EVE General Discussion

I was just thinking about this.

• Animation time dynamically linked to the undock timer, so basically the animation only plays for as long as it would take for you to undock right now. This would work exactly like the new stargate jump effect, so there's no fluff that makes you undock longer than you normally would.


• Have the front of the ship in the hanger view pointing towards the exit which has the background ships passing by.


• When you press undock, the engines start to light up, possibly flicker as though the ship is going through pre flight checks.


• The ship then slowly drifts towards the exit, engines blazing.


• The camera does a fancy graphical transition from the interior of the station to the outside of the station, maybe everything gets pixelated and the camera 'reboots' back up again outside (This could also alleviate the second or two gap of graphical objects of popping in to existence when you undock.).


• With CQ active, you'd just have the fancy camera change, since you're out of pod.

What about when you warp to the part of the station where there is no entrance? For instance Amarr stations, if you warp from the side, to play an animation you would have to fly to the bottom of the station.

I would certainly be happy to spend a few extra seconds if there was a docking animation, but may be difficult to implement for the reasons given above,

A docking animation could easily be two docking drones coming out of nowhere and locking the ship in a tractor beam just as the camera transitions from space to the station.

Hate to hijack the thread but you should also consider much LESS docking.

Some things like talking to agents, offloading, recharging your shield/cap could be done outside the station. If this is done, making a longer docking animation would be more tolerable and it would bring life to the area outside the station with parked ships and little drones flying around to move cargo, repair, guide ships into place etc. The need to dock could be limited to hiding from combat or changing ships.

I think it would be an improvement to stations that outside of places like Jita feel like this dead thing in space.

Even if it added a couple of seconds a brief animation of your ship moving from its hangar to the outbound feed would really help immersion

As would MUCH larger station models to justify how we're all in there

If you can do a stargate loading screen with a transition between the stargates, you can do a seamless transition to undock with the ship moving a little bit towards the exit.

Please do this for odyssey. Simply having flashing lights does not really constitute an undocking animation.

Also, do some sort of transition when i'm logging in. Can't stand having the game freeze for like 5 seconds as it figures out what it needs for me to log in. I can't alt-tab out of the game when this happens or anything, i'm stuck waiting for it to stop freezing. No matter how many caches get deleted this still happens for at least a small length of time...

Whatever is done - I will say that our aim when killing all these loading progress bars is simple:

No Extra Time.

The client has to unload the scene, ask for new location, get information from server, load assets, confirm to server its all there. There are hard limits on this time which will happen no matter how fast your computer is. We want to use this time for something more immersive that "loading bar popup".

It has to be optional.
SOmetimes whole fleets need to undock on short notice and jump to an open cyno.
If eve freezes on some clients because of the animation (not everybody plays on high end equipment) whole ops were in danger.
There would be a lot of petitions....

its already 6am??!

No, 8:30 GMT according to your post.

Now, there's Blue Badges stationed on odd places on the globe as Shanghai and Atlanta.

But a dev on iceland, early morning saturday during fanfast, who's both awake and sober enough to log in ...

Sounds a bit unexpected ;)