I'm surprised no one has got to this yet, and its probably a sign of how unappreciated EVE Online is. Well last Wednesday the much anticipated trinity update was released to pod pilots everywhere, and believe me when I say this – It looks like sex in space.

EVE Online has always been a beautiful looking game. Even by today's standards its pretty hard to take a screenshot of eve that doesn't look like the cover of some space opera novel so dark cold and epic that it drips dark matter.

Trinity update takes the just about dated graphics engine, (finally) moves it over to your computers GPU, and adds all the next gen loveliness we've come to expect in games. Bump maps specular maps, and a massive increase in texture size cements EVE's place as the best looking MMO on the market.


Me, lookin fine in my noob boat.

To me the biggest advantage of these textures is the sense of scale they bring back to eve. The first thing that blows people away about eve is its scale. Looking at the star map can be a daunting experience for a newbie. Even after months of playing, moving back the camera to show my insignificant speck of a ship, that is so small it has to be represented by a single pixel or it would be invisible to the naked eye, dwarfed by a city sized space station like a flea to a skyscraper.

However this sense of insignificance can easily be lost when distances of kilometres are a few hundred pixels wide and your frigate is represented by so few polys. The Trinity update makes sure you never forget your place in the universe when a hulking battleship rumbles past your measly destroyer, showing tiny windows spread across thousands of metres of complex machinery.

However the patch didn't exactly go off without a hitch – for a few hours the users that downloaded the patch would have their boot.ini file deleted. Effectively meaning that if they restarted their computers or turned them off, windows would fail to boot. Thankfully after fucking over a few hundred Windows xp users, CCP noticed their mistake. booting up EVE not brings up a giant message of: DO NOT REBOOT! classy.