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Nice. This will be a popular change because it improves something almost all of us do all of the time. Can you tell us how you did it - did you rotate them all with some sort of script based on the map data? How long did it take to prepare and do?


Yes! This. Please. I've wanted this since beta. Coming from playing Frontier: Elite II there are two big things the EVE graphics have missed for me - docking/undocking and jumping animations. Seeing the ships zoom out of the gate, or a pilot's eye view of the transition between the systems' view of the nebulas would be cool. The progress bar hasn't changed much since beta and, while it disappears quickly these days, still feels like a placeholder, taking the player out of the EVE world when the progress indication could be displayed in a more subtle way (eg. a bar of a few pixels along the bottom of the screen) while showing the player something more appealing. It would help to give EVE another coat of polish.

New nebulas, new warp effect, gates properly aligned... it's as though CCP rediscovered their mojo.

Great work guys! Thanks to you EVE's immersion factor will go up several orders of magnitude!

Some questions and requests, if I may:

1. Is making hi-rez nebula backdrops available (to replace the current ones) for an optional download still in the plans? Approximately when do you think we could have access to that, and what would be the GPU impact?

2. As many have said, increasing the granularity of changing the backdrops to once per constellation would improve the whole thing significantly.

3. Are there plans to update the planet graphics? Mainly the gas giants look a little too fuzzy, and the planets lack any visible polar regions.

4. Could you make available a picture of the EVE cluster with all the nebulae integrated as a seamless whole? Maybe with the starmap of EVE overlaid? In as hi-rez as possible, 16x10 ratio. Thanks!

Why would you need to move your bookmarks? I honestly don't get it. Seriously, I'm struggling to come up with situations where you need to move your bookmarks other than the exceedingly rare case where your bookmark is now inside the structure, causing you to be propelled away from it after warping there.

And this is coming from a member of a PVP corp. I am more than surprised. I won't get into detail where precise bookmarks are needed.

This +1

I was worrying about immersion, not lore-realism.

I don't know about you, but during warp I'm usually looking ahead. It feels better to see the star I'm going to jump to ahead, instead of having it behind me. It would also show some progression during travel, as stars a few of jumps ahead get closer.

Now, I have a feeling the gates are supposed to be close to properly aligned. Looking at the F11 map, often the angles between gates are about right. But many systems are kind of mirrored so that up is down.

Bad idea. It would completely remove the whole "safe spots on the warp vector" thing. You need to think ideas through before you say them. Because first we'll have moving planets(that includes moons, so no more bookmarking POS towers, etc), then moving stargates because that wouldn't make sense either, then we'll have moons revolving around the planets on top of that. I can only imagine what would follow.

You can't make aesthetic changes like that just to "make sense" because they affect the actual gameplay in such a way that is potentially game breaking on several levels. EvE isn't a picture, nor is it a cinematic. The entire game is fictional to begin with. Why is everyone so obsessed with "making sense" in a science-fiction MMO? Explain to me how cloning "makes sense" but planets sitting still doesn't.

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As for the topic, you guys are doing a fantastic job on the aesthetics. The cloud ring/nebulae look awesome, the warp tunnels are superb, flying through planets is a cool effect, yay for trails coming back, and while the stargates pointing to systems is incredibly trivial, it added a nice touch to the game for those of us who enjoy the minute details.

Immersion is one of the most important aspects of a video game. When a game makes you feel like everything is happening directly to you, that's when you, the developers, have achieved one of the biggest goals you have on your plate. And you're on the right track, at least in the aesthetics department. EvE has some gorgeous scenery that really makes you feel like you ARE the capsuleer. YOU are the one getting shot at and blowing things up. When your ship explodes, YOU pop out in a pod. And when you get podded, well, that was just the dude on the screen of course. Couldn't be you, you're in a station already.

Immersion.

THIS, all of it! Thanks for this change though. I've been hoping you'd make this change since 2003!!

RL physics aside, you have to understand why the current method has a few limitations.

1. It does not include all of K-space. Maybe it can be done, but there is a performance tradeoff that you have to ask the coders about.
2. it uses the x nearest, or within x LY. It does not make sure to include all the jump destinations, which in a relatively small number of cases means the destination system has not been mapped to the nebula.
A number of interregional jumps in 0.0 come to mind and part of the Jita-Amarr pipe.
It is however trivial to make sure it gets included.

Now if we could just get the nebulas redone - with much fewer random stars - we might begin to get a sense of where we are. There are simply too many (non-eve ones) to properly distinguish at the current level of detail (and prominense of eve stars).

I don't know about anyone else, but I value attention to detail in games above almost all else. It really displays a care for the game, and this latest change is exactly the kind of thing I'd love to see more of. Thanks CCP!