Missions & Complexes

CCP, can we please do something about the clouds in deadspace/mission/plex pockets? These things have been the bane of my, and many other, pilot's existence for a long, long time now. There are a few that actually look pretty bitchin', and a few situations in which you can capture a really nice looking screenshot.

But in real-time? In motion? In practice? Guys, these things are just hideous.

Whether it's the way the clip through objects, creating hard edges seemly at random that move around with your camera; their bizarre layering effects on top of glow effects like engines and laser beams that leads to some truly unnatural and unnerving visual glitches; or just the way they totally and completely dominate the screen with their massive clusterfuck of a presence, these clouds honestly make me embarrassed to show off EVE online's otherwise gorgeous visuals to friends. Especially considering how fantastic the new nebulae look, these clouds are just an absolute eyesore.

And let's not forget one of their main problems - framerate hits. Most anyone who's using HDR or AA knows what I'm talking about - on many machines, we get our framerates murdered by clouds, and typically have to disable these otherwise perfectly stable graphic options just to play the game.

So, can we please have an option to turn these off? Or down? Or (even better yet) perhaps you guys could set aside some time to really re-work clouds so they're up to par with the rest of the game? Would be absolutely fantastic. Thanks for reading.

How about we just delete them and not talk about them anymore

The clouds make the gfx card fans to spin which is mildly annoying, but more importantly many clouds are just so damn bright you can't see anything.

+1

Thanks, Affinity, glad to hear it! Here's hoping the improved performance stability addresses some of the visual issues as well. The layering glitch where clouds are drawn over the top of any glow effect (engines, laser, etc; see previous post) is particularly jarring and unpleasant to look at. I had submitted a bug report about it some months ago.

while they're at it, can they pretty please make the clouds three-dimensional? volumetric fog has been around since quake 3, so it can't be that hard to build...

+1
I pray for an option to allow us to remove them in the settings.

Just to add a couple of little bits of info to this. Team Trilambda's aim was to refactor the cloud system so that in the future they could work with it easier and be able to progress that system technically. Meaning newer effects, more awesome looking clouds, and a lot of other surprises there. Maybe you'll see something at Fanfest.

Of course the benefits of refactoring, included increased performance gains. Not only the cloud system, but they also managed to alter performance hits for a lot of other areas in the game's graphic engine too.
You know those spotlights on some ships? Those used to be pretty expensive in terms of performance, now less so!

Great to hear that clouds have been looked at.

The #1 gripe I have about some of them is their ever-dominating glare.... vast patches of blinding whiteness which completely wash out white celestial icons in space. An example which immediately comes to mind is the blue/purple/white nebula that exists on the Gruistas/Sansha side of the first room in Worlds Collide.

The clipping is the other one... causing one to spend inordinate amounts of time panning the camera around in a frustrated fit to be able to see anything that's nearby.

nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Mission pockets/Deadspace beacons.

You mean the blinking things like on the amarr shuttle ? I would really like if we could turn them off, as it's kill my eyes, I didn't board these shuttle anymore since months, maybe years, and even stopped using the splendid minmatar one for the same reason, I HATE things that blinks often. On a big ship you don't really see it, but on a small things like a shuttle... it's a pain.

Pretty good know for the clouds, these were putting my old computer at like 5 fps on sleepers site, and even with my current machine I clearly see when they are here.

the word dungeon hurts my eve pride though :P