EVE Online News

Defiant Capsuleers,

Celebrate the freedom of the Seven Tribes of Matar during this year’s Liberation Day festivities from 7 – 19 July, with the return of the Liberation Games! Participate in the reenactments of battles from the Great Rebellion, follow a trail of historical events from Minmatar history, enjoy parade sites, get seasonal rewards, join a new Mining Blitz, and more!

[h2]THE LIBERATION GAMES[/h2]

This year marks the 144th anniversary of the Great Rebellion, when the Minmatar people united as one to break free from more than 900 years of oppression and slavery under the Amarr, rising up to forge their own destiny among the stars of New Eden.

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The Liberation Games are the centerpiece of Liberation Day festivities, celebrating the rebellion and the shared spirit of the Tribes as well as renewing a united dedication to continued efforts to free countless brothers and sisters still suffering in servitude. Declare allegiance to one the Seven Tribes of Matar for the Liberation Games by selecting them in the Agency.

• BRUTOR - A disciplined and strong-willed people who consider themselves the defenders of all Minmatar.
• SEBIESTOR - Emphasizing practical skills, the Sebiestor are known far and wide as engineers and inventors.
• VHEROKIOR - Mystics of this tribe are the guardians of the Voluval Ritual and travel immense distances.
• THUKKER - Nomadic and fiercely independent, the Thukker travel the stars in Great Caravans of starships.
• KRUSUAL - The only tribe that was not completely conquered by the Amarr, their pride is infamous among the Minmatar.
• NEFANTAR - A tribe split between those who remain loyal to the Amarr and those who returned to their homelands.
• STARKMANIR - Few in number and once thought lost forever, the Starkmanir are a symbol of survival for all.

Take part in the events and activities available during the celebrations to collect points and earn rewards, including SKINs and a special facial tattoo in the colors and style of your chosen Tribe. At the conclusion of the Liberation Games, the Tribe whose Capsuleers have earned the most points overall will gain control of a commemorative station in Pator, home system of the Minmatar, for the next year!

[h2]NEVER AGAIN ANOTHER LONG NIGHT[/h2]

Seek out combat reenactments of battles from the days of the Great Rebellion across Minmatar space and the Great Wildlands, and demonstrate your defiance against autonomous drone recreations of the Amarr fleets that failed to extinguish the eternal flame of freedom in the hearts the Minmatar.

For those not interested in combat, have no fear: themed Data Sites and Mining Expeditions provide other options to enjoy the festivities and earn points & rewards!

[h2]DEFIANT GLORIFICATION[/h2]

Dive into a high-speed Proving Ground event, going head-to-head in 1v1 combat aboard the Republic’s iconic Stabber, Rupture, and Bellicose cruisers.



The effects of overheating many module types, including turrets, are doubled in this arena, and a massive Tachyon cloud brings you up to blistering speeds as you battle your opponents – so load your guns and get ready to go all-out!

[h2]A LEGACY THAT WE BUILT[/h2]

Journey across New Eden on a trail of major historical locations in Minmatar history, learning stories and events of the past while earning points for your Tribe in this repeatable route – and travel to a different Parade Site each day of the celebrations to launch fireworks and earn daily Skill Point rewards!

[h2]FREEDOM’S GIFTS[/h2]

Log in for at least 7 days during the celebrations to claim a selection of themed daily login rewards, including fireworks, Liberation Games SKINs, boosters, Skill Points, and a Minmatar Expert System.



[h2]LIBERATION DAY SALES AND BUNDLES[/h2]

Emblazon your ship with one of the most iconic symbols of the Great Rebellion. Chainbreaker Khumaak SKINs are returning to the NES until 19 July, with added availability on 12 new Minmatar ships, including the Rifter, Hurricane, Sabre.



Additionally, don’t miss out on the new Great Rebellion Packs available until the end of the event, bringing you stylish apparel, SKINs, Omega time, a Cerebral Accelerator, and Skill Points!



Festivities are already in full swing as the people of the Republic celebrate their hard-won freedom and renew a united and unbreakable spirit that ensures a day of darkness will never again fall on the Minmatar people.

See you in space!

