Eve And The Apple

After seeing Mynxee’s and others posts about their Eve-Spaces (and hats off to Blake from K162 Space for having probably the coolest spot I’ve seen yet), I wanted to post my own.

Unfortunately, after seeing some of the other eve-spaces people have posted up, (water-cooling, flux-capacitor-wielding, 5-screening, awesome-mobiles) I now have a complex about showing my own =/. Essentially though, it looks like this:

This photo-realistic artistic rendering of my space however should give you a near perfect appreciation for what I look at whenever I’m online. I run a 27″ 2.8 GHz Intel Core Duo iMac with leopard. Is it the premier king of game rigs? Not at all, but it works for me. Its also my professional rig, which I use for audio engineering and recording.

A couple explanations:

The coffee: I drink pretty much an endless flow of this sweet sweet nectar all day. Without it, I do things like shoot corpmates reffing SN frig tournaments (true story, ask Llyan), fat-finger buy/sell orders, and generally rage at things in New Eden that don’t go my way.

The Booze: You try directing a bunch of thieving, scheming, rabble-rousing ninjas dry. I double dog dare you. Also, the fun-level of salvage ops is directly proportional to how many glasses of Makers I’ve had. Also a true story.

The View: I live in NYC, but I actually see both skylight and trees from my window. Actually I live in Brooklyn, so those buildings across the street are really Brownstones, but I thought that was way too much brown for one picture. Also, that tall building doesn’t exist at all in my line of sight, I’m just trying to push that “urban metropolis” look.

On-Screen: I’m sure what is already set as your homepage. Give yourself a firm handshake from me for a job well done.

Redundant Ninja Pamplet of Secrets: These are for me to know and you not to. Sorry.

What You Don’t See: To the left of the picture, what you don’t see is my dual-keyboard station, audio rack (dual dbx compressor/limiters, tube pre-amp, midi-input, etc, etc), and mix board. To the right, and probably somewhere behind me is my girlfriend doing her own thing, and although I love her dearly, impending GF-aggro whilst in eve is sometimes a very real thing =P (and completely un-tankable btw).

I love Macs, and I love Eve, but as you may have already put together, there’s a bit of a handicap when using both. The out-of-game applications for mac users are substantially lacking, and before you mention Wine, Parrallels, or Bootcamp, those do take a fair amount of CPU to run (not to mention a working copy of windows), cpu which I’m not ok giving up seeing as I also use this computer professionally for things that already take heavy amounts of processing speeds (ever pre-mixed a 29-track live/midi audio project while running all native instruments and patches in real-time? Yeah…)

I’ll refrain from a “Waaahhh, I use a MAC and this game wont run right one it!” rant. Why? Because I get it. Windows PC-based machines DO run most games better (and with better/more out-of-game player applications) than a Mac because they’re more open to it. I get that Steve Jobs has a bit of a stick up his ass when it comes to opening up development to 3rd parties and as such, games like Eve have to tunnel their products through things like the Cider client for macs.

But on the other hand, we’re sort of past the age where PC machines were IT for playing games (I played SO much Starcraft on my old Dell), and the best you could get for your OS Mac machine were things like Sim City, Chess, and shitty (and I do mean shitty) knock-offs of Windows-based FPS. And while I’m HUGELY grateful that CCP provides a Mac client at all, sometimes I do wish there was a little bit more thrown into it.

Even though there are a few out of game Mac apps out there (and more coming), without using paralleling or virtual windows software, we have nothing that really compares to amazing programs like EFT and EveMon. I should also mention that even though a lot of them were tweaked in the patch after Dominion, there’s still a list of still-to-be resolved in-game bugs on the Mac client that don’t affect game-play necessarily but would be great to fix anyways (i.e. Jukebox plays 45 seconds of a track then stops).

Ok…that started to get a little Mac-rant-ish, so I’m done on that train of thought. Next topic.

I’m looking to expand my gaming rig a little. All these pictures of Eve-spaces with like 3 or more screens is making me envious. Not to mention, I’ve started dual-clienting, so a second screen would be great. I have an older macbook pro laptop I’ve just recently put a new HD in, but its PC, not Intel, based so sadly enough, neither the eve-client or things like Wine will work on it (oh cruel fate). So here’s where I need your help (yes, you, the guy that knows way more about this sort of thing than me).

Build me a rig! Using the existing computer I have that is, and hopefully the unused laptop (is it possible to use it as a second screen?), make me a set-up that I can be proud of (and also play two characters on without tabbing windows). Also, if it could cost somewhere under a fortune, that’d be great too! I’m not computer-stupid, but I’m no programmer or tech-guru either, so I’m going to need your input. Tell me how to connect things, if I should invest in another screen (and which one?), how to optimize my machine for dual-clienting, etc.

If you’re a mac eve-player and you’ve got a setup you’re proud of, let me know. Thanks in advance.

07,

-Aiden

~ by Aiden Mourn on February 24, 2010.