A look at EVE Online's new planet art

Given how many times one sees the same exact nebula no matter where you go, I wouldn't bet on that not being a dozen "different" planets.

Graphics aside, and honestly none of that looked particularly impressive, are they going to deal with the scale issue? Planets in Eve have been way smaller then they should be, as many objects (asteroids, for instance) are. The planet looked at least possibly closer to scale here, but honestly the way the video is handled it's pretty hard to tell for sure.

god im so tired of responding to this same non-sense question, theirs no SCALE issue! It's a distance issue, the eve ships dont go into orbit around the planets or moons, they stay very far away, warp to zero in fact takes you to a very high orbit not low orbit, hence your very far from the planet and the size still appears small...

asteroids on the other hand are normally 5-10km away and look pretty large,

wow did no one take an art class and get explained depth or perspective anymore?

I've heard the planet surfaces are actually procedurally generated based on a stored random seed, so each planet will have a unique look. And they're going to move the warp-in points and stations closer to the planet surfaces as currently they're so far away that the planets look very small.

hey where'd you see that? As i'd love to put a "DEAR GOD PLEASE SAY THIS IS TRUE" below it, as the moving stations and warp2zero closer, and the procedural would soooooo make things awesome...

Oh and as a nite theirs atleast 2 planets in the video, theirs a earth like one and a ice one thats basically all white almost with hills

In the 2008 fanfest, the chief technology officer Halldor Fannar gave a talk on visual computing at CCP Games. He and a guy from Nvidia discussed the plans for updating the game's visual effects and then planets. The visual effects are done and they're working on the planets now. In the talk, they discussed the possibility of using a fractal based approach to procedurally generate the planetary details.

That would let them add more detail dynamically depending on zoom level, so that people could get much closer to planets than before without resolution problems. That's something you can't realy do with just plain textured spheres, even with high definition textures. And then CCP Chronitis just posted on the forums that they are indeed moving warp-in points and stations closer to the planets ( http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1181371&page=1#10 ).

I seriously hope they stuck with the procedural generation idea and certainly the terrain they have on those planets looks like it was generated with 1/f fractal noise. So it's looking promising.

i wish it was fixed as well, but to do it would require something like a multiple warp path finding, to warp to the left/right of the planet and then set the final path would really slow down travel... but ya i agree it breaks the immersion, but its ignorable.

Who says you need to warp in a straight line? It would look cool as hell banking and zooming around the side of a moon or planet as you decelerate approaching a station. Since they're moving everything closer to the moons and planets, i'd say solving the straight-line warp issue is almost a necessity.

Yeah, they should work out a better bezier warping curve, for instance, the warp takes you through an object, just make the top speed not quite warp, but accellerating around an object, and when you're clear of the obstacle, blast off into space. They're doing alot more complicated physics in other areas of the game, it seems to me.

Warp drive allowing you to go through planets is on purpose, and explained in the Eve lore within the pages on the Eve website...

The background nebulae still look good there just isn't that many of them. Each region, or constellation, should have a unique nebula. Yes, that'd mean groups of systems close together would share a background nebula, but that's realistic.

Some systems the nebula would be a small ribbon and others systems closer in would have it fill the screen.

I second that.. that nebula is nice but seriously.. it's all the same but with different colors... they should have a procedural generated backgrounds as well... that would be cool

Apparently they're still working on that to add more life to certain planets. It'd be epic to see structures and cities on the surface

I've seen several planets that look like it has technology and life in the current version of tranquility but they are all the same coat of paint in every region I've seen them.