So now that I have this tool, what to wreck next GǪ?

The Rubicon 1.1 point release saw a considerable large upgrade of in-game art assets with a V3 renovation of all stations, the introduction of completely new wrecks for capita and supercapitall ships which now properly reflect the destructive forces required to tear down these behemoths.

Please read CCP BlueScreen's latest art blog The Art of Rubicon 1.1 which provides not only shiny pictures (click the thumbnails in the blog for high resolution pictures) but also gives a deep insight into the work processes of our beloved art department!

So now that Stations are V3'd, what is left to undergo this process before we get the new lighting system/render that was promised long ago?

Yes, it is a bit unfortunate that the Bloodbath of B-R5RB happened one day too soon for the new capitals and supercapital as outlined in the Art blog to be displayed in game.

"Well now you can now turn them off if they give your computer/graphics cars any trouble."

I have a graphics car?

We are definitely getting closer but not quite there yet, there is at least a good number of world/dungeon objects left to V3.

But believe me, we want to get there just as fast as you do, and we just about see the light at the end tunnel now.

So now that I have this tool, what to wreck next GǪ?

I love these, but I cant help but wonder why some of the ships don't seem to break along weaker natural stress points in the model.

The Providence being a good example, the front hull breaks but there seems to be a natural breaking stress point in the middle.

That, and some of the ships don't seem that badly damaged (rev, naglfar, Ragnarok). Was there intention behind that, or just artist interpretation?

But we will absolutely keep this in mind when we hopefully get around to making more variations on the individual ship wrecks some day

You mention that better wrecks help with immersion. But the new ones have one big immersion breaker: Floating parts.
If a part is floating free of the ship then it must have moved there; that is at one time it had some net velocity. But now its just sitting there. What stopped it? Space has no friction.

Also in space very small forces, over time, can move things about great distances. Light pressure, solar wind, gravity gradients. Its totally unbelievable that parts of a wreck would remain flying in formation for any length of time. The pieces of the Jita monument should have dispersed long ago.

If the goal was just a pretty game this would not matter. You succeeded in doing that part. But you specifically stated that improving immersion was a goal. Immersion-wise the wrecks just look... strange. Better would be to have parts dangling at the end of cables or thin strips of metal and other wreckage elements.

Battleships! Then battlecruisers, then cruisers, then....

Now were ready to export our wreck and take a look in our game engine tool (AKA "Jessica").

.......

Anyways, seriously now You are obviously right, what I meant by immersion was rather immersion into the game than into an astrophysical correctly represented virtual reality.
As far as immersion into the game of blowing up massive spaceships in space go, I would hold that the new wrecks is a step in the right direction, i hope you might agree on that.

Yes, there was some thinking behind some of those choices Ah but seriously there was.

I don't quite follow you on the Providence, it is true that she has a gap across her main armor plating just about in the middle, but this place also represents just about the absolute thickest part of the ship.

Also to that I would say, what you describe is almost like someone holding a stick at either end, applying force until it breaks at its weakest point.
That's not how i interpret the ship damages. The damages and locations of these is based on imagined direct hits, armor/hull breaches, ammunition chamber explosions etc. (I am imagining some pretty hefty ammunition chambers here, after all, we are blowing apart Titans)

As far as the Naglfar, Ragnarok and other ships with lesser damage, yes it was a choice not to have them all break apart completely.
Obviously I have seen that people have commented on this, and that some Naglfar pilots/hunters are somewhat disappointed in the amount of damage it has received.

It was not intentional to have some wreck be underwhelming, but rather be a bit more clever and subtle in their destruction.
Like the Naglfar, where the top bridge and main gun mounts have been blown to bits, and the before moving parts of the siege module is floating around detached in space.
But we will absolutely keep this in mind when we hopefully get around to making more variations on the individual ship wrecks some day

When I was at Eve Vegas one of the Devs (I forget who) at a round table said there is an unwritten agreement between the players and the developers that the game should make sense. That is when I look at the game what I see at should be what I expect to see and when I do something what happens should be what I expect to have happen.

I do not expect to see a wreck with disconnected parts sitting there with all the parts utterly static. I agree the new wrecks are visually impressive but to me they just look wrong.

When I was at Eve Vegas one of the Devs (I forget who) at a round table said there is an unwritten agreement between the players and the developers that the game should make sense. That is when I look at the game what I see at should be what I expect to see and when I do something what happens should be what I expect to have happen.

I do not expect to see a wreck with disconnected parts sitting there with all the parts utterly static. I agree the new wrecks are visually impressive but to me they just look wrong.

Are there any plans to make an animation of the ships breaking up?

No current plans to add this.

This is absolutely something we have considered and we have all the information/animations available and saved already.
Firstly its a question of time and resources, quite frankly, it probably wouldn't be all that hard, from a technical standpoint, to make this happen, but it would obviously take some time.

But the main problem here is with adding the additional resources and load.
For every capital ship blown up, we would be adding somewhere in the region of 30-50 bones, we would have to apply skinned shaders and we would have to load the animation once the wreck is initially spawned.
Now in a fleet fight environment, that might not be a fantastic idea.

Anyways, those are some of the considerations if/when adding a feature like this, doesn't mean it cant or wont be done, just mean you have to be careful with such things.

Fantastic work TriLambda, it all looks amazing (although the Crucifier gives me a disturbing sense of being upside down).

I look forward to seeing some of these wrecks on TQ, although I'll have to venure further afield than I'd usually like for the chance. The devblog was interesting too, it's nice to get an understanding of the work that goes into things that are easy to take for granted.

