EVE Online cloaking effect evolution

The constant evolution of EVE is one of the main things that keeps me hooked to it. Today’s post is one of those posts about EVEolution of EVE 🙂

First discovered by those, who frequent Singularity test server, and then officially confirmed by both CCP Seagull and CCP Manifest in dev blog and on YouTube, Cloaking Device effect gets a visual overhaul in Oceanus! This new effects complements warp and jump animations and the recently added warp blink after ship leaves and before it enters the grid. This new cloaking effect looks quite original, but it bears some similarity to Predator’s cloak from Aliens, which was most likely the inspiration for this new shader. Behold:

But did you know this is not the first time CCP attempts to change the cloaking effect?

First time CCP done it was in 2007 when Trinity was still in development. In Trinity CCP has done an immense graphical overhaul. All starships have been redesigned into higher poly models and have been given higher resolution textures. As you know, Cloaking Device icon shows half of the ship visible and the other half cloaked, so the effect introduced in Trinity was obviously trying to reflect that:

Second attempt was in 2009 when Apocrypha was being developed. If you logged on to Singularity to have a look at the then-new Wormhole Space, you could also notice this “Triage” like cloaking effect:

Eventually, both of the above visuals have been rolled back to a simple “vanishing” animation.

I must say the new cloaking effect in Oceanus looks really cool and I hope it stays in the game. It is just as good as visuals in some modern sci-fi series (but please mind the one in EVE is rendered in real time, while the ones on the TV shows have been rendered during visual post-processing).

Kudos (again) to CCP’s art departament!