100 survival based it's more like uh like a survival game than it is uh uh not necessarily more than 00:18:05.100 --> 00:18:10.779 an mmo but it definitely has a lot more survival elements to it uh yeah and the environments are 00:18:10.800 --> 00:18:13.320 a little bit more kind of claustrophobic and smaller. 00:18:13.580 --> 00:18:15.140 Obviously, that's very hard in a space game 00:18:15.230 --> 00:18:16.260 because space is pretty vast. 00:18:17.340 --> 00:18:17.920 Yeah, amazing. 00:18:18.310 --> 00:18:19.660 Okay, really, really neat. 00:18:20.600 --> 00:18:23.940 Now let's talk about the reason that I reached out to you, 00:18:24.060 --> 00:18:27.360 which is I saw this article or post from you all 00:18:27.500 --> 00:18:29.720 that said the move to Python 3 begins. 00:18:29.980 --> 00:18:31.880 And, you know, credit to you all. 00:18:31.980 --> 00:18:34.200 This is a really fun article that it's like, 00:18:34.280 --> 00:18:37.599 it's told as sort of the next phase of a game 00:18:37.620 --> 00:18:41.880 or something where it's kind of a mission in the game, I guess. 00:18:42.090 --> 00:18:43.380 But a mission for you all, right? 00:18:44.190 --> 00:18:48.760 Yeah, I think that we kind of got a little bit cheeky with the heading 00:18:48.850 --> 00:18:51.140 because it isn't necessarily the beginning 00:18:51.420 --> 00:18:56.260 because, like we were saying earlier, Frontier itself is already on Python 3. 00:18:57.220 --> 00:18:59.120 But this is specifically for EVE Online itself. 00:19:00.280 --> 00:19:02.380 It's now actively moving to Python 3. 00:19:02.490 --> 00:19:07.580 And a lot of it is building up on the tech that we've developed 00:19:07.600 --> 00:19:12.160 ready and kind of start to prove out through Frontier. But yeah, this is kind of our big 00:19:12.480 --> 00:19:19.860 formal announcement that the legacy of 20 plus years of code, we're now kind of actively working 00:19:20.220 --> 00:19:26.260 to migrate. I think we should start maybe with a little bit of the architecture and just a big 00:19:26.440 --> 00:19:31.900 tech picture of EVE Online. When we spoke, Kristinn, way back in the day, you were doing a bunch of 00:19:32.100 --> 00:19:36.720 interesting things. I think you must have been the single largest deployment of Python, 00:19:37.320 --> 00:19:38.800 a Python app on Windows? 00:19:39.200 --> 00:19:39.700 Is that correct? 00:19:40.000 --> 00:19:41.000 I would say yes, right? 00:19:41.280 --> 00:19:42.140 What else would it be? 00:19:42.360 --> 00:19:44.060 That seems very plausible. 00:19:44.520 --> 00:19:48.440 I think it was a very kind of like a niche environment. 00:19:48.600 --> 00:19:51.980 And what I'd often run into is that I would try to take some libraries 00:19:52.260 --> 00:19:54.660 and try to use them and they just wouldn't work on Windows. 00:19:54.800 --> 00:19:56.840 Like somebody broke it and nobody cared 00:19:57.100 --> 00:19:59.540 because they weren't really using it on Windows, 00:19:59.940 --> 00:20:00.540 except we were. 00:20:01.300 --> 00:20:03.420 Obviously, like at that time, like 10 years ago, 00:20:03.540 --> 00:20:07.680 we couldn't really use a lot of, especially native Python 00:20:07.940 --> 00:20:08.160 libraries. 00:20:08.580 --> 00:20:10.780 I can't even remember if we had removed- 00:20:10.960 --> 00:20:11.540 we must have removed. 00:20:11.780 --> 00:20:13.320 We had our own importer as well, which 00:20:13.440 --> 00:20:16.160 made it also difficult to use third party libraries. 00:20:17.260 --> 00:20:19.280 But I think we fixed that. 00:20:20.000 --> 00:20:21.440 Yeah, there's a lot of- 00:20:21.660 --> 00:20:22.900 I mean, it's a very old project. 00:20:23.500 --> 00:20:25.780 And a lot of the early beginnings in the code base 00:20:25.940 --> 00:20:27.620 were before a lot of the things in Python 00:20:27.760 --> 00:20:29.220 actually being standardized to a degree. 00:20:30.320 --> 00:20:35.120 plus the special circumstances of having a packaged program 00:20:35.340 --> 00:20:36.560 with its own Python interpreter 00:20:37.720 --> 00:20:39.120 just makes certain things more interesting. 00:20:39.400 --> 00:20:40.900 Like, you know, as Kristen alluded to, 00:20:40.980 --> 00:20:44.060 like you can't just import a random public package 00:20:44.360 --> 00:20:46.680 because we don't have pip as an example, right? 