The Game Engine That Powers Eve Online’s Single-Shard Universe Is Now Open Source

As a rule, we don’t cover Eve Online here a lot. That’s because, despite the MMORPG having a free-to-play option, it’s not exactly free-to-play. What it is, however, is one of the most interesting MMORPGs out there – at least, as far as I’m concerned. It may not appeal to the same large numbers of people as theme-park MMOs do. But even people who aren’t interested in playing it have loved watching it.

Just the drama and betrayal between players and their in-game corporations alone are enough to draw attention from time to time. And then there are the wars… these huge events featuring thousands of players interacting in a single space. All of this is thanks to the game existing on a single shard, where players from all over the world exist together.

That shard exists because of the cross-platform game engine Fenris Creations (formerly CCP Games) has been iterating on for the last two decades. Today, the company announced that the engine is now completely open source and features over two dozen Carbon modules including Carbon’s physics simulation and pathfinding technology, Destiny. (Keep in mind this is the tech that allowed the game to support a graphics-heavy PvP space battle with nearly 9,000 players participating in the same space at one time.

This is pretty big news for developers, and it will be interesting to see how they make use of the engine.