Glad they are improved :)

Any clouds you come across that are too bright/cause FPS spikes or anything else that annoys you - file a bug report with detailed information on the mission/location/room number etc and I will take a look. I don't guarantee I will always agree with you, but I will at least look them over and if I notice the same issue I will fix it.

Will do

On another note, was there any consideration given to introducing harvestable gas clouds into these mission sites. I understand this may not fall under your or your teams remit

Glad they are improved :)

Any clouds you come across that are too bright/cause FPS spikes or anything else that annoys you - file a bug report with detailed information on the mission/location/room number etc and I will take a look. I don't guarantee I will always agree with you, but I will at least look them over and if I notice the same issue I will fix it.

I'll file a bug report, but the new clouds are much worse for me than the old ones. My 6yo iMac w/X1600 video card (which isn't officially supported) was able to get decent frame rates even with clouds on screen (by decent, I mean I was able to click the overview and warp out before the ship blew up). With the new clouds, I'm getting hard locks on warp-in, meaning the mouse and keyboard aren't even usable. The framerate will drop to about 2fps when clouds are on screen (any cloud in "Massive Attack" vs Sanshas, handed to me by an agent in Sasoutikh which I completed just before DT, if that helps CCP narrow it down at all).

Maybe it's just time for me to upgrade to a newer computer, but my other computers (2 yrs old) also have much lower frame rates with clouds onscreen (the clouds never really bothered them before).

Glad they are improved :)

Any clouds you come across that are too bright/cause FPS spikes or anything else that annoys you - file a bug report with detailed information on the mission/location/room number etc and I will take a look. I don't guarantee I will always agree with you, but I will at least look them over and if I notice the same issue I will fix it.

Good news - team Trilambda have worked on the clouds for retribution and they will no longer have the same framerate hit they did before. I have also worked on reducing cloud numbers in dungeons... let's see how this helps things out and we can always take another look next release if things aren't improved.

Could we get an update on this? Ever since the Retribution changes, any and all cloud effects kill my framerate, and it seems like the devs disappeared as soon as people started commenting that it has gotten worse.

I think I have to retract my previous statement GÇö it's not the clouds that are slowing my machine down these days, it's the new UI. One of my machines will drop to about 4 seconds per frame before completely seizing up if I am not zoomed out to maximum camera distance. You don't want to know what happens when I accidentally click "look at" instead of "lock target", which happens far to regularly. Since I'm zoomed out all the way I can't right-click targets in space. Right-clicking the overview will get results eventually, but it's faster to click the buttons in the "Selected Object" window. Of course the catch is that the redrawing of that window actually takes a couple of seconds: first the icon comes up representing the new target, then the buttons disappear, then they reappear. If I'm too fast on the clicking I'll be clicking where the "lock target" button used to be, which has now changed to "look at".

I've lost two ships since Retribution came out due to the game running so slow that I don't know what's going on until it's too late. Cycle times on weapons are woeful (I have to wait for the local client to decide that the weapon has finished cycling before I can click the button to start the next cycle).

Before Retribution, the game was playable. After Retribution, the game is barely usable.

I'd like to point out that sleeper site clouds are just as terrible as mission clouds.

You don't want to know what happens when I accidentally click "look at" instead of "lock target", which happens far to regularly.

Is the actual complaint:

* They are ugly?
* They cause lag?
* They are too bright?

... cause my main issue is brightness. Having entire sections of my screen with pixels letting the backlight through feels like being exposed to the Time Vortex in the center of the Tardis. Sure it might make you omnipotent for a while, but then it kills you.