On 13 April 2021, CCP removed empty asteroid belts from space after having stripped them of asteroids several months earlier. Frustrated players were unsatisfied with CCP’s approach to mudflation, even though it was rumored this was a necessary step in the complete eradication of POS code in order to establish a more firm foundation upon which to build future enhancements.
Using POS code for asteroid belts was a “no brainer.” Asteroids were orbiting structures with which players could interact, and which players could destroy by applying specialized weapons. By leveraging the feature-rich Player Owned Starbase code, CCP was able to significantly reduce the time required for the June 2011 ‘Incarna’ release with improvements to the visual effects associated with mining lasers. Nobody had any idea how far the Cthulhu-esque tentacles of POS code would spread.
With asteroid belts fully detangled from POS code, CCP rolled out a patch on 14 September, 2021 that began the process of restoring asteroid belts to Null Security space.
Those changes had unexpected consequences.
When Naoki Yoshida tasked Hideyuki Kasuka with accelerating development of Final Fantasy XIV v2.0 in 2012, he wanted to target both Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 3. Of course, he looked at EVE Online. Hideyuki Kasuka’s friend CCP Redacted was an intern at CCP at the time on the project that would become Dust 514, and targeted the same platforms. The CCP intern, excited about the first draft of his new creation, labeled only “POS Code,” shared it with Kasuka one evening. The two spent hours drinking heavily while poring over just over 1 million lines of undocumented code delivering a deliciously broad feature set.
As development of FFXIV progressed, and pressed for time, Kusuka borrowed a few utility features from the POS code, fully intending to replace it soontm. Over the years, “Hideyuki Engineering Reference Objects” (HERO) code made itself useful time after time, while the task HERO CoRe (HERO Code Refactoring) never seemed to make it from the parking lot to the Kanban board.
In 2021, soontm finally arrived with a bang.
With asteroid belts extracted from POS code, the belt abstraction was retired, and asteroids became first class citizens, paving the way for improved asteroid mechanics sure to drive dozens of miners back into space. A cheer went up in CCP headquarters as 70% of tests went green, squeezing past the critical threshold. Aura’s voice came over the PA, proclaiming “Docking request accepted,” and announcing that a push to main had completed its DevOps journey to Tranquility.
A few hours later, a FFXIV test engineer scratched her head. Belts were broken. The situation escalated rapidly. A senior developer was called in, then a network engineer. The three racked their brains and pored over code. Tripwire showed belt code making a call to a remote server while calculating… something. Days later, they made the call: belts had to go.
When questioned about the situation, Anonymous Game Developer shrugged, grinned slyly, then said “we already stole all your players, we don’t need your code anymore.”