Curious Capsuleers,

A packed summer schedule awaits you in EVE Online as the Summer of Streams begins! From now through until September there will be plenty of new official streams, dev blogs, and Q&A’s for you to get stuck into!

Dozens of CCP devs will be doing deep dives into all sorts of topics from Photon UI to updates from Team Security and the state of Factional Warfare. You’ll find those dev blogs here on EVE News and the streams over on CCPTV . You can also follow us on EVE’s official Twitter to stay up to date on upcoming Q&A sessions that will be happening throughout the summer. Be sure to get your questions ready!

The first of the dev blogs titled EVE Evolved: Tech, Audio & Visual Evolution Dev Blog is already out and goes into depth about all the tech that is continually evolving EVE.

The rest of the July schedule is as follows:

Week of 11-17 July:

• Team Security: 2021 in Review Dev Blog
• EVE Events & Minmatar Liberation Day CCPTV Stream

Week of 18-24 July:

• Security Q&A on Discord

Week of 25-31 July:

• EVE Player Data Dev blog and CCPTV Stream

Much more will be coming throughout August and beyond so stay tuned and stay up to date.

Topics Upcoming in August:

• State of the Union: Factional Warfare & Frontlines
• The Future of Heraldry & InterBus
• Retrospective on the Siege Green update
• EVE Evolved: UI past, present & future
• Status of the First Arc & Narrative Driven Development
• Embracing New Players: What have we learned and what lies ahead

Get ready for a Summer of Streams where you’ll learn more about the past, present, and future of New Eden!

PLAY EVE

Evolving Capsuleers,

It’s been a week since we unveiled EVE Evolved which represents CCP’s commitment to continually invest in the foundations of EVE Online, and we wanted to share with you how CCP are continuing the journey of setting EVE up for its third decade. With a renewed focus on the foundational technology that EVE is built upon, our mission is to bring cutting-edge visual and technical capabilities to the EVE Universe. Through this, we can achieve our goal of visceral supremacy, remaining committed to making EVE the most beautiful, immersive sci-fi game ever made. 

In this dev blog, we will be walking through some of the foundational improvements from the June release. You’ll be getting a deeper insight into what’s changed, what’s coming, and how these updates will enhance your EVE experience in the future. 

[h2]DirectX 12 and Level of Detail[/h2]



As part of our continuous investments into EVE’s future, we have been hard at work to bring DirectX 12 to EVE in the June release. DirectX 12 will serve as the new foundation for rendering the game on Windows, allowing better utilization of graphics cards, reducing power consumption, and bringing better game performance on supported hardware. 

While performance is important, releasing a DirectX 12 capable version of the client allows more modern graphical features to be utilized. It lays a better foundation for EVE so that we could bring even more amazing visuals to all pilots in EVE such as the hangar visual updates that are coming this fall. DX12 also opens the door to even more graphical upgrades in the future such as DirectX Raytracing, which will allow us to implement the next level of visual fidelity and provide an even richer, more immersive experience for all players. 

Alongside DirectX 12, we have overhauled how the game calculates the Level of Detail and fidelity for ship meshes, textures, and other objects when they are rendered at different distances from the players’ camera. This improvement will allow our artists to upgrade assets from our previous three levels to as many levels as they desire. It allows assets to smoothly transition from foreground to background, attaining the best balance of performance and fidelity. 

These LOD changes are designed to scale based on system hardware and settings to ensure the smoothest possible experience for players. 

Along with this, you will also see an improvement in how the in-game camera calculates what it should render, ensuring that objects out of view are not taking up unnecessary system resources. This improvement will lead to better client performance, especially in busy scenes.

[h2]Career Agent Site Overhaul[/h2]

As part of our commitment to providing a more immersive game experience, the career agent mission sites have been given a complete overhaul so that the visual experience in those sites is more in line with the new player experience which has been under constant iteration since its debut in 2021. The placement and appearance of interactable assets in those mission sites have been updated, as well as those in the background. You will also see several structures, effects, and objects that are never-before-seen in those mission sites.



One notable inclusion in the revamp of those missions is new decorative asteroid models. They were generated using a novel art pipeline leveraging modern asset creation tools to help improve the overall sense of dynamism in these assets. We’re looking to expand upon this to include additional variations and shader changes in future releases as we continue to evolve New Eden’s living universe.



