EVE Information Portal

Docking to a station (for the first time) gives me a unusual long black screen. Loading Preview mode give a black Preview window for ~2 seconds.

Starting the game for the first time:
- Hit PLAY in the Launcher, nothing happens. After ~5 seconds EVE appears in the taskbar with "no response" (I don't know what the englisch message is)
- After ~5 seconds the client launches with the "Logging In" message thing.
- Log In is complete -> Black screen for a few seconds until the background loads. The character triptichon loads very sluggish.

I was somewhere in 0.0, JEDQ-7, self destructed and woke up in a Aliastra station.
- Black screen for ~3 secons. Normal Station interior loads.
- Undock warp to a Minmatar station and dock.
- Black screen for ~3 secons. Normal Station interior loads.

Everything works as usual after it was done once.

Loading the Preview gives me the following. Then the Background appears and then the ship texture appears. Every step with delay of 1-2 seconds. I totaly understand this. Textures not downloaded, etc.

I have a fast connection so it's not really a issue for me, but for someone with a slow connection all the above will be really pain in the ass. Especially for the new players that you are aming at, because they will not understan/know the technical background and think that the game is broken. A simple loading wheel will be a huge win for everyone.

EDIT: And don't get me wrong. I really like that change and think it's a very good step forward. But the above mentioned "problems" should be solved befor release

Any resource the game downloads will be cached locally on disk, so no, it will only download it once. It only downloads it again if it changes.

The goal is that the average player, tech savvy or not, will not really notice a difference, except you were quicker into the game when setting up for the first time, or after a patch. What might have taken hours before, may now take minutes.

Is this a step towards those HD textures mentioned a while back or have you stuffed that in the 'shiny but never' pile?

First Dev Quote! Yay!

A follow-up question then:

If an update/patch is released, and there are things that aren't touched (like the way a can looks floating in space) then that thing hasn't changed and should need to be updated, right? Is this the way it has been in the past, only things that are new are DL'ed then installed, or is everything "copy and replaced" with the newest patch files.

Another other question:

Could this lead to on-the-fly patches? Lets say there is a problem with a ship model looking wonky. Could you (the Devs) put an updated file on the server to fix the issue, and the next time I look at the wonky ship, its magically fixed?

Another other other question:

What if there is a problem with a file, and it just so happens that a player never interacts with whatever asset that file is associated with. Wouldn't that player technically be playing with a broken client, just never looking at the broken part?

Assuming the cache is implemented properly, this kind of patching wil be likely possible.

Prefetching for neighboring systems only looks at static data that the client already has. This means what stations, stargates, planets, moons, etc. are in the systems. We do not get any extra information, whatsoever, from the server to decide what do download beforehand. So sorry, no help there for your nefarious purposes.

Within a few minutes of gameplay the client will have downloaded low-detail models for everything - all ships, stations, stargates, etc. so you will never enter space and not see anything. Besides, the overview and brackets will always show up immediately.

And finally, if anyone has concerns over not seeing things right away due to downloading, have the launcher download everything before entering the game. That option will always be available.

I already can see the sh!tstorm of whine threads that will happen on GD. Like all launcher whine x 100.

But I like the change especially if that will allow to bring some other more awesome features sooner or easier or preferably both :)

The .stuff files are exactly that, an uncompressed "flat" archives.
This, however, has nothing to do with fragmentation, large files fragment as much as smaller. The space used (rather, space wasted) and access times for many small files versus one big linear archive, however, is a concern. Especially for a thousand of very small (under 4k) files. MFT$ could grow enormously and will be more prone to loss of data on system crashes, as small files are stored directly in MFT.

How I see this, it can be implemented in two ways. A large .stuff file and unpacked amendments for chnaged stuff. At some regular intervals, the amendments are incorporated into archive for easier access.
This will let you have an "archived" retail client and a bunch of amendments for test server client, which will be incorporated into archives at release date (for example).

Nothing changes, really. The launcher still does the patching of the binaries so you will still need it for that.

The launcher does prefetch some files to improve the startup time of the client, like shaders and basic UI resources but the client will always go and fetch any file it needs if hasn't been cached already.

Please for all that is holy, tell us that you've switched to a proper CDN, that doesn't eat **** and die everytime we try and download anything from it.

Please?!