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Please, do it for christmas 2012.

Really.

The most enticing thing about this, to me, was the mention of actual geometry collisions. That is, instead of things running into an invisible "bounding box" (or sphere), we can have actual collisions with the actual skin of our ships and stations.

Three major implications come to mind:

• Collisions can now be modeled realistically, which includes the damage or effect it may have on your shields, armor, or hull.
• Ramming may become a plausible mechanic.
• Fixing station undocks, and dancing ships in general (wonky collisions).
• Flying through asteroid belts with a frigate using a joystick becomes a real option. Dogfights, races, new strategies... in general, a whole new layer to the game. This would be particularly exciting if coupled with the ring mining which was also mentioned... for example, perhaps use frigates to tow asteroids out of the depths of the belts (where it is too dangerous/inaccessible to the primary mining barges), and within reach of the mining fleet?

Of course, I would love the enormous graphical upgrade all by itself, even without what it may or may not do for geometry dynamics within the game, but still...

Thanks again for the great feedback and it makes me happy to see that for the most part, people are interested in DirectX 11. Here goes for some more detailed answers, I think I've got you all:


There are two components to this. The engine team responsible for adding DirectX 11 support, including the new domain and hull shader portions of the DirectX 11 pipeline that are required for tessellation do not work directly on player facing graphical enhancements. Adding this support to the engine is the lion's share of the work and is better handled by few specialists, rather than throwing all of the graphics programmers we have at it to get it done quicker.

Secondly, once the engine can support DirectX 11 features, then the EVE space art teams are able to start utilising the features of DirectX 11 during new feature development. Whether the engine is ready in time for Ring Mining or perhaps the PoS upgrade, I cannot say at this time. Potentially yes, it could slow feature development time but it's difficult to say by how much at this early stage.


This is a totally valid concern. As others have mentioned in this thread, the richer graphical content and features of DirectX 11 will be configurable via the graphics settings, if your card cannot support the features there will always be a fallback option.

There is always the risk that the minimum spec machine is updated and your hardware falls below the barrier of what we can reasonably support. The current minimum spec card is now 7 years old, which is a fair notice period.


It's quite possible, although there is nothing currently on our roadmap.


Higher resolution textures are typically required to take full advantage of tessellation, so there is potential for an increase in client size as more assets become tessellated. Tessellating a well built piece of geometry is a relatively trivial task but adding support for it in the engine along with the other pieces required for DirectX 11 is the time consuming part.


Typically speaking, UI programmers and graphics programmers are not cross-functional. Unless you get your hands on CCP Snorlax, he is quite capable of both but ironically is working on client performance at this moment.

More triangles!! Do it!

But seriously, I'd spend money I don't have to build a new PC if you implemented this...

JUST DO IT.

This!

Sadly this point (AMD not adhering to standards)is grossly incorrect. Physx is proprietary and owned by nVidia. They could make it so that AMD cards could use it as well but they have closed the door on that. They do NOT want Physx (I know it's spelled wrong but whatever) to run on any hardware but their own. Their theory is that this will force people to buy their hardware.

Since they can shmooze game developers into doing this, it would force people who want Physx to buy their video cards. Not a bad business model from their point of view, it's smart and aggressive. I just don't like being pushed into only one buying option. I would like to choose my hardware based on the standards I feel are most important, not on the fact that the game I want to play only supports one hardware vendor for certain features.

Consider that they worked it so that sound effects only work if you install a Sound Blaster sound card. No sound effects if you have only onboard audio. Bet that would really cheese off lots of people. This may sound a bit extreme but the comparison and the principle are valid.

Its been asked already I think, but if we said 'no' to this, what would the engineering team do instead?

In the presentation video we were shown asteroids colliding with the supercarrier and breaking up, but this isn't mentioned in the dev blog. Is that a separate feature to this discussion on tesselation, or is tesselation required to implement that?

I think that everything shown in the video was cool, but I'm still not clear on what the alternative is. Keeping the visuals fresh is important, and 'destructible objects' would be sweet but unless there's a gameplay mechanic to go along with the asteroids then its ultimately 'just' more visual polish. Even if it is very sexily applied. ;)

If there isn't an alternative on the table then I'm just going to go 'Yay! Do this!'

Supported.


So I can finally use this Nvidia 570m card for Eve soon™

Wait, so once this goes through those of us using OpenGL will no longer be able to play eve? Or just be locked out of the high end graphics? Or it will all work as it does now with the translation layer, but with even lower fps?