Jita, The Forge — Fenris Creations confirmed Tuesday that EVE Online’s long-awaited migration from Python 2 to Python 3 is “going extremely well” and “definitely will not brick your Thanatos during a structure bash,” according to a statement delivered entirely in print statements rescued from a 2007 dev blog.
The project, internally codenamed “Please God No Division Errors,” covers 2.4 million lines of code originally written when the internet still believed cargo pants were acceptable office wear. Senior systems engineer Vek Torvald, a fictional man who definitely exists, described the challenge as “like performing heart surgery on a patient who is currently piloting a titan and filing taxes.”
“We’re replacing roughly 1,500 old-style print statements, 800 number literals ending in ‘L,’ and fifty uses of ‘<>’ for ‘not equal,’” Torvald explained. “Half our interns thought ‘<>’ was a typo. The other half asked if it was a new Triglavian glyph.”
Of particular concern is the 20,000 lines where Python 3 behaves differently from Python 2 – most critically around division. In legacy EVE code, dividing an integer by another integer silently floors the result, a behavior that has determined every damage calculation, market price, and bounty payout since the Bush administration. Under Python 3, the same operation returns a float.
“If we get this wrong, your 400 million ISK bounty becomes 0.5 ISK,” said capsuleer “DivByZero4U,” reached by narrowbeam from a wormhole. “I already live in a hole where reality is questionable. Now you’re telling me my armor rep might heal me 0.5 hit points because a developer missed a line?”
Fenris Creations has assured the playerbase that the first stage of migration will be “completely invisible,” a phrase EVE veterans have learned to treat with the same confidence they reserve for “this gate is clear” and “we have intel.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” said “IndentationError,” a miner in high-sec who asked to remain pseudonymous. “What’s the worst that happens? CONCORD crashes and we all become gods?”
Fenris Creations declined to comment on whether the migration would finally fix Jita local chat, but sources close to the project confirmed that no amount of Python 3 can accomplish that.
