EVE Trinity!!!
They just released a few previews of their new graphics engine, and it’s ABSOLUTELY AMAZING. If you haven’t played EVE, check out this trailer, and this one, then visit their video section of their site, here: http://myeve.eve-online.com/download/videos/ Pretty much all the videos are footage from actual game play. Once you see that, check out this up coming expansion and imagine how much kewler the game is going to be relatively soon.
Here’s a quote from their Trinity page:
This winter we will be releasing the Trinity expansion. This constitutes a massive change in the world of EVE: Not only is the expansion packed with new features, but it also includes a graphics update of gargantuan proportions. Every ship, station and stargate has been completely overhauled from start to finish, resulting in an amazing splendor of space-faring sights. It really has to be seen to be believed, and once Trinity arrives and you log on to EVE, we’re convinced that you will never look back.
Get these awesome wallpapers here.
(Please excuse the improper spellings of CCP employee names, I need to figure out how to get international character sets to show up, a few of the names are not spelled correctly because of the fact that I’m stuck using a standard English character set right now – I’ll figure it out later).
The interview posted with EVE’s Art Director, Asgeir Asgeirsson, gives a little insight into the scope of what they did with this coming expansion. In the interview he mentions, when they first designed EVE, there were a lot of limitations with polygon count etc, now they have almost no limitations on what they can do with the modeling. He mentions everything has more weight and mass to it, and when you look at a ship you are able to tell what materials it’s made out of. Looking at the footage, the texture and how lighting interacts with the models is way more in depth what they have right now. He also mentions many stargates, stations and ships have been redesigned completely, and I have to say they look really nice. They also added a more uniform color scheme for the different races.
EVE’s Art Producer, Benjamin Bohn’s interview covered scope and vision of the retooling done to the graphics in EVE. He states that they’ve spent almost 2 years doing the revamp of the graphics for EVE. They remodeled every asset from scratch and are finally are getting close to the original art that was envisioned when they started in 2003. In this expansion there is over 500 ships that were remodeled, 100 objects and at least another 200 in the works for remodeling. Some of the stations contain 40k polygons and are 40km in size. They increased the number of textures and the how they interact with lighting to show more detail. The new textures each have their own unique look based on the material it represents. He estimated that 50 years in man hours was put into the redesign of the graphics, and he feels that the graphics are the best that you can get for a video game today. Seeing some of the art they have on the pages for the expansion, I have to say the stations look absolutely amazing. I can’t wait to get this downloaded and running! Their goal was to create a more immersive environment. I’ve already enjoyed the graphics thus far, and have to say it looks pretty nice, but with what they’re showing in these interviews, it is completely mind blowing to see the difference.
Halldor Gudjonsson EVE’s Chief Technical Officer states in his interview, he believes this expansion to be the largest they’ve released. The reason it’s the largest is due to the revamp of their modeling and the amount of content they added. From what I understand they will also be releasing a lot of PvE content with this expansion too. They’ve been working on making all of the graphics scalable to perform well in whatever situations occur in the game. He states there are a number of effects they’ve wanted to put in for a long time that just don’t scale yet. He expects to release more of the effects and more updating of their graphics in coming expansions, but they wanted to release what they have now because it is so good. He mentions their main focus for this update was on the ships, stations and stargates. They worked a lot with the shaders to give everything a much more realistic look to it. He expects a lot of the effects will be overhauled in coming expansions due to the fact that the hardware and software is getting more and more sophisticated, allowing them more freedom to produce stunning effects and still have it scale.
Nathan Richardsson, EVE’s Excecutive Producer, and Noah Ward, EVE’s Lead Game Designer, go into more detail on what to expect from the mechanics of EVE. They mention that they have done a lot of work on new player experience. They created corporation registry for new players to search to find a good fit (similar to the guild recruitment tool implemented in EQ2). Better contextual help so that you can get help by clicking on various parts of the interface. Tip of the day when you log in, and added tutorials. They’re adding new tech 2 ships, EWar frigates as stepping stone between recons and cruisers. Cruiser size interdictors, with interdiction field attached to ship instead of launched (prevents warping out of the area). Tech 2 battleships called black-ops use capital jump technology, but it’s limited for use by specific other types of ships. Jump freighters, which are basic freighters but with a jump drive. The overloading of modules have been tweaked a bit. Adjacent overloaded modules will cause heat damage to surrounding modules now. You will also be able to repair modules in space when you overheat them and direct heat to offline modules without damaging them, making them effective heat sinks. EVE voice is being built into the fleet manager interface, and I believe they’re making EVE voice free. They finally revamped drones! (thank the heavens) The drones will be smarter with different modes of operation such as, passive, aggressive, or can be assigned to assist other ships. They added new missions and more stuff to Loyalty Point store for some factions that were lacking previously. They’re also adding lot more exploration sites, gas clouds etc. They also revamped the kill mail system.
Overall this is looking like it’s shaping up to be an absolutely amazing expansion and I think it’s going to put them way ahead in the genre of space MMOs. The graphics and in-game technology being added to this game is going to make it even more addicting that it is now. I can’t wait to get a hold of this one! I definitely recommend that if you like sci-fi games, you should at least get the 14 day trial when this expansion hits.
