Half of me says "to hell with them, they can make new bloody bookmarks".

But, realistically, I guess that would be an issue. I guess you'd have to take every bookmark within, say, 1 megameter (Wow, don't get to use that very often) of a station and rotate it along the same axis as the station itself is rotated, or some such.

Well if I were to put on my hardcore astronomer hat (which is a heavy woolen balaclava because of the cold nights) I'd like to see proper HDR environments. When you're in close to the star you wouldn't be able to see other stars or nebulae, and as you go further out the stars become visible, and then the nebulae. You can move your ship into the shadow behind a planet and reveal the heavens in all their glory should you desire.

Looking forward to trying these out on the test server.


This, so very much this.

It would be cool, absolutely, their constant alignment along a principal axis is a legacy issue. If we rotate them, we could possibly screw up some people's warp to zero bookmarks, which would cause rage, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, so it would require some investigation upfront.

Also, since the cube map is a projection on a sphere, identical throughout the nebula, the gates shouldn't rotate towards the actual target gates, rather coordinates on the sky. There is some hand-waving involved, unfortunately...

You realise we haven't needed WTZ bookmarks since the Kali expansion in winter 2006?


Yeah, maybe log in once in a while man. Who knows how much it might help you to reconnect with your customers....?

Contrary to popular belief many of us do actually play the game. My bad at referring to an old mechanic but the point was that stargates have a collision model that would be different if they are rotated and that might affect bookmarks, which is always a concern when we do world changes.

It would be cool, absolutely, their constant alignment along a principal axis is a legacy issue. If we rotate them, we could possibly screw up some people's warp to zero bookmarks, which would cause rage, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, so it would require some investigation upfront.

Also, since the cube map is a projection on a sphere, identical throughout the nebula, the gates shouldn't rotate towards the actual target gates, rather coordinates on the sky. There is some hand-waving involved, unfortunately...

The snapshots look gorgeous. I'm going to travel like mad with a ceptor just to see the background change. By the way, how heavy are the new backgrounds in MBs? I bet there are some real astronomy addicts that would be really interested in downloading 3GB of backgrounds, while someone else would like just to turn it off (I am in the former category).

The maps were authored at twice the resolution we are delivering them in, and they are compressed. Ofc, they look much better uncompressed and in full resolution, so we might offer those as an optional download at some point in the future, for the die hard astronomy addicts with space on their hard drives and video ram to spare.

The total size for 67 cubemaps is 201 megabytes (Each cubemap is 3 megabytes). The new cubemaps are the same size as the old ones. Note that the patch will not remove the old cubemaps from your hard drive, due to legacy issues and the fact that they are used in places such as ship icons. They are planned to be removed later at a date to be determined. The old files occupy around 134 mb.

So you will be downloading 201 megs, which are then compressed, I can't tell you the exact compressed size at this time. The maps were authored at twice the resolution we are delivering them in, and they are compressed. Ofc, they look much better uncompressed and in full resolution, so we might offer those as an optional download at some point in the future, for the die hard astronomy addicts with space on their hard drives and video ram to spare.

The total size for 67 cubemaps is 201 megabytes (Each cubemap is 3 megabytes). The new cubemaps are the same size as the old ones. Note that the patch will not remove the old cubemaps from your hard drive, due to legacy issues and the fact that they are used in places such as ship icons. They are planned to be removed later at a date to be determined. The old files occupy around 134 mb.

So you will be downloading 201 megs, which are then compressed, I can't tell you the exact compressed size at this time. The maps were authored at twice the resolution we are delivering them in, and they are compressed. Ofc, they look much better uncompressed and in full resolution, so we might offer those as an optional download at some point in the future, for the die hard astronomy addicts with space on their hard drives and video ram to spare.

The total size for 67 cubemaps is 201 megabytes (Each cubemap is 3 megabytes). The new cubemaps are the same size as the old ones. Note that the patch will not remove the old cubemaps from your hard drive, due to legacy issues and the fact that they are used in places such as ship icons. They are planned to be removed later at a date to be determined. The old files occupy around 134 mb.

So you will be downloading 201 megs, which are then compressed, I can't tell you the exact compressed size at this time. The maps were authored at twice the resolution we are delivering them in, and they are compressed. Ofc, they look much better uncompressed and in full resolution, so we might offer those as an optional download at some point in the future, for the die hard astronomy addicts with space on their hard drives and video ram to spare.

[...] The old files occupy around 134 mb.

So you will be downloading 201 megs, [...]

so we might offer those as an optional download at some point in the future, for the die hard astronomy addicts with space on their hard drives and video ram to spare

When they went in initially, raw from the rendering farm, they were about 2GB in size, which caused a few issues in client size

The maps were authored at twice the resolution we are delivering them in, and they are compressed. Ofc, they look much better uncompressed and in full resolution, so we might offer those as an optional download at some point in the future, for the die hard astronomy addicts with space on their hard drives and video ram to spare.

The total size for 67 cubemaps is 201 megabytes (Each cubemap is 3 megabytes). The new cubemaps are the same size as the old ones. Note that the patch will not remove the old cubemaps from your hard drive, due to legacy issues and the fact that they are used in places such as ship icons. They are planned to be removed later at a date to be determined. The old files occupy around 134 mb.

So you will be downloading 201 megs, which are then compressed, I can't tell you the exact compressed size at this time. The maps were authored at twice the resolution we are delivering them in, and they are compressed. Ofc, they look much better uncompressed and in full resolution, so we might offer those as an optional download at some point in the future, for the die hard astronomy addicts with space on their hard drives and video ram to spare.

Been looking forward to this for ages. Looking good. Except ...

I'm also disappointed by the region granularity. Previous communications from CCP made it seem as if the changes would be at least through solar systems, if not slight ones between individual star systems.

It means that contrary to our present circumstances where the backdrop does change from system to system, giving some sense of travel, now we won't have much of a sense of a difference between systems at all except for the suns.

This is obviously a big gain in terms of background beauty and versimilitude, but perhaps a loss in sense of movement between system and system?

Note that the patch will not remove the old cubemaps from your hard drive, due to legacy issues and the fact that they are used in places such as ship icons.