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They do look nice...

2 questions...

1: How much will the new nebulas increase the memory footprint of EVE? As someone who used to dual client but can no longer do this with 1GB of RAM... hopefully CCP wont go overboard on the already large game memory footprint... Could also affect multiple clients on PCs with more ram...

2: How much space will these take up on the hard drive? Considering not everyone has 10k RPM drives or SSDs, could they increase lag by taking time to load off of the drive into memory?

The total size for 67 cubemaps is 201 megabytes (Each cubemap is 3 megabytes). The new cubemaps are the same size as the old ones. Note that the patch will not remove the old cubemaps from your hard drive, due to legacy issues and the fact that they are used in places such as ship icons. They are planned to be removed later at a date to be determined. The old files occupy around 134 mb.

So you will be downloading 201 megs, which are then compressed, I can't tell you the exact compressed size at this time. The maps were authored at twice the resolution we are delivering them in, and they are compressed. Ofc, they look much better uncompressed and in full resolution, so we might offer those as an optional download at some point in the future, for the die hard astronomy addicts with space on their hard drives and video ram to spare.

Any chance for a low-res download of the entire client graphics pack?

When they went in initially, raw from the rendering farm, they were about 2GB in size, which caused a few issues in client size

I see the advantage of prerendered images, and therefore the need to limit the number of backdrops. But as said above, the region granularity is a bit too large to notice changes in environment often.

My suggestion would be:
Use the large prerendered cubemaps for region changes. They show the really big phenomenons even from far away.

But think of a way to add a second layer with smaller phonomena, maybe even rendered live on every system jump which show the closest stars and small nebulae between them. They can be much smaller and only need to cover a small percentage of the whole cube, but change with every jump. It would be really nice to see the star you are jumping to (relatively) aligned with the gate and much brighter than the rest of the stars. Or that you could move around a small nebula when moving inside a constellation.

Those things from the second layer would be small dots from far away, so they are not a concern after a region jump.

I could imagine that a second layer which is transparent in large areas and only has some noticable spots filled would not take too much ressources.

I also guess just adding bright stars for the other systems of the constellation with some simple geometry would make the nerds (like me) happy. Just some small things that change when jumping from system to system. I promise i will search for them

What are the chances of getting those three images in the devblog in larger sizes?

Let's say 1920x1200 (or 1920x1080) or 1680x1050

Awesome work guys, I'm really looking forward to this

I agree that it would have been incredible to have nebula changes on a system or constellation level; I was imagining each jump enlarging or reducing the size of the "neighboring" nebula (the one for the adjoining region in the background), but like you've said it's all a balancing act. As it is though, giving each region its own nebula will do wonders for giving us a better "feel" for the different areas of space and adding some much needed geographical flavor.

I've waited for this feature since it was announced at the last Fanfest. It looks absolutely fantastic in appearanc and execution, but I'll torture myself a bit more and wait for it to appear on Tranquility instead

I'm just wondering if there's any plan to have the nebulae superimposed on the map screen instead? So we have an appreciation of the location and relative sizes of the nebulae? From an exploration point of view, it'd be interesting to go to one system and be able to say: "I'm in Catch, I looked back and there is the XXX nebula surrounding Domain, my home".

Will there be an official naming convention for these nebulae, as implied by the Dev Blog, or will we leave it to the community to "evolve" names for them?

Next in the space background department, I'm really hoping to see binary or multi-star systems, comets, black holes, supernovae, neutron stars and other exotics!

Please keep up the good work!

Farewell, Smoke Monster from Lost! I'll miss you!

I'm liking the change but I'm not entirely sure I like the relationship between natural phenomenon and security status (and to a lesser extent racial colour). It seems a bit arbitrary and slightly counter-intuitive.

While the racial colour thing kind of makes sense (nations base their colour schemes on the local surroundings), I would have thought that the over-populated urban sprawl of high-sec would be more dark and grey, where the vast wilderness and freedom of nullsec would have more vibrant and bright colours. Think Los Angeles vs the Amazon Jungle, or New York vs Madagascar.

I think that might even be a psychological queue that would encourage more people to explore beyond the boundaries of highsec. Food for thought at the very least.

Having said that I really like that this will give a visual queue of the player's current location, and if you pay attention you can get an idea of relative locations between systems for a sort of veteran's instinct navigation system (for capital pilots anyway).

It actually changes between constellations, not systems, right now. But like stated in the blog, many constellations share the same nebula.

The concern for our choice of granularity has been noted, we won't make drastic changes to the system or the assets before the winter release, but this is obviously something many are concerned with and we'll examine what we can do.

However, I encourage you to check it out on Singularity ( or TQ once it ships ) before making final judgements!