EVE Trinity! – December 5th
I’m a bit late in putting this one up, been kind of busy, but here are my impressions of the Trinity expansion that I took a look at on CCP’s test server for EVE. Keep in mind the screenshots are without all the anti-aliasing and nifty other optimizations that will be working when this is released.
The level of detail in the models has increased a million times over. Originally a lot of the textures were rather flat and had very little detail to them. A log of things had a very flat and boxy look to it to some extent. A lot of the original modeling is quite nice, it’s what drew me to the game, but it was lacking to some degree. Now, the textures have taken on a new life. All of them show much more detail to them, even close up they have a more realistic look. The way the lighting works in combination with the textures gives it quite a leap towards realism than what they had before. The textures and modeling on the stations, especially Minmatar, give the impression of being vast cities in space. The modeling has enough detail and the textures give the stations much more of a feeling of being giant floating urban centers. Minmatar stations before Trinity – lol we were like the Sanford and Son of the cosmos until Trinity…Now there won’t be any more jokes about our ships being pieced together from a junkyard held together with duct tape. I logged into Singularity (their test server) from work when they released it to check out the models. I finally get on after messing around with the patch, screwing up the install, redoing it and waiting in the queue. I’m glad I had something else to do while I waited lol. When I got in finally, I found myself sitting in the station in my Cyclone. I think my head imploded or something from the shock of seeing this beautiful redesigned ship, sitting in this absolutely amazingly beautiful station. I almost didn’t want to ever leave, who wants to lose such a gorgeous looking ship? I mean the whole thing was remodeled from the semi-boxy structure, with the giant solar panels on the front, to a sleek, mean looking, pew-pew machine.
The old Cyclone:
The new Cyclone:
So after flying around a little outside the station and marveling at the new detail, I headed on over to a stargate. I have to say, that was quite a sight in itself.
Before:
After:
This new design was quite a departure from the lack-luster design it had. The details were just amazing to see. The textures had a much more realistic look, you could see what the material was instead of a very flat and plain look like it had before. You can actually tell it was constructed with many sheets of metal, prior to that the textures had a very flat, solid look to them, not nearly as much detail as they have now. The edges of the various parts extending out from the main ring of the stargate are much more strongly defined as opposed to looking like someone drew a couple lines at the very ends to look like the tips extended out.
There’s been quite a stir from the Gallente and Amarr players about the new designs for their race’s ships. The Gallente players seem a bit upset over the color scheme changes. Granted a lot of the Gallente ships haven’t diverged from their original color scheme, and most of them look quite nice, but there are a few exceptions to that. One of the Gallente freighters called the Obelisk currently has a little bit of a mismatched color scheme as opposed to what it used to be (Comparison screenshots: http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=645619&page=2#46). It is now predominantly brown with blue as opposed to the typical Gallente sea green. It actually doesn’t look as good as what they have now, but of course, what’s on Singularity isn’t completely finished. I’m sure their intention of releasing the new models and textures was to gauge what might need to be tweaked before they release the final versions. The Amarr seem a bit disappointed that some of their ships aren’t their typical golden color. I think they look quite nice, but of course the only time I see an Amarr ship, I’m usually about to get blown up at a gate camp anyways. Kind of hard to take a good look when you’re punching the “Warp to” button so you don’t get podded too. 
(Why is it Amarr have to gate camp to blow up industrial ships anyways? j/k )
I was quite interested in the new overview when I tried to resize it and the drone window didn’t move. I realized it wasn’t attached to the over view anymore. OMG I love this! I played around a little more and found that most of the interface could be moved around now. The selected item box that sat on the top of the overview now moved, the drone window, fleet, and even the overview itself. There are a few things I would love to see them do with it, namely make it so you could extend the overview horizontally and have it multi-columned, instead of list everything straight down. Something else I would like to see is the boxes that represent your locked targets have the ability to be moved. One thing I did notice is that when you set the windows to be transparent it doesn’t seem to lock them into position anymore. I perused the forums and a developer commented in a thread about it, but didn’t mention how to lock the window
They just announced that Trinity is due for release on December 5th. It’s not a Tuesday, like their normal days for major updates, so I’m wondering if everything is going to come down Tuesday and not come back up till Wednesday LOL. At any rate, I just purchased a nice new beast of a machine, so the release is coming just in time for me to REALLY enjoy Trinity.
