Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I've been out of the game for a little while. I remember there was once a beautiful blue flash when a ship exploded. Now it's a sad orange pop. Some of the satisfaction of blasting a ship to bits was the orgasmic flash that would follow! It's an addictive thing!

Much like the outcry for ship trails, I'd like to see a return of the blue flash of a ship explosion!

Bump!

How many Japanese children must perish to fulfill your wants for this multiplayer game?? How many?

Are all the cel gifs from Macross Zero?

Didn't check, but Macross and Gundam in general did have some pretty epic swirly missile spam.

I can see a compromise here because you actually have three effects occurring, and not just a ship explosion which I think of as.... The explosion of a ship...

1: There is the actual exploding ship, Big and blue and understandably lovable, but not for me. I prefer small and intense explosions in space.

2: There is a lens flare coming from the ship explosion. I'm all for lens flares.

3: There is a screen flash/screen whiteout (different people will recognize it by different terms) I can dig this also. The explosion can be bright and intense without being unnaturally obese.

Here's what I see the problem being:

In the old days, EVE sounds and lights were supposed to look epic but were made on (now) old technology. CCP was limited in what they could do, and many of the sounds and lights ended up drowning out everything around them. This caused some problems.
Examples:
1.) Clouds in space did (and still do) drown out the player UI and make all transparent parts of the screen next to invisible.
2.) Loud sounds such as strip miners and weapons' fire would drown out other sounds and could be heard very loudly even with the volume turned down so far that most other sounds were nearly inaudible. These sounds would carry almost evenly across the grid until you got far enough away that they were simply cut off.
3.) Ship explosions created a bright flash that briefly illuminated a player's screen enough to cause flash artifacts in the eyes of the players, or obscure transparent parts of the UI when dealing with rapid ship explosions, and the sound of the ships exploding was so difficult to control that most players found they couldn't have the sound on any setting other than off.

Nowadays, with advanced shader and audio filter technology, our computers can seamlessly render complex light and sound shading effects without skipping a beat or using much excess processor devotion. So the problem comes in with CCP's new sound and light effects. They always make a habit of bringing each update as far as possible away from what made it bad in the first place. While this is a healthy fear, sometimes I feel CCP takes it too far. It looks good to the players who are fed up with it as they mention the change, but way down the road it becomes underwhelming and serves to chase people away from the game.

How it could be different: EVE runs on technology that can easily accomodate scaling sound and light volume. We can have ship explosions that are very bright but don't obscure transparent parts of the UI, both with modern transparency effects as well as making a dark background behind the light parts of the overview. Loud sounds can be loudest at the point of origin and can get quieter quickly with increasing distance from the source.

Too bright? Just turn the contrast down a tad in the video settings. You can see your UI and operate fine regardless of your settings. Ship actions too loud to hear other things? You're too close to the ship. Zoom your view out a bit.

It would be pretty sick to see a ceptor dumping flares dodging incoming light missiles

Speaking of which, it's been a while since we've had a "Fix Defender missiles" thread.

Whose turn is it this time?

The old torps were large, but updated animations slightly smaller would be fine. They've got alot on their plate but the cyno effects are weaksauce compared to the old. With them implenting the warp effects I'd bet in a point release sometime this year we may see updated effects. Someone on the Dev team reads these things and has probably forwarded it along to a queue.