I know I have missed one very important feature mentioned in this devblog here, which will be coming in the “October patch” for Incarna. I am talking about the: *drumroll here* new cynosural field effect. New stuff has been available on Singularity since last friday, but I wanted to get some screenshots pretty enough to please the public (and do the new cyno justice: it really looks much better than the current one).
Okay, enough reading, let’s see *it*:
Animation is a bit slower than the one in the current effect, and textures’ resolution has been bumped up a few notches. The new capital jump has been improved as well, but I couldn’t get a good screenshot of it: it seems to only look good when animated.
But wait, what about the engine trails? Are they coming back?
According to a very well informed person (CCP_Fallout), the answer is YES. Unfortunately, there is no schedule, so we will just have to wait.
Yestarday CCP t0rfifrans has posted a dev-blog about racial Captain Quarters being already available for testing on the Singularity test server. If you can’t wait to see them before your client is patched to the Singularity level by the trusty SiSi Launcher, feel free to watch this youtube movie. All CQ’s reflect their races distinct culture and style: Caldari are cold and “made from steel”, so their quarters have a strong utilitarian look. Gallenteans value freedom and pleasure, so gallente CQ are IMHO the best looking ones at the moment. Amarr, the most religious race, have many statues and other religious accents in their quarters. And of course you already know the Minmatars: rust and duct tape (as if they don’t know how to smelt stainless steel, even though they are able to fly in space. It might have something to do with the legendary strength and durability of Minmatar duct tape).
T0rfi also mentioned that the inital spawn point after docking has been moved, so you can immediately access the ship’s console, rather than having to turn around and walk towards it. Oh, yes, you will now be facing your ship when you dock. And no, it does not work on Singularity yet.
Eve Sans Neue
One thing not mentioned in the dev-blog is the new font. It looks just like on the screenshots in this dev-blog (or on the screenshot on the right).
And yes, ship spinning is back, too. Just click on your ship in CQ and select “Enter Hangar”. The ship spinning UI is almost the same as it was before Incarna, but it seems not to be the final version: Station Info panel on the right is missing.
I've broken it
Unfortunately I can’t get on to Singularity thanks to this nice red error on the left. This is why I don’t didn’t have the usual bunch of screenshots from the current SiSi build – I am was stuck at accepting EULA. Hopefully CCP has published a few screenshots so I will link them below instead. And I won’t give up trying to get it working.
Reinstall of the Sisi client did not help. My guess is, since I’m running polish version of Windows 7, EVE tries to find polish version of EULA. It fails, and cannot load its contents, so it becomes stuck on EULA window. Bug reported #117055. Here is the solution: how to get past the EULA window.
PS. I consider moving from my quiet home system to a new one with a Gallente station. Why? See for yourself.
Pattern Clarc has written an excellent post on EVE Online forums regarding how players would like to see the solution for the current issues in EVE. It is a “fake” dev-blog, which adresses all of the below issues players see in EVE:
Players know that CCP is currently developing two other games: Dust 514 and World of Darkness,
Thus, the amount of manpower available to develop EVE has been reduced,
Players also see lots of known issues, which are not being addressed (hybrids, dreadnoughts, COSMOS, etc.),
Instead, players see new, mostly unwanted content (100+ pieces of clothing, aka space-barbie),
CCP not being transparent to the playerbase – resulted in the ‘monoclegate’
Post is really insightful, and the general feedback in the forum thread is rather positive. My opinion is no different – Dear CCP, listen to this guy; or even better: hire him to write dev blogs for you. By the way, the Tick-Tock approach mentioned in Clarc’s post has really worked well for Intel.
The Door.
Personally I think we should listen to Zulu’s statement for now, and see if CCP keeps their word. CQ/WiS is not bad in itself, it just lacks the usability of the ship spinning interface (takes time to load, no context menu on ships, no way to open Ore bay/Fuel bay/Corp Hangar/Ship Hangar without opening “Ships” window first; no drag and drop from hangar to ship; no doubleclick on the ship to open cargohold). Another thing is lack of environment: instead of Walking in Stations we’ve got Walking in One Rusty Room. I’ve got a paddle, and a bucket but there is no sandbox to play in – there is only a big mysterious door instead.
Seismic Stan's hat by Rixx Javix
PS. Dear CCP, we want a new ship for christmas; snowballs and launchers will work, too. AUR and clothing is a no-no, unless it’s a classy, black pirate hat:
If you are an EVE Online player that is. When logging on this evening I have noticed my account now has 1000 more AUR than it had yesterday, meaning another share milestone has been reached on eveisreal.net and CCP rewarded players with free currency to buy clothes for avatars. Two sharing stages have been unlocked so far, yielding a total of 2000 AUR per account (1 PLEX equals 3500 AUR, so CCP gave away an equivalent of half a PLEX so far).
