EVE General Discussion

So that's it people, we have our answer to the important question.


It takes 150+ pages of support to get something you want in Eve.

No, its a failure of the US public school system.

Wasn't there a walking in stations thread that made 150+ pages?

what about hi-res textures for other objects other than ships? the universe the planets the stars the supernova the asteroids the explosions and particle effect....?

Most games out there dither. Most players of those games think dithering is normal graphics.

The problem is that doing this well is very processor-intensive. A film visual effects project can tolerate a 48-hour render. We have 17 milliseconds per frame.

We've investigated this type of thing, and will continue doing so, but the results have not yet been satisfactory.

So every current game in existence can somehow achieve HD textures yet eve cannot. Best get the art department painting!!

EVE differs from most games out there that I'm aware of that have delivered improved texture resolution as an optional addition in one key respect: The physical scale of objects in EVE ranges from a meter or so (a corpse model, or a canister) to objects more than 100 kilometers wide. In EVE you can zoom in to fill the screen with one of those 1 meter canisters, or you can zoom back to see a 100 km wide structure.

Meanwhile, many other games are scaled to the human body, so for example in a game like WoW you'll rarely see buildings more than 10 stories high, and camera angles and distances are limited in relation to this.

This makes delivering high-quality textures a much more difficult problem to solve for EVE than for other games. When you zoom in on that 100km structure to fill the screen with the 1m can sitting in front of it, we'd need the equivalent of 100 million pixels across, or 10x10^16 pixels, to retain high-resolution detail in that structure. A compressed texture map that size would be something like 10,000 terabytes.

There are various possible technical solutions to this problem. One is to add detail procedurally below a certain scale. We've considered doing this but it's a challenge to do it in a way that looks natural.

Another is to use texture tiling, which can produce acceptable results in many cases, but would require a major redesign to our art authoring process and rebuilding every single asset to exacting standards in a totally different way from how they're built now. Texture tiling also presents serious visual issues when the viewing scale reaches certain multiples of the tile spacing, and good solutions to those problems are not trivial.

Such a project would likely take years to complete and stall progress on many new art assets and features we'll want to introduce in the meantime.

We do have raw nebula maps that are 2x the linear resolution (so 4x the size on disk) of what we're delivering. Delivering these higher-res nebulas should distinctly increase nebula sharpness on high-res displays, and should be a nice improvement.

See my post right before the one you quoted. If you're asking for infinite fractal detail in our nebulas, sorry, that's not in the plan right now.