Test Server Feedback

Thanks. After having a look, the short version is that you're running on a machine that's below our min spec, but I see a few things you could change in your settings that would probably help. I'll email in-game with details.

I agree, and my experience is that minimized clients are a lot better behaved on Windows than what you describe as your Mac experience. This may be a limitation of the Cider &/or Wine compatibility layer or something we're doing to enable Eve to work with that layer. I have a Mac dual-GPU laptop myself at home and I'll do a little testing with multiple clients to see if I experience similar issues.

The problem is not really if the hardware can't or can support it, it is about if it is a good idea to do it or not.

I have a Radeon HD7870 so my GPU can support it and even the Captain's Quarter if I want to go in. But most of my time in this game is in a station, sometimes with multiple accounts... So obviously it is not a good idea to stress the GPU and waste electricity (and so real money) just to follow trade orders, wait for fleet or chatting. I didn't have to hear the GPU fan before you removed this option and I am already in low settings, no transparency, no damn blurring effect who was an eye strain, etc. just for the sake to NOT make my GPU work for nothing. I just have to reactivate decent details when needed.

In fact, the real problem is that EVE requires more power INSIDE than OUTSIDE a station (in non-battle situations). That don't make any sense as there is only one ship to render apart for the non-accurate part of the background where you see ships moving and I don't understand it myself.

Maybe you can make things simple, like just... not render the ship or the element who ask for power when this option is active, while keeping the 3d engine online. Or make sure that the station is really well optimized.


You can include the "small details" who seems to be nothing individually, but when accumulated become a serious annoyance for this game. For exemple, the "Selected item" window has to take a serious amount of space if I want to have big interactable icons inside all the time, just because CCP thought that this icons should not be displayed on two or more rows (like this exemple) and so they made their size automatically adjusted to be sure that they remain on one row only, with no options to keep the old (better) way. A bad decision they made since 2007... or how waste monitor space for nothing while making the usage of this window slightly harder. Also, I wonder how much players are inpacted by the bubble of light and thunders who appear sometimes in the middle of stargates (I mean THIS) because I am annoyed by them each time. Sometimes I cover the screen with the wallet window, especialy after XX jumps... I know that the EULA has a seizure warning for "rare" instances, but is it a valid reason to create effects who will voluntary provoke them without any way to disable them (and I think that stargates aren't "rare" instances) ? I can continue for long...

The amount of small annoying details and the reduction of his accessibility (RGB sliders removed, neocom without colored icons, etc.) make me wonder sometimes why I still play at this game as they seriously affect my gameplay. Well, I did leave for some months multiple times but I really like this game, not CCP... I guess that some players did decide to leave for good.



For the moment, well... I just disable the new map and I guess that I will have to get the reflex to use it as a sort of Gpu-Saver. After all, CCP « have concluded that we do not plan to do so » ...

Thank you for explaining CCP Darwin. Though I’m sure you’d prefer we just leave this issue be I feel I also need to chime in.

I have a feeling that this is something quite a lot of people noticed and found irritating, but just haven’t voiced an opinion on; but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be worth spending a tiny fraction of development resources to make their experience that bit better.

As you can see from people asking for a black screen we aren’t looking for anything fancy, something that would take 1 maybe 2 days of dev time tops.

If you felt you had to keep it within the lore etc. someone could make a simple background saying something along the lines of “External Camera Drones offline. No other feeds detected. Ocular input disabled”

10 minutes on Photoshop for one of the art guys (maybe an hour if they want to make it look snazzy), a few hours programing, and a few hours making sure it scales with different display resolutions. If you really wanted to go all out an extra day to get that sentence translated for all the different client languages and a bit of QA testing to make sure it’s colour-blind friendly.

That’s it, job done for the foreseeable future, no maintenance required.


Please?

I'm not sure I replied to this in another thread, but you are not seeing my machine. I'm on a Mac using the new Wine wrapper, and that is hiding the machine I'm really on. Its a 17 inch MacBook Pro.

Any news on this? If CCP resists the idea of a static hangar background, for whatever reason, how about limiting the hangar interior to one frame per second? I doubt this is less hassle than a static background, but there must be something you guys can do to avoid this utter waste of energy caused by GPUs running hot for naught.

Again: the dynamic hangar adds nothing whatsoever to my personal experience of EVE, other than tons of annoyance about the shockingly bad performance. If CCP stubbornly insists on doing the dynamic hangar, at least do it right in terms of performance.

Yeah, sorry, we're still working out how to get better reporting of system specs via our Wine wrapper. The most recent 17" MBP is still a pretty modest machine for Eve and I believe turning down your settings should be something to consider.

Ive turned down things about as far as they can go. With three clients, its on the edge of unplayable, even for mining. The thing is, its worse than it was a year ago. You are going backwards in terms of improving things.
As soon as Apple comes out with a new 17" laptop, I'll get it.

BTW, the main reason it gets unplayable is low frame rate seems to reduce client responsiveness. For example, right click in space, wait for menu. Slide to my travel list, wait for a sub-menu. Slide to my station, wait for menu. Slide to "Dock", wait for it to highlight. Its all that waiting that is annoying. Its like the client is saying "I'm too busy making a space scene to look at where the mouse is". Well, I would much rather have it look at where the mouse is than make a space scene. Is there anything you can do to keep the client responsiveness constant, irrelevant of frame rate? Somehow divorce the two?

I really wouldn't mind if you (CCP) just gave us back "the door," though I guess that probably still wouldn't be free from the problem of increased QA load for you.

Wow just came back to this game and this sucks. I find it hard to believe that something so simple would be such a problem for the Dev team. I will not be renewing the subscription due to this slow station environment. That was my fav part of the game, sitting in station and messing around with stuff. Now it's impossible without upgrading my PC. No way...