EVE Online:Incursion patch 1.6 has been Released
From EVE Online CCP,
With this release of patch 1.6, EVE team are introducing the new CarbonUI framework into EVE. You shouldn’t see much difference – with this round of changes we have fixed the underlying code, not the user interface itself.
This step was made possible by the UI corification that happened last year. This project was a big engineering undertaking that you can read more about below, to pave the way for taking the EVE UI into the future.
Why CarbonUI?
The UI in EVE is somewhat dated by now, and so was the underlying code that handled the rendering. The old UI rendering used fixed-function rendering in Direct3D – basically a D3D7 approach. D3D9 still supports this approach, but it can be a performance bottleneck, and limits you to what the fixed-function feature set offers – no fancy shaders, for example.
They’ve wanted to overhaul the UI in EVE for a long time now for several reasons:
•Improved usability
•Improved look
•Improved performance
The UI framework itself held us back – as it has grown over the years it had become cumbersome to use and they had reached some dead ends in trying to improve its performance. Not enough attention had been given to the framework itself in the rush to add new features to the UI.
They considered several approaches to revamping the UI framework, but at the end of the day we realized that the EVE UI code base was far too big to consider rewriting the whole UI with some new paradigms.
So, CarbonUI is an evolution of the existing UI framework, with a completely new rendering layer.
they’ve strived to change as little as they can in the high-level interface, so the UI programmer, working in Python doesn’t see much change – and more importantly, those ~200K lines of UI related code continue to work.
The patch size for this release will be approximately 550 MB but your overall client size will increase by 10 MB. This is due to the new Carbon UI files replacing older files. Do not be alarmed when your full client size does not increase.