EVE General Discussion

Dear CCP art team,

So now we have one unique skybox for the ENTIRE region.

Really? What happened to "going through space"? What happened to "seeing the ship going through the nebula"?

I thought there would be a new nebula for EACH SYSTEM when you said it's gonna be rendered. And everytime you jump, the skybox changes a little, and you can actually SEE the GRADUAL changes in the sky. It's like from A to B you need to go through the space in between. Not like A and then suddenly BAM, B. You know what I mean?

Since they are all rendered in the computer anyway, why is it so hard to put in a few extra GB for the new skyboxes? Don't you just need to setup the camera positions and hit render? Why not unique skybox for every system or at least every constellation?

Curious EVE player

You do realize that you are jumping upward of several light years between regions? You will still see the old nebula, just farther away.

It changes relative to the distance you are from the major features, especially when you move to new regions, which is totally awesome and should help give yourself a better sense of "place" within the cluster. I guess it's supposed to change within a single region as well just to a much smaller degree and the overall theme of the nebula within a single region will be roughly the same otherwise.

Yeah it is region now, but give it time. Its a start at least :)

Correct in the mechanics, but from the bits I have seen I think that the change will be more gradual than that. Nebulae are not exactly small.

I will admit I would have been happier with it still being one viewpoint per constellation, but I'll reserve judgement until I see the actual effect on the test server.

My thoughts exactly, or add some graphics trick that distorts the image slightly based on coordinates. We'll see.

It was more about saving dev time. The art team has a huge backlog and there are a lot more important things to do. If they had spent time doing constellations instead of regions it would have taken FIVE TIMES longer to get the nebula done, and would have been five times larger a download. As it is they are only getting Gallente and Caldari ships V3'd if all goes well. Would you rather they spent more time on Nebulae or no new ship skins?

Thanks for your inside information. Development of Nebulae was outsourced btw...

You're seriously complaining about this? Per region really isn't as bad as you think. You will still get the sense that you're traveling through space.

There are 786 constellations in the currently known space of New Eden. Do you have any idea how long it would take to give each of those constellations their own cube map? Furthermore, let's think about the quality of the nebulae maps we're getting. If we assume that the quality for each constellation would be equivalent to the region nebulae maps, then we would be getting an exorbitantly sized download for cube maps alone.

We're getting 68 new cube maps that actually make sense and serve a purpose in EVE. That's a huge improvement from the 30 low resolution and repetitious nebulae that don't make sense in their placement as far as navigation is concerned.

The dev blog is pretty clear on it, and the comments thread clarifies it even more. Personally, I'd rather not have terrabytes of stupid space-background chewing up my hard disk. They found a decent balance between bloat and granularity. Ideally, they'd figure out a way to procedurally generate them live per-system, but as was also in the comments thread, when they experimented with that, it looked like sh!t.