Test Server Feedback

I noticed the static background option didn't seem to be working recently, so I just logged on to attempt fixing whatever settings were wrong. When I opened the menu there was no sign of the checkbox for Load Station Environment.

Is this getting removed? I normally have several characters sitting in station at any given time and the GPU load of rendering the station scenes drastically reduces framerate for all characters when that option is enabled. Hopefully there continues to be an option to disable 3D rendering when docked or people like me will have to repeatedly sign a bunch of characters in and out instead of just docking.

Just pointed this out on the camera feedback thread as well. That ship bobbing makes me legitimately sea sick and there doesn't seem to be a way to make it stop.

I also was surprised to find the Load Station Environment checkbox no longer being availabe without note. Is this something players complained about to customer support, like about reducing all open windows using TAB?


You did measure the number of clients that use this option to disable station environments and came to the conclusion that there are too few to keep that button within the client?

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Available on Sisi as well as TQ is a possible remedy for your nausea.

It's not "completely different". You're looking to disable environment loading for performance reasons. I'm looking to disable load so that I don't see a ship bobbing up and down (since there's currently no other option to do so). Either way the issue is that they removed the option.

Please understand that we realize the value that a feature like this can have for someone who's running Eve for some reason on a really slow machine that needs it. If you are, it probably seems annoying and arbitrary that we'd take it out.

However, any feature, even something like this which is relatively simple, carries ongoing costs to the development team for the life of the game.

The way this feature works is that it loads the 3D station environment, including your ship, captures an image of your ship in the station hangar, and then disables rendering of the 3D station environment, using that image in its place.

First, even when the feature works fine, every release we have to make sure our QA team schedules a task to verify that it still works. We do this for every feature in the settings.

Second, certain recent changes (I'm not sure exactly which ones, but I believe they were related to the new, unreleased hangar environments for citadels) broke this feature internally. This particular feature had broken before in the recent past, and each time this happens, we must allocate developer time to investigate and fix the issue.

Finally, we have an ongoing problem (and I'm pretty sure you've noticed it too) that our settings menu is overloaded with choices, many of which are hard to describe in a tooltip or a few-word name. It's easy to add settings and harder (particularly when players depend on them) to remove them. So, we're trying to manage our settings more closely and not just leave them there because they've been there for a long time.

In this instance, we're very sure (because we repeatedly check) that our normal hangar environment performs acceptably on "low" settings on a machine that meets our minimum specification. We also have data that lets us know how many people enable this particular setting, and it's not many. (Sorry, I don't know the exact percentage.)

If you're struggling with performance with a single client, I would first try turning the settings all the way down on that machine, if you haven't already, and see how far that gets you. If it's still problematic, turning on Interval 1 and lowering screen resolution may also help.

If you are finding there's a significant performance drop for your foreground Eve client with entirely minimized clients running in the background, this may be a bug, and I suggest using the in-game bug report tool ("Report Bug" on the F12 menu) to report it.

First of all: thanks to CCP Darwin for taking the time to explain the reasoning. I encourage other CCP devs to follow his example.

Still, I want to ask about what I mentioned in my earlier post: why not provide the option to completely disable the hangar interior scene? Displaying a static "you are docked" image/wallpaper with no details about the station type or active ship should be easy to implement, easy to test and almost impossible to break. I would even be happy with a completely black background, no artwork required. I run multiple clients on a notebook, and battery life is very precious to me.

As for reducing the graphics details: sorry, but this is not a valid proposal. I want EVE graphics while in space, but don't care about graphics when docked. You can't expect players to fiddle with their graphics settings whenever they dock or undock just because CCP removes a very useful, performance relevant option without providing an alternative.

You can just change it for an image placeholder of racial CQ or hangar.

And not having the option entails some players having to render a scene they don't want, resulting less performance and/or havingto repeatedly change settings. It comes down to balancing the devs' work with how much it affects players. Hopefully we can come up with a simple solution that is easy to maintain and doesn't harm the players like outright removing the option.

I'll check with one of our QA analysts. We may be able to publish a procedure that will allow you to change that setting without launching the game.


Are you referring to the new WINE option? If it's much worse in a way you can describe, please file bug reports about any issues you encounter!

Thank you CCP Darwin for the explanation. It would be nice to have this feature restored in some manner but I understand the development reasoning behind it. If there was some way for a variation to be performed that allows a static background versus full 3D render, that would be great. Even a static image of the ship itself used from item description images would get the idea across without excess overhead for the client.