The Contracts system in New Eden allows players to set up business dealings with other players to Exchange goods, Auction items and have their belongings couriered across the universe. With this release, we'll be adding this functionality to Citadels, making these fortresses in the sky the best locations for logistics, trade, staging, training and congregation in New Eden.
The visual damage system (VDS) has been improved by taking feedback on board and making a second pass over a few of the current visual effects. The armor hardening effect has been overhauled and a new hull repair effect has been added, along with audio.
This release also improves how the VDS is updated, so that pilots will no longer need to have a ship targeted to monitor the visual damage being inflicted on their foe. The VDS has also been extended to objects other than ships, structures in space will also now have shields and armor VFX.
In our ongoing efforts to keep New Eden looking as beautiful as ever, the next set of space assets have been processed with our new V5 shaders, giving them improved fidelity and performance for the Capsuleers of New Eden.
With this release, the rendering for celestial clouds has been updated, providing a significant performance improvement to the clouds under the DirectX 11 client. To improve performance, a ray marching approach has been used which unfortunately will not work under the DirectX 9 client. This means that DirectX9 clients will still use the old cloud rendering technology.
As part of our efforts to make the user interface more intuitive, this release will include a more detailed overview of a pilot's ship's storage spaces, including more visual representation of the status of ship holds and how full they are.
Configurable through a right click menu, pilots will now be able to select which hold to track, so that they may see a percentage readout of how much capacity is taken up by their current cargo, and can receive feedback via visual notifications when this changes during in space activities such as mining and salvaging.
