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GC 2007 - Day 2: Eve, Conan, Quake Wars and more

By: Jarno Kokko Aug 24, 2007

Altair, the guy from Assassins Creed taking a break before heading out to backstab someone...

Second day of GC 2007 was a bit less hectic than the first one, but it was also the day when the floodgates were opened and general public was let in. And they came in droves... the public halls were absolutely jam packed with people and almost any demo station or enclosed booth had a queue of some sort.

Second attempt at Blizzard

My plan was to hit the Blizzard stand first thing in the morning, hoping that I would beat the queues and get to try out Starcraft II and Wrath of the Lich King. I got in using the press and exhibitor entrance a bit before the main doors opened, but as I was walking towards the Blizzard booth, I noticed couple of people running past me... then a few more... and then it was like Horde raiding the Ironforge. By the time I figured out why they were running, it was already too late.

Blizzard booth just after opening, with demo kiosks empty.

... but I was too late - the horde that ran past me was already camping the gate.

Foiled again. I had other things scheduled so I couldn't stick around.

Blizzard released a couple of new screenshots at GC 2007.

Another landscape shot off WoLK.

CCP - Eve Online

First on the list of "other things" was a meeting with Arend Stührmann, Associate Producer of Eve Online. The subject was the upcoming Trinity 2 game engine upgrade to EVE Online.

I saw a comparison between the old and the new engine showing the same ships and the difference was definitely major. Arend explained that initially, Trinity 2 will be just a modern DX9 upgrade. DX10 is coming as well, but the story seems to have changed a bit along the way: "Trinity 2 will give the framework that allows extending the graphics with DX10 features". So the current plan is to get Trinity 2 out by the end of the year for DX9 and follow it with a DX10 version later on.

The schedule has already slipped a few times and the current timeline is not set in stone either - programming is still very much underway and CCP also has to ensure that everything will work on both versions of the client. You can keep on playing with the older client if you want, and it's probably going to be the best option for those with very old systems.

For those with new video cards, Trinity 2 should bring a notable performance boost. Current EVE client does the bulk of the visual effects by just using brute CPU power. This means that the game runs about the same on just about any video card - only the fill rate matters, and even that is irrelevant after a certain point. At the same time the client is starving for CPU on any system. Trinity 2 will balance things out, moving as much of the visual side to the GPU as possible.

DX10 seems to have slipped from being the main point of the upgrade and is now a side-effect coming later. The new DX9 material shown was very beautiful, but the story on DX10 seems to be a bit like with every other developer these days talking about DX10. Before anyone had really tried doing anything with it, DX10 was the next messiah, and now it's starting to look more and more like some people have said - the current generation of DX10 hardware can't actually run any remarkable DX10-specific features at acceptable frame rates, so adding DX10 support at this point is fairly pointless. I'm sure EVE Online will get the DX10 shiny eventually, but it looks like it won't be part of the initial Trinity 2 patch.

Arend also said that they hope that they'd have the game running wth the Trinity 2 engine on public display at the EVE FanFest 2007 that opens November 1st in Reykjavik, Iceland. He stressed that it's not yet confirmed - they just don't know if it's going to happen, but they are going to try very hard to get it to a point that it could be demonstrated in public by then.

Then I got to see the new capital mining ship, the Roqual, and while the model was not final, it looked very nice - a real 'star destroyer meets industrial machinery of doom'. I didn't see the Siege Mode "Transformers trick" in action as I was shown just still images that had just arrived from the CCP studios.