Standardized Python installs

Virtualenv for Python is wonderful, and you should use it.

Our path to using it however, was rather rocky: working primarily on Windows, we were for quite some time victims of the Python community’s focus on Pip (and insistence on compiling everything during install).

Working on Windows, with a large number of non-technical users, the idea of trying to get your tools to compile on an artists’ machine should really scare you (never-mind the lack of testing / support and particular versions of visual studio that had to exist).

Eve Online started out life early on with the “Database”. Because the DB existed already and was relatively convenient, we put data into it. Later, we realized that a lot of data was stuff that our game designers authored (like solar systems and their contents) that we called “static data”, and a clever system was created for versioning this data with revisions at a row level. It didn’t seem unreasonable at the time, and the waterfall mechanics of our release process matched pretty closely with the mechanisms in the database versioning system.