Six months ago CCP Games confirmed they were planning to bring their massively multiplayer outer space game EVE Online to the Mac. On Tuesday they confirmed that their development partner will be bringing the game to Linux as well.
The modern descendant of classic computer games like Elite, EVE Online is set thousands of years in the future, in a remote region of space controlled by different factions of warring humans. You command a spaceship, and it’s up to you to decide how you want to develop your skills and your capabilities. You can become a miner or trader, pirate or captain of industry, depending on which skills you choose to focus on and how you invest your income.
Unlike many MMO’s, such as World of Warcraft, that will distribute their online worlds onto many different fragmented servers in order to distribute processing load, EVE Online all takes place in one persistent, consistent online domain, where everyone is together and everyone co-exists. You can develop alliances with other players, join guilds, and more.
CCP Games has partnered with Cider developer TransGaming to bring EVE Online to the Mac, which it expects to release later this year. TransGaming’s Cider technology has been developed to enable Intel-based Macs to run games designed to work on Windows — it’s been used most recently by Electronic Arts to bring four new games to the platform including Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Battlefield 2142, Command and Conquer 3 and Need for Speed Carbon.
Development on a Mac version continues. Cider itself is an outgrowth of a similar technology TransGaming uses for Linux called Cedega. Cedega enables Linux users to run different Windows games (it’s a descendant of the WINE project), and, indeed, some Linux users already use Cedega to run EVE Online. CCP Games indicates that TransGaming will also make a version of the game that will have Cedega “directly integrated,” rather than requiring users to install Cedega and EVE Online separately.