EVE General Discussion

I suggested it in another thread already, I'd love to see maneuvring thruster effects on all ships like on the Enherji fighter. It would add greatly to immersion when a Rifter fires a side thruster when turning around. It would also feel more like a spaceship and less like a submarine.

Just some flame exhausts on nose and sides and thats it, should be no big problem.

Go nuts!!!!!!!!!!!! Serially explosions and wrecks and missiles are big ones so are the crappy gas clouds.... I think everyone will agree go nuts with effects... Just have ability to turn them down when posssible or off when needed... And u will have EVERYONE HAPPY

Until it melts my GTX 580, it is not too hard on the hardware

Just do two versions of all effects - very basic "information only, minimal GPU load" effect for crap systems and super shiny goodness for high ends. Those with real PCs can run with the shiny, rest can use the minimal effects.

well. If i where you i would consider introducing a "very high" shader option. All effects which make the client run noticeable slower should go into this category. This will avoid all the pain with people on old hardware and would make you also look cool for the hw enthusiasts. However this may also increase maintenance costs since you have to maintain multiple shaders in some cases.

There are people fighting in null which will disable almost any effect anyway. Others who do exploration or small fleet warefare may have enough resources to enable everything. Performance based lod would be an option too... rage and supreme commander 1 are doing this. You can see it fairly easy in SC1 as soon you have hundreds of units on the field shaders just get swaped out.

let's make sure I get this... so, for example, we could have turret effects that are more GPU intensive than lolincarna launch day, or we can turn them off to have no turret effects at all? Not sure I'd support that.

When planning for advanced graphics, there are a few things to consider...

1) the client is horribly horribly optimized. Seriously, stuff that should cause absolutely zero FPS drops (brackets in space) can trash performance. That kind of basic stuff that even WIndows 3.11 got right should have NEVER made it into the game the way it has. I don't know why this isn't a bigger issue... we are already forced to sacrifice playability either in FPS or in situational awareness. Dumping more dev resources into hurting the FPS even more sounds stupid to me when you can't even keep basic functionality that other developers mastered in the 1990's.
2) this is an MMO. If you design the client for the top 1% of your potential customers, and leave the rest with bad/no graphics, the majority of your trials accounts won't subscribe. They will assume they either don't qualify for the game, or that the graphics fundamentally suck. Existing customers might stick around. Maybe. But you wouldn't deserve them.

I'm all for having graphics improve. But any idiot company can crank up the resolution, add a bazillion layers of shaders and skins and effects. It takes talented devs to improve the visual quality while yielding absolutely zero drop performance. Consider analog art... the greatest artists of all time discovered techniques to use the materials that have been around for thousands of years in new ways. Amazing art trumps amazing technology, every damned time.

Artillery turrets need to be bigger, with larger fireballs at the muzzles, to bring back that WW II Battleship feeling.

http://de.valka.cz/files/ia-1984guns_107.jpg

I run 2 clients.

I want supper shiney gfx goodness...on one acount
my alt in station or support I want to have almost no load

For my main in the super shinney mode having it scale back automatically in a big fight would be a plus.

I do when I'm just talking and not actually getting anything done. Strangely, the older avatar portraits did a better job of being distinguishable at small sizes.

I literally posted that volley from a different angle on page 2.