00:20:47.100 --> 00:20:48.060 Or uv these days. 00:20:48.220 --> 00:20:51.020 But like, there's a lot of interesting problems 00:20:51.100 --> 00:20:52.860 you need to solve when you have such a large deployment, 00:20:53.160 --> 00:20:53.420 for sure. 00:20:53.620 --> 00:20:54.840 Yeah, there was a lot of custom stuff. 00:20:55.060 --> 00:20:56.340 When did this first get created? 00:20:56.480 --> 00:20:58.000 So I know we spoke in 2016, 00:20:58.320 --> 00:21:00.720 but it's been around for more like 20 years, right? 00:21:00.920 --> 00:21:02.320 So 2005, 2006? 00:21:04.520 --> 00:21:06.080 I think it's earlier than that. 00:21:06.240 --> 00:21:09.340 It's like the game is released that 2003, 00:21:10.120 --> 00:21:14.220 the development started in 99, I think. 00:21:15.440 --> 00:21:17.460 They didn't really choose Python. 00:21:18.290 --> 00:21:20.840 I don't know the exact date of that, 00:21:21.100 --> 00:21:25.040 but like there was, that is an interesting story as well. 00:21:25.110 --> 00:21:26.220 Like why they chose Python, 00:21:26.800 --> 00:21:29.260 which was actually rather new at the time. 00:21:29.800 --> 00:21:31.720 Yeah, I was actually wondering about that as well. 00:21:32.080 --> 00:21:33.320 I'm glad you chose Python. 00:21:33.460 --> 00:21:34.380 I think it's really cool. 00:21:34.720 --> 00:21:36.960 And I'm sure you all really enjoy working on it. 00:21:36.960 --> 00:21:39.460 And this has got to be an exciting project to say. 00:21:39.560 --> 00:21:40.680 We're moving to 3.15. 00:21:41.060 --> 00:21:41.760 We can use uv. 00:21:42.240 --> 00:21:45.900 We can import libraries, like all the exciting stuff. 00:21:46.200 --> 00:21:48.140 But at the time, it was pretty new. 00:21:48.640 --> 00:21:52.040 And we said, well, we could run this much faster and easier if we wrote it, 00:21:52.420 --> 00:21:56.620 I don't know, with C++, Java, C#, something like that, right? 00:21:57.320 --> 00:22:25.700 I think a lot of the core libraries, they are in C++, so our physics engine, which we call Destiny, that's all C++. Trinity, our graphics engine, similarly. But yeah, most of our kind of higher level, all the gameplay logic, a lot of the network stack that we have, that's all built, or clustering stack, that's all built in Python. 00:22:25.780 --> 00:22:37.240 Yeah, probably add to that as well is that like the time when we started or not me, even though I've been here for a very long time, it hasn't been that long. 00:22:37.660 --> 00:22:45.700 But when they started writing EVE, like that was around the.com era and kind of the older listeners probably remember that era. 00:22:45.920 --> 00:22:49.700 But the programming resources were scarce and heavily sought after. 00:22:49.840 --> 00:22:51.480 So very expensive. 00:22:51.760 --> 00:22:57.460 So part of the reason why they chose Python was to get more junior people and even designers 00:22:57.600 --> 00:23:04.640 to be able to write sequential code in Python in order to speed up development. 00:23:04.720 --> 00:23:06.320 It was all about development speed. 00:23:06.580 --> 00:23:12.040 Especially in Iceland, right, where you've got a much smaller pool of people to work from. 00:23:12.320 --> 00:23:15.000 Honestly, that's kind of a cool success story, right? 00:23:15.260 --> 00:23:18.800 Like bring more people in to help build the thing that we're building. 00:23:19.360 --> 00:23:20.140 Yeah, absolutely. 00:23:21.380 --> 00:23:38.860 Yeah, absolutely. And as Kristin just said, allowing people to write sequential, simple, straightforward Python code as well, which then led to us discovering stackless Python, integrating that one, and then building an abstraction on top that people don't realize that they are writing code that runs asynchronously. 00:23:40.220 --> 00:23:47.340 And it enabled us to scale to the degree that we're able to scale with thousands of people being in the same solar system and so on. 00:23:47.540 --> 00:23:52.440 Yeah, you needed concurrency before Python was inspired by concurrency. 00:23:52.880 --> 00:23:56.040 Maybe we should talk a little bit about free-threaded Python later, 00:23:56.380 --> 00:23:57.820 as well as the possibilities there. 00:23:58.020 --> 00:24:02.080 But I just want to kind of touch on this historical angle a little bit more. 00:24:02.400 --> 00:24:07.400 To me, there's two really significant milestones that matured Python. 00:24:07.860 --> 00:24:10.200 I'm sure there are more, but these are the ones that stand out in my mind. 00:24:10.500 --> 00:24:14.420 They both are around 2006 or so time frame. 00:24:14.920 --> 00:24:20.800