EVE Online shows off new Crucible engine trails

Veteran EVE Online players will remember the joy of engine trails, a simple graphical effect that really added a feeling of speed to fast ships like interceptors or microwarpdrive cruisers. While the much-lauded Apocrypha expansion brought us countless new features, developers were forced to remove engine trails due to performance issues. We recently learned that engine trails will be making a comeback with the Crucible expansion, and in a new devblog today CCP Mankiller released details of the tricky work involved in getting the much-loved feature back into the game.

Mankiller explains that the old engine trail effect actually needed to have its vertex buffer updated every frame, making it a massive performance hog. The new trails use a much less costly approach that generates the geometry inside a vertex shader using splines. For those who fancy themselves mathematicians, CCP Mankiller provides the gruesome details of the equations that had to be constructed and solved to program the new shader. The new technique has additional advantages, like no longer skipping around when you're lagging and the possibility of new effects like heat shimmer, light absorption and refraction. The new engine trails go live with the Crucible expansion on November 29th.