[h2]High-Res Nebulas[/h2]

The resolution of every nebula background in-game has been doubled, quadrupling the pixel count and increasing both the level of detail and quality of the starscape. The increased resolution of the cubemap also gave us the opportunity to remove unintended seam errors. In addition, the colors of each nebula have been rebalanced to further enhance and modernize your experience in space.



Sightseeing in New Eden has now become more immersive than ever before! 

[h2]Cloud Cover Updates [/h2]

Speaking of sightseeing, how can we miss the reintroduced cloud cover effects? Previously deactivated due to quality and performance concerns at the time, these cloud effects have been brought back in the June release, with improved appearance and better utilization of our latest tech.  



These vast cloud formations have now returned to fill our skies with swirling gas funnels, raging stellar storms, and claustrophobic elemental vapor. You will now be able to see these effects throughout sites across New Eden, so keep an eye out for space weather in a system near you!

[h2]Texture Compression Improvements [/h2]

Significant updates have been rolled out in the June release that improve all textures in the game. 

In days of yore, developers needed to be very mindful of memory usage and hardware limitations. A common technique was to save space by using fewer color channels from the textures and packing them together in a single, multi-channel texture. This would save space and reduce the data being sent to the GPU. However, doing this has an effect on the quality of the visuals such as blocky artifacts in the normal maps that are highly visible in specular highlights. 

These errors were acceptable at the time because of the benefit to memory and processing power, but the technique has become less frequently used as hardware has become more capable. In EVE, texture packing has been removed altogether to ensure these artifacts will no longer appear while also giving a cleaner visual for every asset in game.

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Using unpacked textures also gives us more fine-tuned control when compressing each texture, as we’ve now selected a compression type that is best suited for each of the map types. This has allowed us to improve the overall detail of the in-game assets.

In short, these upgrades will ensure that ships and stations now look the way our artists envisioned them with no lost details or unexpected rendering artifacts. And the more power we can give to our amazing artists, the more beautiful EVE can become in its third decade!

[h2]Compact Mode in Photon UI[/h2]

On our path towards modernizing the EVE experience, Compact Mode has been introduced in June as we continue to iterate and improve Photon UI. You can now enable this mode for select windows such as the Overview, Chat, D-scan and more. With Compact Mode, you will see an improved experience with the UI that is more consistent and easier to grasp – sometimes great things do come in small packages!



We’re continually iterating and improving this feature, and we will be sharing more details on that in a dev blog later this summer.

[h2]Propulsion Sound Rebalance [/h2]

Building an enhanced sensory experience that you can get lost in needs more than just graphical improvements. In service of that, we’ve taken player feedback onboard and further improved the audio experience by allowing you to hear the propulsion modules of those around you. Along with this, the diversity of engine sounds has been expanded to give a more unique auditory experience for a wider range of ship sizes. Because after all, flying a Nidhoggur shouldn’t sound or feel the same as flying a Rifter. This improvement focuses on giving you an enhanced and more balanced sound experience in space.

In addition to that, sound effects for career agent missions and other cloud covered sites have also seen an update as we continue to create a much more immersive audio experience for players.

[h2]Audio Performance Improvements [/h2]

Speaking of audio enhancement, we’re currently working on how the client handles audio in heavy scenes. The new audio prioritization system will ensure that scenes with a high number of audio objects such as fleet fights will have improved performance while also ensuring a clear and concise audio experience. Sounds at closer distances will be prioritized, and the number of audio events will be scaled based on machine performance to ensure a smoother audio experience for players. We’ll have more to share on this by early fall, so stay tuned!

[h2]Distributed Tracing [/h2]

In order to keep EVE healthy, we know that it’s important to address any defects or bugs as quickly as possible. In service of this, we have been continuing the work to improve our tooling and have added improved debugging tools with Honeycomb, helping us find and squash bugs faster than ever before. With this improvement, we are now able to see the root causes of an issue more quickly. In addition, we can utilize distributed tracing to more easily identify opportunities for making EVE faster by finding performance bottlenecks. 

