Test Server Feedback

So I want to take a moment and post a follow-up for CCP Sledgehammer regarding my earlier lengthy wall of text.

I re-examined all the Amarr ships again and in general they do look pretty good. The white armor is mostly only terrible on the Oracle; everywhere else it's not too bad. I think a lot has to do with how much detail and shading is or isn't present, and the Oracle's hull doesn't seem to have much in those white areas compared to most other ships. The degree of matte or gloss in the white plating makes an enormous difference as well. A main thing I noticed was that as the ships get larger, the overall scheme looks better and better.

On the subject of matte and gloss, the Abaddon (and to an extent the Prophecy) really helped put good words to what's been bugging me about the gold trim. It's not the color - that's actually quite fine - but rather it's the glossiness on some ships. As these are Amarr ships, there is a lot of gold trim, as you'd expect. However, some ships have disproportionately more than others (Abaddon and Prophecy again) and in situations like that it's really important to make sure that the gold trim isn't over-glossy or looking rough and bumpy instead of weathered. An excellent comparison is the Abaddon's shiny, bumpy, shiny (yes, I did it deliberately) trim which makes me kind of cringe a little bit vs the Apocalypse's and Armageddon's trim which looks flat-out astounding.

More impressive still are the Impairor and the Amarr Shuttle. The Impairor has a lot of gold trim on it for a ship that size. A lot. However, the main strip down the center isn't as shiny as it could be and instead is slightly weathered to mute the sheen. The two pieces off to each side are glossier and less weathered but are broken up by that engraving which actually has enough detail in it to survive the new rendering process in a generally pleasing state. This new PBR brings out literally every last detail in a skin and not all of them have enough detail for it (perfect example being the wingtip hardpoints on the Harbinger which look perfectly terrible now).

The Amarr Shuttle, meanwhile, shows what matte armor plating should look like. If it's not going to reflect light then it bloody well shouldn't reflect light. I went back after looking at this and checked out some of the Caldari ships I thought were plastic-y and they actually reflected more light than the Shuttle but not as much as the new Minmatar ships (which are mostly all amazing by the way, now that I've stopped and had a long look at them).

The gold on the shuttle is weathered and dulled nicely, and while there's overall a higher percentage of gold on the shuttle than on the Impairor, the shuttles matte panels (which are moreso than the Impairor's) balance it very well.

So mostly, to improve Amarr further I think it goes something like this: Smooth out all the gold trim on old ships where it's rough and bumpy, dull the sheen a little bit with some weathering on ships where it's really glossy and make sure none of the white hull plating is glossy. Put some detail back into the Oracle's forward hull.

Then, when you're all done, please give the Abaddon, Harbinger and Prophecy proper 2014 reskins. Leave the model, just make new skins with the level of detail new ships are getting.

....and with all that, I wrote another wall of text. Joy.

There's a devblog coming up with all the answers! ...and lots of formulas...

The camera pivoting in space around the new Blackbird mesh is off. In the station, the camera pivots around a point somewhere in the center of the ship, as it should be. But in space, preview windows, and the fitting window, the pivot point is below the ship for some reason.

I took a screenshot and drew some lines to illustrate this

I have checked with other ships and this doesn't happen, and my camera settings are all default (no offset or anything).

Fantastic! Thanks for your great work

Black bird animation(only warp out animation works) and warp trails still not correct.

Nooooes!!

Amarr ships looked much better two days ago. Where did the Amarr fleet get that black on epic ships like the Armageddon or the Apocalypse?

The Khanid ships look okay with that silver and black-glossy armor but the Damnation doesn't look like an angry bird with scary blue shining eyes anymore pls reconsider the blue shiney eyes on the Damnation and the red shining eyes on the Prophecy.

The Sansha ships lost all their Terminator-steel gloss

Tech one Gallente hulls look cool and the tech2 hulls are too shiney for my taste.

I am not a fan of the new Blackbird hull, she doesn't look like a bird, nor a black bird. The only Caldari hulls that need better looking hulls are the Griffin, the Bantam and the toothbru- errm.. Osprey.

I am still wondering what kind of bird a scorpion is but what do I know..

Does that include answers about the goggles?

And the Loki, where the center is under the ship with some sub system configurations that make the Loki look like an arc.

something is wrong with amarr tech-part textures. It looks to me as if two textures have been merged into one.

compare Oracle back side
http://i.imgur.com/wUEsFAh.png (two textures used, one brown and one is the ship hull texture)
with
http://i.imgur.com/Xo2C6G1.png (new, all black)

or Sentinel top side
http://i.imgur.com/P8fVi3h.png (two materials)
with
http://i.imgur.com/ACFMSSQ.png (one material again)

you also notice that the tech parts of small ships look very oily. Esp on the sentinel. Some material properties might need adjustments there.

The only thing I really could copmment on was the rendering of my Cynabal. It looked horrible, there semed more details but the colour was washed out and my already nice looking ship did not look nice at all.

Also, while docked, the frame rate seemd to be really jerky but the fps monitor said 55-60 so would assume this would be something t do with the server processing the new graphics

New details good, colour depth very bad, please improve the colour for the new rendering a lot.

Also very concerned about adding dust and other particles in belts. I get problems with missions with dust etc and alsways my frame drops a lot. There was supposed to be an option to disable this effect but I cant find it. Adding similar effects to all the belts we need to ensure that a pilot has some control over the settings for these effects, switch them off entirely or switch off/activate different aspects of this at will.

Lower end machines are not going to enjoy the new effects and it could put people off the game.

My machine is not amazingly high end but I have intel i7, 2gb Nvidia GTX 750 ti, 16gm RAm and Gigabyte Motherboard, normally deals with max settings no problem for two clients. Gets a bit hot with 3 on max :)