Here’s some detail regarding the character systems changes in the patch notes:
For various parts of our graphics systems, we use 3rd-party middleware libraries. One of those libraries, about a year and a half ago, was blocking our move to a 64-bit client, so it had to go. As it turns out, it was software for layering and sequencing animation. Captain’s Quarters depended on it heavily, but it was also used in the character creator, and while we could (and did) remove Captain’s Quarters, the character creator is a necessary system in our game.
So, in mid-2017, leading up to the Captain’s Quarters removal, I spent some time building out our in-house animation software support to replace the bare minimum functionality necessary to keep characters idling naturally in the character creator. This change was a success in that I never heard a single player complain about the fact that characters were less lifelike, but our tiny but still active 3D character team wasn’t happy with the details that had been lost in the process.
This year, another of our 3rd party middleware providers delivered a 64-bit capable system that had a lot of the advantages of the one we’d taken out. Furthermore, we realized that with careful engineering we could use it for both characters and space objects. And, since adding support for it would require getting some experience with the new tools and updating our character animation workflows, adding some minor, more lifelike details to characters in the character creation screens was a reasonable, low-risk testbed for the technology.
So yeah; none of this is life-changing in itself. The fact that you’re not seeing much of a difference is just fine, though it might mean that we toned down the visual interest a bit too much on the way to release. But, now we have a modernized animation pipeline, some new tools that work well and enable very exciting new capabilities, and an implementation that will allow us to use it with ships and characters interchangeably.
The thing I can’t stress enough is that this kind of infrastructure work is tricky to get right, perfectly invisible when it works, and is absolutely essential to keeping Eve’s code base healthy, well-maintained, and modern.