EVE General Discussion

Regarding camera field of view, we are looking into whether any changes to our camera system might have unintentionally affected the existing camera's field of view. Nothing to report on this front yet. We did not intentionally change this parameter.

Previously to this patch, the star fields were added on top of the background nebulae. Now, nebulae occlude the star fields behind them to varying degrees. This means that you're able to get a better look at compression artifacts, which have always been present in our nebula textures. We're looking into our options for improving compression for these textures to reduce the artifacts you've pointed out in your screen shots.

Finally, I'm working with one of our art directors, CCP Nag, on optimizing our background starfield to reduce artifacts when zoomed in and sharpen the visual impression of the stars. This work is looking promising and would be a simple change, but as with the nebulae, it requires balancing quality against compression so that we don't kill your video card or deliver something with artifacts that feel worse than what's in game now.

There's no doubt that our new nebula setup has brought certain artifacts and imperfections in our assets to the forefront, but the technological groundwork is sound and we're doing what we can to deliver a higher-quality look for the sky background that addresses the issues you've raised here.

Wow that last one is really bad, it's like someone took an airbrush and averaged the colors of the nebula and then sprayed it in a streak across the image.

Winning!




CCP knows what they're doing.

I think Minmatar space is awesome looking, tbh.

Most techniques for image compression sacrifice quality in reds and blues to achieve a better overall look for typical real-world scenes. Unfortunately, this isn't very kind to very red images like our Minmatar nebula backgrounds. I'll make sure that we carefully take a look at the impact on Minmatar nebulae as we discuss texture compression going forward.

Get a better PC

Very nice to hear some response as we never really got any in the camera thread. If you're still around, is there any info on the other issues that I mentioned? Particularly centering the camera direction on objects selected on overview and the way the camera zooms in on the starfield? (test server features) All the background looks fine if tactical view is enabled, but as soon as you go into orbit cam the backgrounds explode into pixel poop. From a strictly optical property and physics pov, objects light years away shouldn't even be remotely effected visually by zooming in on a ship 1km away. Please tell me at least that this is not an intended or unavoidable effect because it was obviously taken into consideration with the old system.

(not even going into all the other issues like ships disapearing, tactical overlay going awol, wild camera jittering even when sitting still, I just docked on test server and found myself somewhere in the floor of the station...new cameras are soooo broken and seem to be breaking everything they touch as well.)

I am actually back from a months long break.

These aren't little details, though, it's horrible to look at.
I do a lot of gfx coding and image manipulation, so go figure. :P

For years have I been silent, but now I am fed up about how "my" part of space is treated.

Like a red headed stepchild.

Literally !

Long focal lengths (narrow fields of view) have always showed up severe artifacts in the sky backgrounds. The controls in the beta camera make it easier to wind up zoomed in, which makes these artifacts easier to see. Our efforts that I describe above should improve the results when you do this, but it's not a magic bullet. Zoom in enough on any raster image and it'll look bad.

There are a lot of issues with the beta camera and it will need a lot more polishing to go live. When it's released on TQ, I recommend carefully documenting and describing what you don't like about it in the appropriate comment thread, and filing bug reports using F12 > Report Bug and lots of screenshots when you run into problems.

You dont adversely impact game performance when you have option to have high definition nebulas in your game. Just make it optional, just like you have low and high settings for antialiasing.