Congratulations, EVE community!
PS. The next step will unlock 1500 AUR, so if you want some premium stuff for your avatar for free, keep sharing.
This is one of the most important news, as most players have complained about loading Times of Incarna’s CQ and worse usability of its interface (no context menu on ships, no way to access fuel bay, corporation hangars, ship maintenance bays, no doubleclick to access cargo). There will now be a toggleable option to load either CQ or ship hangar (game will remember your preference). Additionally, Captain Quarters will receive some graphical fixes. To quote a few:
Fixed the incorrect specular behaviorFixed shader texture gamma issues
Implemented a new specular glossiness model
The specular reflection is tinted by the color of the light
Added diffuse and specular fresnel
Added specular light from indirect light (spherical harmonics)
New turrets look cool on the ship, but their icons in UI are too small. Thus turret icons will be reverted to the hand drawn versions before Incarna. Of course preview of turret models will still be available. Last news is the new cynosural field effect, which will make it to Tranquility in work-in-progres state without sound.
Unfortunately, most anticipated by some EVE vets (including me) engine trails will not be included in this update.
EDIT: CCP Punkturis has published a second dev-blog about the new font for EVE Online. IMHO it is a bit too compact and could easily be a bit wider. Readability is indeed better than the original font. Will need some getting used to.
The name EVE Online, even though written in capitals, is not an acronym. If you ask any player however, what this abbreviation could mean, you will most likely hear „everyone-vs-everyone”. EVE Online is strictly a PVP game, which does not mean there is no PVE in it – killing NPCs is one of the ways to fund PVP endavours. What’s most important, is consequence. PVP in EVE always has some consequences, which in turn brings lots of emotions.
A new patch has been deployed to Tranquility today between 9:00 and 12:30 UTC in order to address the issues introduced with Incarna 1.1.
Patch notes have been released and are available here.
I don’t know why the said patch notes say nothing about a hundred or so of new clothes introduced in this quite big (102 MB) package. The code fixes mentioned in the patch notes should not take more than 15-20MB.
I do understand that this content will not be available right away, because CCP decided to make clothing available in staged releases. Still, the patch notes should reflect it, at least as “new Incarna content prepared for staged release”.
CCP has been working on the Minmatar CQ while pushing forward with the development of the remaining racial quarters. CCP Fallout also mentioned that CCP is working on establishments (my second name is Quark and I wanna have my own space-bar). Incarna 1.1 will bring some improvements to the existing CQ, and later this year CCP will bring the remaining racial quarters as well as established.
Compared to space-barbies, space-bars might actually be quite interesting (I am definitely going to try this out).
Incarna 1.1 patch will be deployed on Thursday, 1st of September.
Nope. More space barbie. Another batch of clothing has been released from NeX shop. You can now dress your female avatar in some pretty camo skirt, or some navy shirts. You can’t walk barefoot, so you have one more pair of shoes to choose from.
Great. I don’t know how about you, but I’d like more *ships*.
There have been rumours in the capsuleer community recently about a new vessel designed around Rogue Drones technology codenamed the ‘Cockroach’. There has been footage of this vessel (on which it is able to destroy a Control Tower along with a complete set of structures – please see here), but there has been no data on the ship itself. An anonymous source has published a file on galnet which seemed to be an industrial database backup. One of the hackers employed by the Torchwood Archive corporation has found the following record in forementioned file:
Cockroach class ship
Cockroach
The specially adapted rogue drone scanning technology integrate into this unique frigate-sized platform is reserved for the exclusiveuse of the elite Equipment Certification and Anomaly Investigations Division (ECAID) agents. The femtometer wavelength scan resolution allows the pilot to virtually dissect and analyze any object at a subatomic scale, divining all flaws and defects with an uncanny level of quality. Flying one of these amazing ships is also a great mark of achievement. Any ECAID agent worthy of such a command can be said to have reached the pinnacle of his career and is worthy of all capsuleer’s deep respect.
There is also a record of a ship of this class destroyed about a year ago here. Unfortunately it is impossible to confirm if footage mentioned above was real or just a clever fake. A ship with such capabilities should easily be able to fend off a group of other ships.
((OOC: I found this ship while surfing through the inv_items table from EVE Data dump))
