Back in the old days when icons were colourful, solo PvP was a thing, and you could walk in stations, there existed a wonderful feature known as the Jukebox. Ask any veteran to EVE and I’m sure they’ll have fond memories of Below the Asteroids and the wonder of New Eden as a lonely newbro. It was, unfortunately, removed as of the December 2012 patch seven years ago and replaced with CCP’s Soundcloud page.
This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Maintaining superfluous code with little gameplay impact eats away at valuable dev time for other tasks. I don’t claim to know if this was the actual reason for it’s removal, but it wasn’t something I was happy about. At least that was the case when I returned to the game in 2014 to find it missing from the Neocom.
Fast forward to 2019 and I had an idea; one mostly based off the site halome.nu. It’s a site where you hit F11 and sit back to let the Halo 1 (and later others) main menu play with the classic music. Why not build something like that with an interactable Jukebox using CSS? Well… I did. With the help of my good friend Malmar Padecain we set to work developing it in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I worked on styling and he made it play music.
What ensued was roughly five months of on-off development to design something that looked like it was created for a 1999 website. There was extensive use of HTML tables mixed with flex boxes and amateur CSS’ing. The very first image is on the right here and you can check out the Github page itself at this link. My main branch is called ‘Style’. There’s also a chunky gallery of random development screenshots at the bottom if you want to see some funky stuff.
Release 1.0
Anyway, I’ll stop beating around the bush and actually provide that link now.
Features
- Draggable, fully featured Jukebox styled to look like the 2012 client.
- Most, if not all, of the EVE Music until now. Newer login screens are missing, however.
- Fanfest Orchestral tracks and fan-made New Eden Logs added.
- Background options of still images or looping video captured from walking in stations.
- +10% bonus to nostalgia per level.
- Permaband.
FAQ
“Haha nice fake but I know it isn’t real because you can’t get out of your ship.”
Until a while ago you could! Ashterothi covered it here. That was a real quote by the way.
Why use HTML tables and why does it look so old?
Because this is pretty much exactly how it used to look in-game. This seemed the best way to replicate that old style.
What are the log playlists?
Those are fan-made tracks and were designed in 2014 to fit the theme of EVE Online.
Why didn’t you include x?
Let me know what needs adding in a comment below and I will look into it. I already know about Rettic’s Sounds for Flying.
How do I change backgrounds?
Click on the “Opt” button and change the selection. Options are currently quite limited.
Why is the server down?
Let me know if this happens. Server hardware may need to be upgraded to handle load. Songs may also take a moment to play since this is running on a potato.
Why is the background low quality?
Working with what I have in terms of footage and the quality needs to be compressed as to not take up 400MB on data-limited connections.
Known Bugs
- Caldari and Amarr backgrounds don’t exist yet.
- Background may appear completely black on first load. Use the Opt button to fix.
- Custom scrollbars do not work in non-chromium browsers (nothing I can do, sorry)
- Volume slider looks strange in Firefox
- Video may not loop properly. You can right click to turn this on.
- There isn’t a system name being shown currently
- Player buttons may take a moment to load and cache on first hover.
- Switching playlists will stop the currently playing song
CSS Dev Gallery
Because I enjoy looking at how much I kept fucking it up 😀
Is this available on GitHub? Would love to tinker around with hosting high-fidelity images and the like.
Yup! (I mentioned it in the article and the Jukebox about page, too!)
https://github.com/MalmarPadecain/EVE_Jukebox/
For the most part though, you can simply change the .mp4 or .png files (minmatarStill.png, gallenteBalcony.mp4) and see how things look.
Your CSS errors are as much fun as mine 🙂
I would swear that the hologram vindicator is slowly oscillating.
Go to Opt and you can change the background to make it actually play 😀
I love this. ty so much
Thank you so much for using the old beautiful icons! I really miss them in the game.