[h2]Future Infrastructure Improvements [/h2]

In the spirit of making EVE faster, we are also actively working on replacing some of the critical infrastructure under the hood, so that in future you will see EVE features become more responsive. But more on this at a later date.

That about sums things up for now but stay tuned for blogs and streams on topics such as UI to audio as well as game updates in the weeks and months to come, as EVE continues to evolve into the next decade and beyond!

Fly safe! o7

Greetings Spacefriends!

In the last episode, we saw some great projects from the community, including the Battle of Bricks Lego Submissions, a beautiful watercolor, and the plans for a player-run Federation Day Event! Let's quickly touch on that final point event and get things rolling with this edition of the Community Beat!



Federation Day was a massive success last weekend seeing celebrations across multiple Gallente systems! One of the events we featured last week was a poster design contest - we’d like to say a big congratulations to Miyoshi Akachi for their submission below. We had a look through the submissions ourselves and there was a lot of tough competition, but well done to everyone who submitted an entry!



As a part of the same event, a conga line was formed over in Luminaire where Che Biko captured a great shot of the capitals being illuminated of the fireworks being fired from the conga line.



A great time was had by all and a massive thank you to both the organizers and all those that attended the event as well!


Before The Agency as we know it existed in New Eden there was a web-based tool also known as the Agency which served as a hub for player-created missions and campaigns. Today this tool has continued to grow and evolve and is known as EVE PANDORA.

Developed by DeT Resprox from T.R.I.A.D, its purpose was to create a mission system that could be used by individual capsuleers, corporations, or alliances from all over New Eden. Today, EVE PANDORA received a big update dubbed the “Champions” expansion. You can check out more details on this phenomenal project below:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/DxwfdeJ9ioY



We spotted this picture over on Twitter and felt that we just had to share it! Featuring multiple Titans hanging outside of a Keepstar, they are all simultaneously firing off a bunch of Lance Doomsdays to create an awe-inspiring light show. Neat.






For the last few Community Beats we’ve featured upcoming Eve Player meets around the globe and we thought we’d give a little mid-ish-year reminder of upcoming gatherings that we’re aware of so you can make sure you don’t miss out!

• 
  23 July – Steel City (USA)
• 
  12 - 14 August – FinFest (FI)
• 
  13 August – EVE Glasgow (UK)
• 
  27 August – EVE London (UK)
  
• 
  8 – 11 September – Eve North East (USA)
  
• 
  15 October – EviEnna (AT)
• 
  20 - 23 October – EVE Vegas (USA)

Of course, if you’re aware of a meeting that’s happening that we don’t know about, or you're thinking of organizing one yourself - we’d love to hear about it! You can drop a message on the Out of Game Events forum to let us all know!


Eve Partner and Streamer Gustav Mannfred is planning on running another summer event stream, this time featuring around 180b ISK in prizes! Gustav is also going to include a passive track too, meaning that even if you can’t make one of the scheduled live streams, all is not lost, and you’ll be able to still participate!The first stream is coming up July 16 & 17, for Minmatar Liberation Day so be sure to check out their Forum post for more details.

If you don’t know of Gustav Mannfred we’d recommend checking him out over on Twitch where they stream a mixture of PvE and PvP EVE content. Gustav has had a big desire to bring back the old-style Abyssal arena-style combat, so it's not uncommon that you’ll see them engaging in Proving Ground Arena PvP, but drop by, and have a chat with them about it!



We conclude this week's Community Beat with a very cool video recently made by the Arataka Research Consortium covering the developing story in Athounon and Arshat!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/n1DEeyMsN3w

Head on over to the Eve Online forums to chat! We’d love to hear if you’ve seen or found anything mysterious around the cluster, or have any stories to tell too!

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This week's episode contains details on the following:    

00:00 - Intro
00:26 - EVE Evolved
01:01 - DirectX 12
01:17 - Audio & visual improvements
01:42 - Career agents
02:10 - AIR Career Program
02:29 - Narrative arcs
02:45 - CSM 17
03:01 - Gallente Federation Day
03:25 - Omega & MCT offer
03:38 - Outro

EVE Evolved CSM 17 Gallente Federation Day Omega & MCT offer EVE Universe