It actually changes between constellations, not systems, right now. But like stated in the blog, many constellations share the same nebula.

The concern for our choice of granularity has been noted, we won't make drastic changes to the system or the assets before the winter release, but this is obviously something many are concerned with and we'll examine what we can do.

However, I encourage you to check it out on Singularity ( or TQ once it ships ) before making final judgements!

Instead of a separate download, high-res backgrounds should be possible to download on-demand. Turning on an option of some sort could make the client download skyboxes of much higher resolution for the region you are in.

This could also be extended to provide more granularity, e.g. if you're flying around in The Forge it will download per-constellation backgrounds in that area. And if making backgrounds for _ALL_ constellation takes too much time, at least make them for the most popular regions of space.

E.g. 4 extra images for the Jita and the different directions would impact quite a lot of people.

Making it on-demand would increase server stress, and the servers already deal with a lot to begin with. I would definitely prefer a separate and optional patch for more cube maps.

I'm liking the change but I'm not entirely sure I like the relationship between natural phenomenon and security status (and to a lesser extent racial colour). It seems a bit arbitrary and slightly counter-intuitive.

While the racial colour thing kind of makes sense (nations base their colour schemes on the local surroundings), I would have thought that the over-populated urban sprawl of high-sec would be more dark and grey, where the vast wilderness and freedom of nullsec would have more vibrant and bright colours. Think Los Angeles vs the Amazon Jungle, or New York vs Madagascar.

I think that might even be a psychological queue that would encourage more people to explore beyond the boundaries of highsec. Food for thought at the very least.

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.

cause its UNKNOWN SPACE what are they gonna do make a billion different astronomical things to make each unknown space look different since ther einside WORMHOLES! i'd say inside wormholes shud be pitch black with a small spark of stars to breakt he darkness

The Cloud Ring, the Cauldron, Vapor Sea. These are large stellar objects that span multiple light years. Magnificent astronomical phenomena that evoke a sense of awe and beauty.

Well done CCP, I think wormhole explo will be more fun too as you'll have an idea where you wh exits go in HS before you jump!

No it wouldn't.

No more than you browsing a **** site while playing would stress the EVE servers.

Except with an on-demand system, it would be distributing data for thousands of users at a time, and that bandwidth could be used for better things that are more relevant to gameplay. Assets for online games are usually pre-loaded before any sort of live interaction between the player and environment occurs. This is done to ensure a smoother playing experience.

Imagine jumping into a system containing 1000 players who all jump into the system around the same time. Before ever having to deal with player input, the server would have to distribute cube maps to every player's client first. Each cube map is 3 MB in size. With a system containing 1000 players, the server would have to distribute nearly 3 GB worth of data, which just isn't practical when the server could be used for more important things. It's more efficient to have assets on the user's side than on the server's side.

gravity would kick in and the universe of EVE would implode into a black hole, which makes all of your stuff lose all of its electrons and turn to plasma

Not something we want.

Looking great, but I have a couple of suggestions:
Within a region you can still generate some feel of differentiation between systems by warping the coordinate space of the skybox, this is a trivial thing to do with existing shaders.

Can we fix the gates orientation in space so that they appear to jump in the direction of the destination system - right now every gate points the same direction.

Are the stars painted onto the nebula texture? Are the constelations going to be static within a region?

How come Wormhole Space is not going to be altered by these changes?

*snap*

There's no technical reasons why they can't implement my suggestion.

*snip*
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.
*snap*

This may have been mentioned but especially from a nullsec dwellers perspective, will this cause more lag in larger engagements and can it be turned off/down in the graphics settings if your PC struggles with it?