EVE Online News

Stellar Capsuleers,

Voting is now open for the 15th Council of Stellar Management (CSM15), so exercise your democratic right and cast your vote for the candidates you feel best represent your interests in New Eden! Make sure to check out the details on all of the candidates and cast your vote before 12:00 UTC on 8 June.

To celebrate the voting period, alongside voting for your chosen candidates in CSM15, you can also claim free gifts as part of the Rewards of Democracy daily login event running from 1 June to 8 June! Rewards include Skill Points, Boosters, Needlejack Filaments, and CSM-themed special edition shuttles.

Both Alpha and Omega Clone State Capsuleers can claim free gifts daily, with Omegas getting bigger and better rewards as well as being able to claim the Alpha rewards, too!

For those unfamiliar with how the voting works, please take a look at this video created for one of the previous elections.

Dear Capsuleers,

From undocking in Jita to getting in your first Titan, beauty is found in all areas of New Eden. Today, you will be introduced to one of the new features coming in the upcoming Clear vision update: Contrast Adaptive Sharpening.

The process of image sharpening is important in most visual media. Film directors, photographers and game texture artists will use it daily to get the desired result. Using it correctly takes patience, practice, and skill, but the result can be a vastly improved image when used appropriately. When used incorrectly, over-sharpening an image will make the result look unnatural or introduce artifacts.

The main reason this happens is due to the way sharpening generally works; it adds contrast between pixels, which means it becomes particularly noticeable around edges. Quite simply, as one pixel gets brighter, the other gets darker.

The image on the left below is a normal, unedited screenshot from the existing renderer within EVE Online. On the right is the same image, adjusted by using the default ‘Sharpen’ filter twice within Adobe Photoshop, to illustrate the type of issue that can occur when sharpening is applied incorrectly. There is artifacting at the edge of the planet, the gradient has lost its smoothness and the surface of the planet is starting to look too pixelated.



While it is clear from these images that sharpening can hurt image quality if not done correctly on a 2D image, in a 3D rendered environment where the camera and ships regularly move, it looks even worse. As EVE has a significant number of areas that also have large contrast differences, such as planet surfaces, ships against space, hangars, stargates, and even weapons fire, it’s been a challenge to find a solution that fully satisfied. This means that sometimes objects look slightly blurred, out of focus, or the image looks soft.

This problem is not unique to EVE, and many other games encounter similar issues. AMD noticed this and provided a free-to-use, open-source, high-quality sharpening shader called "Contrast Adaptive Sharpening" as part of their GPUOpen FidelityFX toolkit. It is graphics card agnostic, so you will see a benefit no matter what GPU you have.

As the name suggests, Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) considers the contrast of the pixels during the sharpening process. Edges and gradients no longer suffer from the same artifact problems shown above, but it still allows for areas that have large contrast differences to be sharpened accurately.

A great example of this is moon surfaces. They have craters, surface rings, mountain ranges, and flat areas that have large contrast differences by design. CAS really shines in this situation, where it successfully allows for the subtle details created by the artists to become clearer in the final render, even with the existing post-processes turned on.



It looks equally as good on ships, where CAS brings out the subtle details of the hulls. You can see this particularly well on the Orca and Naga where paneling and decals are used:





The performance cost of this enhancement is negligible relative to pre-existing post-processing. However, it has been decided that this feature will only be enabled when the ‘Post Processing’ setting within EVE is set to ‘High’ for the moment.

Work is continuing on the DirectX 12 client which will open up even more avenues to explore in the future.

Fly safe!

Opportunistic Capsuleers,

There is currently a limited time 10% discount on PLEX purchases of 500 PLEX and higher! You'll need to act fast, though, as the offer is only available until 11:00 UTC on 2 June.

Remember, you can trade your PLEX for in-game ISK to spend on ships and skills, or spend your PLEX at EVE Online's New Eden Store on Omega Clone State time to unlock access to all of EVE's ships and skills, as well as double training speed. Your PLEX can also buy you Skill Extractors, HyperCores, stunning ship SKINs, character apparel and more at the New Eden Store!



The HyperNet Relay fee reduction is also now live! The fee has temporarily been reduced from 5% to 0%, but only until 11:00 UTC on 4 June! It’ll be cheaper to put your items up for sale on the HyperNet Relay during this time, so don’t miss the opportunity to save some ISK.

Are you a Triglavian hunter or defender? Show your allegiance with the brand new Eden's Hunters and Kybernaut Clade SKINs for selected ships, available now in EVE Online's New Eden Store!

As Chapter 3 of the Triglavian Invasion is now underway, you can get either SKIN for the Nestor, Vindicator, Kikimora, Drekavac, Leshak, Guardian, Basilisk, Bifrost and Noctis.

For those eager to support and promote the efforts of Capsuleers hunting Triglavian structures and vessels, the unique Eden's Hunters SKIN is perfect for anyone aggressively taking the fight to the enemy.

Radical Capsuleers who find something attractive, even uplifting in Zorya Triglav's message of "proving and joining the flow" can display their allegiance with the Kybernaut Clade SKIN, its name a reference to the Triglavian term for Capsuleers.

Declare your support for the invaders, or for the Empires as they fight for New Eden!

Decisive Capsuleers,

The start of Invasion Chapter 3, the third and final installment in the year-long Triglavian Invasion expansion, is now live!

As seismic events occur and continue to unfold over the coming weeks and months, Capsuleers will have important decisions to make as they choose between defending the Empires of New Eden or siding with the mysterious Triglavian Collective. These choices will have a direct impact on how the story develops, and will have lasting consequences in New Eden, ensuring that life in the cluster will never be the same again!

There will be open conflict between EDENCOM forces and the Triglavians across high and low security space, with Capsuleers no doubt being drawn into engagements with roaming fleets, as well as each other, depending on the side they choose to fight for! As a result, Capsuleers will attain standings for EDENCOM and the Triglavian Collective.

New Eden will see new structures and defenses being created on all sides of the conflict as the situation develops, with the Triglavians establishing infrastructure focused on attack, and the Empires fortifying their star systems against invasion.

So will you, intrepid Capsuleers, remain allied to your chosen Empires or risk everything and side with their unknown and potentially dangerous enemy?

It's time to decide.