@Op. I sort pretty much agree with most of what you said. I think EvE is probably the best looking space game out there but they do need to up their game in certain areas.

My main beef with the graphics in EvE is the effects. They just need to go the extra mile and make sure that they have both visual and auditory oomph. They actually took a step backward in that department in Retribution as far as I'm concerned. The new explosions suck by HW2 standards, the particle system is technically better but the overall effect just doesn't compare.

In HW2, the life of a ship had a certain continuity. When a ship was built or undocking, it wasn't just popped out, it was launched. When a ship dies, it does so in a fashion consistent with it's mass and purpose. Fighters left a streaking fire trail leading to an explosion, bigger ships had secondary explosions and slowly rolled out of control before a devastating final explosion. The sound effect made you feel like the ship was being ripped apart from the inside or that you were fighting for your life in a spacebourne fur ball. I think CCP could learn a lot about battle immersion from HW2.

I totally agree with you about the community ship modeling contests! We definitely need more of them, even if there aren't any prizes other than the possibility of it being put in game. I've been working on a new Typhoon model off and on over the past couple of months and would probably submit it should they have another one. The creativeness of the community was one of the things that drew me to this game so long ago =)

I'm seeing two different threads of conversation here. One is graphics quality. The other is performance.

As far as graphics goes, no one has mentioned Tesselation yet. At fanfest last year they showed this video and asked if it was something players wanted them to pursue. This was a stand-alone test, not using the current Eve engine. You can read more details in this dev blog
So CCP is looking forward with graphics, don't worry too much on that front

As far performance goes... well that got a very brief mention at fanfest too but they had no map of how they're going to do it. (unless I missed something) In my personal opinion performance should take as high, or higher priority than improving graphics. Just my 0.02 ISK

My! A whole thread dedicated to graphical updates that are already in the pipeline since before fanfest with several videos showing it off.

The only thing I can't seem to remember is if they are planing to increase texture resolution, but then again I also remember reading somewhere that the model polygons is the limiter and that tessellation would solve this but that it would take a good couple of man years to finish (I can't find a link atm but it was less work than the trinity update).

That same video also show off future lightning effects that will come after (with?) the V3 project. There are also concept art of ships taking damage to noticeable shields as well as armor damage effects.

This is a big project and it will take time and should not be rushed, just be patient.

So, pray tell, what is it you wanted? Do you even know?

The tessellation and shaders upgrade are stated on the press conference, its planned by CCP , not me.
But what I want is more extensive graphical effects , note the starting post and the quotes .

Performance will always be an intrinsic problem to the Trinity Engine.
CPUs just can't MT as efficiently enough for the scale of battles in EVE and considering how Team Avatar, the team behind the Carbon Superstructure is disbanded, I'm not sure how things would go on the technical front .
But the art team is still here ,and its time to turn living into thriving .