A couple of questions occurred to me as I read the dev blog.

• Is the wrecking of the hull animated or does it just appear as a static object once the initial explosion subsides?


• You wrote that the damage displayed is procedurally generated - is it conceivable that this process be applied on an ad-hoc basis to generate unique wrecks or whould that be a resource/client killer?


• Are there any plans to apply the same process to sub-capitals? I note that the physical mesh floor experiment was conducted on a Raven hull.

10/10 would read again.


Stations



I wonder how complex this thing is. Is it possible to release some light standalone version to the community at some point in the future (like Valve did with Source filmmaker)?
CCP already gave access to Jessica in September 2013 to these guys and results were great.

The wrecking of the hull is not animated, it loads as a static object once the original ship mesh is removed, sometime during the explosion.

Unfortunately it is not feasible to have this happen or be generated randomly for specific ship kills. The amount of calculations it takes to just successfully break apart the 3D mesh of an eve ship is far to great for that.
Asides from this and although automation was a huge part of making this happen, there is still considerable amount of manual work in setting one of these wrecks up looking correct.
And, that would be a yes, to even try and emulate just the procedural steps in this process would be a "resource/client killer" as you put it.

So about wrecking the sub-caps, obviously this question has come up quite a bit.
We could obviously do that, and I am hoping some day we will. The floor meshes you refer to and also spawning the additional mesh debris on the broken surface , was in some extend developed specifically for smaller ships and fragments.
again there is a couple of things to be considered here, and again its mainly time and client load.

Obviously there is quite a bit more sub-capital ships in game than there are capitals, and the time we would have to invest to make unique wrecks for all of these would be quite considerable.
now having unique wrecks for all ships would not present any problems in most PvE and even PvP environments, but for larger scale battles the story is quite different.
As it is now, whenever a sub-capital ship is blown up, that ship and its resources will be removed from memory and one generic wreck will be put in place, this asset and its resources is shared for all sub-capital wrecks on grid.
Having all wrecks be unique would mean keeping every single one of these and their resources in memory, which in turn would then mean a very considerable addition to the resource and memory load in any fleet fight environment.

Again, there a pros and cons to this and obviously some of the above issues could be handled by giving the players the option to use these wrecks or not. We will see, hopefully one day...

But the main problem here is with adding the additional resources and load.
For every capital ship blown up, we would be adding somewhere in the region of 30-50 bones, we would have to apply skinned shaders and we would have to load the animation once the wreck is initially spawned.

nice, nice stuff. stations are amazing!
very much appreciated!!

2 short questions though.
what about symmetrical missile/turrets on ships which got odd launcher/turrets after balancing (TALWAR, Arbitrator)?
(obligatory repost https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2238156#post2238156)


And since we got a new, very awesome Crucifier model, are there any plans to make a slightly modified version for the sentinel?

i know... you give and give but we keep asking for more. as already said, you work is very much appreciated!

Also, there are unfortunately no current plans for a variation on the Sentinel.

Not even the color part ? It is very hard to tell the difference between T1 and T2.

Hi Nagarythe, we meet again

So that Talwar, after contacting the appropriate construction yards and manufacturers, the turret modifications on both the Talwar and Arbitrator has entered production as we speak.

The ship yards in question have committed themselves on delivering these custom modifications no later than Rubicon 1.2.

Sorry for the long wait pilot. o7

Also, there are unfortunately no current plans for a variation on the Sentinel.

GAS CLOUDS.

Its says the effect tickbox is used to toggle them on and off. But what else does the effect box toggle off ?

All i need is to turn the gas clouds off, everything else causes no fps loss and I would like to keep all the other effects.

Can we have a tickbox to toggle on and off gas clouds only ?

another little thing... there are inconsistencies in the ship preview backgrounds.

Nestor has a different backgrounds as astero or stratios.
Revenant uses something from the industrial tree
and daredevil uses the minmatar background.

"The GÇÿeffectGÇÖ setting will now toggle particle clouds on/off."
It may come as a surprise, but there is at least one who would like to turn off the clouds regardless of performance issues. The only thing is, you have lumped turning them off into the same circuit breaker that, according to the pop-up help text, controls a whole bunch of other, desireable effects.

Very beautiful Work with the stations and wrecks, but can't help but wonder.. https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=229521&find=unread You promised us 1 year ago that this was like 99% ready. Everyone agreed that we want this, so can you at least post in the thread what's holding you back? Pretty please

Just off the top of my head we would be able to deliver high resolution textures for assets like, nebulae, planets, Tech 3 ships, any newly redesign ships plus any new ship added to the game within the last 2-3 years at least.

So about wrecking the sub-caps, obviously this question has come up quite a bit.
We could obviously do that, and I am hoping some day we will. The floor meshes you refer to and also spawning the additional mesh debris on the broken surface , was in some extend developed specifically for smaller ships and fragments.
again there is a couple of things to be considered here, and again its mainly time and client load.

Obviously there is quite a bit more sub-capital ships in game than there are capitals, and the time we would have to invest to make unique wrecks for all of these would be quite considerable.
now having unique wrecks for all ships would not present any problems in most PvE and even PvP environments, but for larger scale battles the story is quite different.

Yes, just getting the clouds into the effects group was the first step.
But we hear you and are aware that, given the current state of the clouds, enabling you guys to toggle them on/off independent of other effects would be optimal.
I am currently lobbying this to see if we can make that a reality sooner rather than later.

It is correct that a "Jessica Light" has in the past been distributed to a very limited amount of people for specific purposes.

There are no plans, that I know of, to continue or expand this initiative on a larger scale.