One of the best parts of my day is enjoying the beauty of the ice fields and ice mining into the night.
It’s as if someone was paid to work on going backwards.
Please go back to how it was.
Edit: I mean you have all these soft blending colors, it was like warping into a turner painting the Ice was rounded and smooth, it all fit together as if someone had taken time to design and paint us a picture. Now we have jagged blocks that are not in keeping at all with the rest of the environment.
Has anyone else taken a look ? I know Art is subjective , do other see this creative direction as an Improvement or ? Miners spend a lot to time staring at rocks so it might be important for others as well.
It’s been awhile since I mined ice, but don’t recall the look of the ice rocks.
What I do recall is being incredibly annoyed to suddenly see a skybox effect with a ridiculous horizon at the horizon in 3D space.
I wish CCP’s art team took another look at this recurring skybox cloud effect as it is jarring to see clouds move as if on ridiculous horizontal planes in three dimensional space. Metaliminal storms, Pochven and now ice belts all suffer from this awful skybox effect.
I’ll take another look at ice rocks next time I’m mining ice.
As @Gerard_Amatin mentioned not everyone is aware how it looks after the change or other cases how it looked at all, so maybe not a bad idea if you’ve included a screenshot.
At least could result in more people being able to respond meaningfully as not likely someone will go out of their way to look for an ice field just because of this thread.
I havent mined a single block of ice since returning over a month ago. I have in fact done a few ice mining missions and noticed the ice looked different.
Does the ice fields look like the mission ice fields?
It’s not ice but the new rocks look boring and bland, just like anything CCP did in recent years. The removal of the huge crystal outgrowth and replacement with a web of inconspicuous small crystals is a visual deterioration of ore roids.
Just chunky, blocky, low-poly, low effort blocks instead of smooth, flowing ice masses. The textures aren’t the worst but the geometry is just uninspired and boring. Typical for modern CCP design.
Size is really hard to tell in a game like EVE, as you can be zoomed in at nearly any distance. So just scaling the rocks to be ‘bigger’ means nothing visually if two rocks could look exactly the same yet one is further away and scaled to be larger.
By keeping some remarkable and naturally occurring features like the crystals the same size CCP can make asteroids larger not just by scale but also visually, as you can now compare the size of the rock to the size of the constant-size crystals which makes the larger rocks visually at a glance too.
I think the idea behind this new design is an improvement.
That said, I only like the idea for now. I haven’t been to any of the asteroid belts yet to see them live.
The pictures in that link look like an improvement though, so I’m hopeful.
I love that I can now see that rock 1 is closer to me than rock 2, because the crystals are always the same size. Without such consistency rock 2 might just as well have been smaller instead of further away.
Not only does the new design look pretty good, it also gives more visual clarity.
Yep, thats what the mission ice looked like. Honestly, i didnt pay much attention to it that closely…but now that its been brought up, now i cant make up my mind which is better.
I need to pay better attention to it the next time i can get into an ice field to make judgement on it.
Just one thing, please get rid of this horizon in the ice belt skybox, it’s silly to have clouds drift only on two horizontal planes when we’re supposed to be flying spaceships in 3D space:
The new asteroids look really good. I’m not a miner, but I’ll speak on behalf of them anyway, and give CCP a hearty “Well done!”
If anything the “horizon” is where the dust should be thickest, if we assume it represents the plane of the ecliptic and New Eden is a sufficiently young cluster that most systems still have protoplanetary disks.
I’m no astrophysicist, but I’ll speak on their behalf anyway, and say this doesn’t really make much sense given the abundance of temperate planets, but whatever.
Even if the horizon were supposed to be the thickest plane of our current star cluster and not some design mistake of a rookie developer who accidentally looked up a tutorial like
for clouds not on earth but in 3D space, then this thickest plane has no reason to be at the horizon or look that awful.
In fact, a thicker concentration of stars of our milky way could look awesome:
Speaking of ice mining, maybe CCP could implement a random spawn of new type of NPC in ice fields that is actually an ice asteroid that will attempt to collide with the miner’s ship and if succeeds will deal 15 million points of damage to it.
During the occasion an EVE lore suitable version of the radio messages quoted in the below linked article should be transmitted in local chat to anyone on grid with the asteroid:
Well the Hi sec Belt rocks do really look a lot better. Perhaps the Art team did the ice last and were a little burnt out or rushed for time. So on a more positive note , Congrats on things overall.
Just going to zoom right out and pretend it’s like it was. <3
I am not a programmer or an expert in 3D graphics, but I know the difference of skybox and skysphere. I am not sure which one CCP uses but the texture is applied incorrectly. Having an artificial horizon on instruments is normal, having a visual horizontal vanishing point in space is not.
As for these visuals, let’s assume we perceive everything we see through an implant. Then I would exit my capsule and ask some tech why they are so obtuse. I would demand I have better visuals in my next implant. In all reality, we know this is done to cheapen the game. They get away with less work and the developers think most of us are idiots who don’t know any better. Guess what, I am a homemaker, with nothing more than a high school diploma, and I know the difference.
When they don’t care what it looks like, it shows. It is the difference of doing a job and taking pride in your work.
