Amarrius Ibn Pontificus
Legion Air
Meracom
29
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Posted - 2016.03.09 18:40:27 -
[1] - Quote
CCP Darwin wrote:Please understand that we realize the value that a feature like this can have for someone who's running Eve for some reason on a really slow machine that needs it. If you are, it probably seems annoying and arbitrary that we'd take it out.
However, any feature, even something like this which is relatively simple, carries ongoing costs to the development team for the life of the game.
The way this feature works is that it loads the 3D station environment, including your ship, captures an image of your ship in the station hangar, and then disables rendering of the 3D station environment, using that image in its place.
First, even when the feature works fine, every release we have to make sure our QA team schedules a task to verify that it still works. We do this for every feature in the settings.
Second, certain recent changes (I'm not sure exactly which ones, but I believe they were related to the new, unreleased hangar environments for citadels) broke this feature internally. This particular feature had broken before in the recent past, and each time this happens, we must allocate developer time to investigate and fix the issue.
Finally, we have an ongoing problem (and I'm pretty sure you've noticed it too) that our settings menu is overloaded with choices, many of which are hard to describe in a tooltip or a few-word name. It's easy to add settings and harder (particularly when players depend on them) to remove them. So, we're trying to manage our settings more closely and not just leave them there because they've been there for a long time.
In this instance, we're very sure (because we repeatedly check) that our normal hangar environment performs acceptably on "low" settings on a machine that meets our minimum specification. We also have data that lets us know how many people enable this particular setting, and it's not many. (Sorry, I don't know the exact percentage.)
If you're struggling with performance with a single client, I would first try turning the settings all the way down on that machine, if you haven't already, and see how far that gets you. If it's still problematic, turning on Interval 1 and lowering screen resolution may also help.
If you are finding there's a significant performance drop for your foreground Eve client with entirely minimized clients running in the background, this may be a bug, and I suggest using the in-game bug report tool ("Report Bug" on the F12 menu) to report it.
I think we can all understand that. Or at least those willing to understand it, they will. But I'd like to throw a different and yet related wrench at that argument.
Years ago when I started playing EVE, the system reuirements were incredibly low even by the standards of the time and by comparison with other PC games. That was one of the reasons that led me to keep on playing EVE back then, to be honest. I would often log on using an ASUS eee notebook to update my skill queue on the go and take care of a few corp management things. Then the changes on the shader were implemented and it seems to me that was the point when EVE took a slightly different path to flashier and fancier graphics that started demanding higher computer requirements, on par of most other computer games.
This is not a bad thing by itself, but everytime you implement changes that increase the minimum system requirements, be it shaders, or the upcoming DX change, or this static station environment, you cut off a few percentage points off your player base. And you have even offered actual figures on that a few times, regarding the percentage of players that are using machines that won't meet every new requirements change.
And over time, with all those incremental changes, I do wonder the real weight that also has on your player base. Sure anough many such people will upgrade their hardware or buy a new computer. But not everyone can. We're still under the effect of a financial crisis and while the original intent behind PLEX was a different one, the data seems to point that not everyone can (or is at least willing) to spend real money to sub their accounts, much less invest on a new or renewed computer.
So I'd only suggest you consider that side as well and how many people and even new players from less common countries in the EVE universe, may be "locked out" of the game because of the computer they own. It could be that a better ballance between EVE graphic awesomeness and minimum system requirements to run the client could be found.
Or maybe not. It's just something that's been bothering me for a while so... there.
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