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Speed rebalance has been introduced, affecting a great many different ships and modules. Maximum top speed has been reduced across the board along with changes to how micro warp drives operate. Stasis webifiers, rigs, overdrives, implants, web drones and gang bonuses have all been changed. Full details of what has been changed will be listed in the appropriate section and a full listing of the Speed Rebalanced Dev Blog by CCP Nozh is available.

# Changes have been made to all Frigates, Interceptors, Stealth Bombers, Destroyers, Cruisers, Battlecruisers and Battleships regarding base speed and micro warp drive speed. Rookie, Industrial, Capital and shuttle class ships remain unaffected.
# All interceptors now have a new role bonus. Interceptor Skill Bonus: 15% reduction in micro warp drive signature radius penalty per level.
# The Kronos and Paladin have had their webifiers bonus increased from 2% to 10% per skill level.
# The Crane, Prorator, Prowler and Viator can now equip a covert ops cloak and can therefore warp whilst cloaked now. In addition these four ships can gain a 5% bonus per transports skill level to the CPU need of fitting a covert ops cloak.
# The Crane, Prorator, Prowler and Viator can now use a black ops jump portal.
# The Crane, Prorator, Prowler and Viator have had their +2warp strength bonus removed.
# Jaguar bonuses have been clarified, and resistance bonuses have been removed.
# All Harpies and Hawks have been recalled for urgent paint jobs. They will now show their respective mega-corporations’ colors.

Blockade Runners

The Blockade Runners (Crane, Prorator, Prowler, Viator) are meant to be rather good at getting through gate camps and navigating through low and null sec space with more impunity than the other industrial ships. Several changes such as the introduction of interdictors, heavy interdictors, and force and fleet recons have had an impact on their ability to run blockades with much success at all. As a result, we wanted to try and balance things to better focus them towards their role in light of many changes EVE has seen since they first were introduced.

To improve them we refocused on stealth rather than agility. They will gain the ability to equip covert ops cloaking devices and therefore can warp whilst cloaked. In lieu we removed the +2 warp strength and one or part of their active tanking bonuses which were not really being used anyway as much. They will also gain the ability to utilize the black ops jump portals.

By switching to stealth and cloaking as their primary defense in navigating through space and getting through gate camps they gain a significant edge in being able to cloak and move away fast if within a bubble. The ability to use the black ops jump portals is a fringe benefit allowing specialised operations where you would need cargo capacity moved around for a variety of reasons.
Deep Space Transports

The Deep Space Transports (Bustard, Impel, Mastodon, Occator) have good tanks and good cargo capacity but really no focused role beyond the good tank. The most important part of moving your cargo around is arriving safely at the destination. The DSTs have significant drawbacks as they are less prone to getting through the all critical gate camps like their Blockade Runner cousins. If warp scrambled, it was a matter of how long their tank might last in order to have a remote chance to survive the encounter.

To revamp their role we gave them the +2 warp strength of the Blockade Runners and also a bonus to shield hitpoints (Bustard and Mastodon) or armor hitpoints (Impel and Occator) to increase the ability to fit for a HP tank which is much more useful than their active tanks in many situations where you are receiving a large amount of damage over a short duration. In balancing this out, one of their active tanking bonuses was removed.

With these changes we hope that the extra warp strength and HP tank will greatly aid their use in all areas of space especially in empire where they have less to worry about with no bubbled camps to have to run through and only the heavy interdictors as their nemesis.
Mackinaw, Procurer, Skiff and Rorqual

The mackinaw gets some love with an additional +10 cpu and +1000 cargo capacity to allow it to be more effective at ice mining. It always under performs a little compared to the hulk and these changes should allow it to specialise at ice mining better.

The Procurer and Skiff both received minor boosts to their agility as we wanted the smallest barges to be at least agile if completely outclassed by their larger cousins in most scenarios and nudge them towards more of a ninja mining role a little. It might also be good for you all to know the Skiff has always had a +2 warp strength bonus but this was never detailed in the description so we have updated the description to highlight this rather powerful bonus as a good selling point.

The Rorqual will be receiving a minor boost to its corporate hangar capacity. This is done to allow the hangar to be used as a shared and secure container for mining ops and also increase its utility for carrying cargo around.

In a drive to find new players, the expansion will also ship in a boxed copy of EVE, with all previous expansion content. The box will be published by Atari, whose chief David Gardner appeared in a video message hailing the deal.

Senior producer Torfi Frans Olafsson said the update would be “the biggest expansion in EVE as of today”, with a larger team working on it than the game has seen in its lifespan.

The focus of the expansion will be “true exploration”, with players using new skills and modules to travel through wormholes into all-new, unconnected space. There they will find unique stellar phenomena and the resources and artefacts that will lead to the third level of technology in the game universe, Tech 3 - the first such update since Tech 2 was introduced back in 2004.

EVE Online developer CCP has hinted that an FPS based on the EVE universe is in development.

Footage was shown of a Halo-like shooter on a daylit, Earth-like planet surface. The architecture and gun designs were clearly redolent of the space MMO’s art style.

Now, today we’ve set our sights on character rendering and lifelike animation. It’s important to realize that in order to create realistic looking characters, you have to pay great attention to how they will be animated. We have examples of 3d rendered characters in films and digital media that look amazing when you see a screenshot or a still frame, but once they start moving, they look like zombies or animatronic RealDolls™. There’s actually a term that describes how cg or cartoon humanoid characters tend to look creepy and un-lifelike the closer you get to photorealism. A Japanese roboticist named Masahiro Mori gave it the name “Uncanny valley”. If we plan to create close to photorealistic characters, we must ensure that they’re behavior matches the quality of the shading and rendering in order to keep them out of this valley of darkness.

So exactly how do we create lifelike animation? Well, for one, we will use state of the art motion capture. There are nuances in the biomechanics of the human body that only the most experienced and skilled animators are able to express. It takes them, however, days to create what you capture in minutes in mocap. The amount of animation needed for a project like walking in stations prohibits us from hiring an army of the worlds most talented animators and having them animate for years until their fingers bleed.
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This brings us to an area of computer graphics called dynamic avatar human-to-human interaction. It tries to apply knowledge derived from years of research of human body language into the actions of computer generated avatars, so that their behavior mimics human behavior without the user or NPC controller micro-managing every little twitch of the body or glance of the eyes.

This is one of the areas that we intend to research and apply to our animation system.