EVE General Discussion

@.....
In HW2, the life of a ship had a certain continuity. When a ship was built or undocking, it wasn't just popped out, it was launched. When a ship dies, it does so in a fashion consistent with it's mass and purpose. Fighters left a streaking fire trail leading to an explosion, bigger ships had secondary explosions and slowly rolled out of control before a devastating final explosion. The sound effect made you feel like the ship was being ripped apart from the inside or that you were fighting for your life in a spacebourne fur ball. I think CCP could learn a lot about battle immersion from HW2
..........

It's not graphics Eve lacks, it is the behavior and movement of ships and the "feel" of combat between ships. In this regard I agree with OP, Homeworld 2 is unchallenged till today regarding the presentation of a space combat. Especially the Complex mod, which tweaks the game in various regards like expanding weapon range on all ships is so excellent that I am still playing it today and prefer it to all other space RTS. For 2003 this game was godlike.

It is exactly what a space battle would look like. If Eve could somehow capture that Homeworld feel.... for starters getting rid of the bumpy submarine behaviour would be nice.

Personally I dont like them either, i´d like to have like in mass effect 3 at the beginning of the game where the (insert ship class here) on the surface got destroyed. If our vfx guys are working on them i honestly dont know.

Except that "modern" cards and sli/xfire have outpaced graphical fidelity for years. You can easily run 2 2 year old cards and crush some of the most graphically intensive games out. This is not the early 2000's where upgrade cards every year was more or less required to stay up to date with graphical progression.

With a single 5770 (100$ 2 year old card), 3.2 ghz quad (overclocked to 4.0 with 35 dollar heat sink) and 8 gigs of ram I can run bf3 at almost full graphic

The Good-

Runs on old DX9 Hardware.

Easy to multi-box.

Exceptional variety and scope regarding design of ships, weapons/turrets, jumpgates, stations, hangers, captains quarters to such an extent that any new player can (very quickly) identify any racial object or environment by looking at it.

All popular sci-fi styles are covered; Steam-punk, Neo-Tokyo/Akira, Blade Runner, Mirrors Edge/oppressive-dystopian and 2001/Kubrick colour palettes.

The Bad-

Explosions. They lack racial significance; if you were to look at a battle from afar, you should be able to tell whether a Gallente ship went down or an Amarrian. And they are not awesome and devastating. Both of these points undermine the intricate depths the design team(s) have put into the models, and, undermine the significance of taking someone down AND; is contrary to the laws of game addiction. This is surprising from a company who have been making a game for ten years.

Engine Trails. They are weak. The creative side of me says the trails lack a decent opacity gradient between the centre of the trails and the outside edge. It looks too fake and for some reason it bends after the fact, instead of emitting, adding to the fakeness. And, there is no correlation between the engine particles that do emit and the trails. Overall they look rushed and tacked on, probably because they were rushed and tacked on.

The GUI. Needs a complete redesign, it's functional at best and dreadful to work with. It genuinely looks like a programmer designed it "...Just make a series of lists on the screen...that'll work fine..." because programmers work with lists all day long :) We're supposed to be controlling a spaceship with our minds! I know we're not; we're sat at our computer terminal and using a keyboard and mouse; but FFS at least give us some onscreen representation that we're immortal demi-gods capable of controlling the destinies of entire worlds by thought.

The Ugly-

Graphical break-up of textures and polygons. Biggest issue I've had since day nought and suspect it's a problem of DirectX, but I'll mention it anyway. To explain this, undock your ship, 'look' at a station, move the camera as far back as possible - and then do ctrl+alt+shift+rmb+lmb and then move your mouse to the right, this will zoom the camera in. Post back here and tell me what you see.

Skybox. It's pixelated.

Low-res textures. Like the skybox, we all know you have higher-resolution textures on your servers, you use them for marketing videos/trailers and screenshots - and even have E-ON magazine with their own copy of your external dev-tool so they can create screenshots and not bother anyone @ HQ.
We understand you need to keep the downloadable client as small as humanly possible, but in all honesty, where is the harm in offering a high resolution texture-pack download as an option? An option.Optional. This would mean those with lesser internet connections would be no better or worse off for either deciding to download EVE or not; and the same would go for those who do not have enough VRAM to play EVE and load all of the textures. There is no argument for not making it an option.

Epilogue-

You spend so much time over suspending disbelief by style, and then destroy it by substance. And you wonder why you do not have more new accounts; it's not the NPE (although I'm sure it contributed) - it's because you alienate those who would be drawn to this genre.

But I still love you guys.

A

One of the graphical aspects that I have always hoped would be addressed is ther apparent scale of the ships. This is typically achievable through a combination of textures and model complexity and some shops and races in EVE deal with it better than others.

Take the Abaddon, for example. In my opinion it's model and texture purvey a large ship - it has a large mass of main hull with detailed bridges that are smaller and hint at the ship's true size.

The new destroyers are also excellent in this respect, especially the Algos. Those tiny details that make up the illuminated bridges and of course the drone hanger lights all add to the perception of scale. I think this is an easier task on smaller hulls too because you are not fighting the texture stretching that appears to be the case on large hulls.

Now let's look at the other side of things. Take carriers; the Thanatos has the bridge lights and drone hanger effects that the Algos boasts but on a large model the texture is stretched and the detail lost. I cold show the Algos and Thanatos models to a new player and they could be forgiven for believing them to be the same physical size.

The other thing in this area I don't like are moving parts on ships and stations like mechanical arms that instead of adding scale detail have the opposite effect because they are completely out of true scale.

Things are moving in the right direction though. The new ship modelling and V3 textures are amazing in my opinion. The Vagabond has been changed from ship with a Duplo model and Quake-like textures to an improved model with a much cleaner design that improves the perception of the ship's scale.

In summary there are two big ways in which CCP can continue to improve ships across the board:

1) Clean up and expand the detail on out-dated textures, especially on larger ships like carriers.
2) Remodel ships where required to remove blocky designs that to not purvey the true scale well.

If you're actually comparing the current graphics to the ones from a game released in 2003 (the same year people started playing EVe by the way), then you probably need to pony up & buy new computer hardware. You can't really judge when you have everything set to 'low'.

EVE definitely looks better. Those HW2 graphics are just a notch above BC3000AD.

Applying more manpower to a situation does not necessarily mean better results.

You kidding me? Those homeworld graphics suck ass. The graphics here are beautiful.

Well true, but I'm just saying .
Where is the revolution?

Lets take DICE as an example.

They published the Frostbite engine back at 2008
And each year we see considerable improvements , and today we have BF3, one of the best looking game on the market.

Then we have Dunia engine.
I don't think much needs to be said.

Back to the topic.
The game aesthetically is good, but we just need to fill in the pot holes.