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EVE Evolved: Touring a galaxy reborn
EVE Online recently celebrated the release of its incredible Crucible expansion, noted as one of the most feature-heavy expansions in the game's history despite the majority of its features being produced in a period of just a few weeks. Two years' worth of graphical upgrades, features, balance upgrades and quality-of-life fixes hit Tranquility all at once, and the response from players has been incredibly positive. Last week I rounded up all the information there is to know about the Crucible expansion, but reading articles and news posts is no substitute for hands-on experience. This week I took a tour around parts of New Eden to explore the incredible new graphics Crucible delivered. As I have a background in graphics programming, the graphical upgrades are obviously the most exciting change for me. The astounding background nebulae are even more impressive when you know just how difficult it would be to build a nebula system that looks this incredible from any location. In this week's EVE Evolved, I explore a reborn galaxy and catalogue my adventures in a massive HD gallery.
EVE Evolved: Everything there is to know about Crucible
This summer's lackluster Incarna expansion and the ensuing microtransaction drama took a massive toll on EVE Online's player community and development staff. Players were quitting in droves, and CCP eventually had to lay off 20% of its staff worldwide. Two years of half-implemented expansions, broken features, and "first steps" that were never iterated on left players begging for a content-heavy expansion like Apocrypha or those released in EVE's early years. EVE is known for being practically a new game every six months, but since the blockbuster Apocrypha expansion, daily life in New Eden hasn't changed much at all. To pull things back from the brink, CCP refocused development on EVE Online and gave developers a free pass to work on hundreds of small features and improvements. The company began flooding us with details on new ships, graphical updates, new gameplay mechanics, and desperately needed balance tweaks, and we loved every bit of it. Although it's mostly small features and gameplay tweaks, the Crucible expansion feels like a genuine rebirth for EVE Online. The types of changes made show that CCP knows exactly what players want from EVE and that the company is now willing to deliver it. With CCP's renewed focus on internet spaceships, the Crucible expansion feels like the start of a new era in the sandbox. In this week's EVE Evolved, I pull together everything there is to know about the Crucible expansion that went live this week, from its turbulent origins to the awesome features and PvP updates it contains.
EVE Online shows off new Crucible engine trails
Veteran EVE Online players will remember the joy of engine trails, a simple graphical effect that really added a feeling of speed to fast ships like interceptors or microwarpdrive cruisers. While the much-lauded Apocrypha expansion brought us countless new features, developers were forced to remove engine trails due to performance issues. We recently learned that engine trails will be making a comeback with the Crucible expansion, and in a new devblog today CCP Mankiller released details of the tricky work involved in getting the much-loved feature back into the game. Mankiller explains that the old engine trail effect actually needed to have its vertex buffer updated every frame, making it a massive performance hog. The new trails use a much less costly approach that generates the geometry inside a vertex shader using splines. For those who fancy themselves mathematicians, CCP Mankiller provides the gruesome details of the equations that had to be constructed and solved to program the new shader. The new technique has additional advantages, like no longer skipping around when you're lagging and the possibility of new effects like heat shimmer, light absorption and refraction. The new engine trails go live with the Crucible expansion on November 29th.
EVE dev video shows work on engine trails, custom ship skins and more
If you're a fan of EVE Online, I apologise in advance for the funny looks you get when you jump out of your seat yelling "HELL YES!" while watching the latest In Development video. In this second part of CCP Games' new video devblog series, CCP Guard takes a live hand grenade into EVE Online's art department to show us just what's going on behind the scenes. We've already seen the impressive nebula effects and new Raven model due for release in the winter expansion, and today CCP showed off some massive shadow improvements, but those upcoming additions pale in comparison to what's planned for after the winter period. The latest In Development video shows that CCP is currently working on engine trails, custom ship skins, a new cyno effect, a new warp tunnel, and graphical upgrades for every single ship in the game. It's a tall order, one that's unlikely to be fulfilled in the winter expansion despite developers' recent laser focus on delivering new features. The video gives a sneak peek at the models for the Amarr and Caldari tier 3 battlecruisers, which were selected from fan-submitted entries to last year's design contest in a similar manner to the already revealed Minmatar Tornado and Gallente Talos. Read on to find out why custom ship skins are more work to implement than most of us realise and to watch the new video in HD.
Star Trek Online's executive producer sits down for a 25 minute podcast interview
Star Trek Online's Craig Zinkievich, the executive producer, has taken some time away from work in order to sit down with the guys from the Hailing Frequency podcast.The podcast interview, spanning a nice length of 25 minutes, features questions geared to Zinkievich's background and early days with Cryptic Studios before moving in and discussing the game at large.Questions regarding the game design span a huge range of things, including sending over away teams during combat, different type of missile salvos and configurations, how healing and protection is handled during away missions, and the biggest question of them all, can you turn off the engine's trail effect. Very serious Star Trek lore in that last question. (And yes, Craig says there will most likely be a toggle to turn it off.)If you're interested in more Star Trek Online information, listen in on Hailing Frequency's interview podcast or, if you can't listen, check out the written transcripts.
