EVE General Discussion

Posting in a stealth "remodel the Domi" thread.

Is this an AFK cloaking thread?

I'm not a dev, but I'll take my best guess as the devs may not have time to respond.

Is there a maximum texture resolution for graphical assets used in the client, and if so what is it?

Everything has limits. That said, the devs have stated that a high-res texture pack is at least being considered.

Is there a maximum poly count for 3D graphical assets, and if so what is it?

Too many polygons would detrimentally affect EVE's performance. They already use bump mapping to make models look more detailed than the geometry actually is. There's more to looks than poly count.

For what lowest-common-denominator are these limitations built to accommodate?

I don't know. They probably looked at their statistics and did their best to come up with some baseline. Looking at other games minimum system requirements would be a good place to start.

Are these in place because of server limitations, client limitations, or simply catering to the minimum system specs for client computers?

No, yes, yes.

Is the game client currently built to handle higher poly counts and resolutions, or does it require more work?

Of course it can handle higher poly counts and resolutions. It just requires a lot more work to put more detail into models and textures. Also, total installation size (already fairly sizable) has to be carefully managed.

Would we be suffering from more frequent crashes and memory issues if higher resolutions and poly counts were introduced?

Possibly. Everyone would experience lower framerates, that's for sure. If you have lots of graphics horsepower, no one cares about the difference between 290 and 210 FPS. The people who are already on the threshold of playability however, would care very much.

What exactly is holding EVE's graphical capabilities back?

I kind of think EVE is pretty gorgeous as-is.

Stealth "Hurry up with DX11 already!" thread.

Thanks for the replies. I had a good laugh at some of them, and got largely what I expected from others. Many thanks all around.

I'm more or less curious to see where CCP can go with EVE's graphics, and what sorts of roadblocks might be ahead of us before we see any more major advancements in graphics. References to tessellation, high-res textures, and DX11 are being bandied about but they seem vague or a long ways off, and I'm largely just curious why.

I know that on many games, if you push the memory usage past 2GB, the application can simply crash out. Examples are Bethesda games (Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout 3 series), and Total War games (Napoleon, Shogun 2, Rome II). These games are built stock with limitations on the content and textures, but modding the games can vastly increase the resource usage causing CTDs. The answer to such problems is usually "use less mods".

Now, I know we can't mod EVE (and I don't want to), but increasing the graphics of the game like 4k textures and tesselation and moar polys and particles... then throw that all together in a fleet fight or Jita undock. I can see the game crashing out regularly because of ~reasons~, probably memory.

My curiosity is mostly - at what areas of the game's graphics are the tightest limitations? What things simply cannot be safely increased, or how much can we increase the things that are?

I'm no programmer, but EVE was written as an x86 client back in 2003. I can't imagine it's coded to work efficiently with today's monster hardware, or even today's multi-core hardware. Can it even address more than 3.2GB of memory? What bottlenecks exist?