EVE Online : What Happened to the UI?
"OH GOD CCP WHAT ARE YOU DOING AAARGH" is how CCP Zulu starts the discussion in the latest EVE Online developer diary on the official site. In case you've not logged in for a couple of weeks, a patch released recently seems to have had...problems, problems that Zulu addresses in the blog post.
We finished most of our corification last summer, but one of the big outstanding jobs was the UI code. As you may have guessed, EVE Online's UI code is rather idiosyncratic, and has thus far resisted corification (despite several valiant attempts). This is work that nobody really wanted to do - it's big and boring and difficult and requires a lot of concentration and late nights and being shouted at for breaking internal builds, and it doesn't even give you the satisfaction of having made something nice at the end, because the best-case scenario is that other departments ask what the hell you've been doing for six months because nothing's changed. However, it's work that's necessary in the long term if we want to make more interesting and visible improvements. Over the summer we bit the bullet, took our medicine, and made a big push on getting the work done. We finally got our known defect count down to zero a few weeks ago, and lined up all the resources and processes needed to release a patch.