Trinity First Glance: Issues

Trinity is up, and within the promised time frame.

Trinity arrives

The basic patch went quickly and I was in the game in a few minutes.

The “pretty patch,” the Trinity graphics upgrade, is a separate download that you have to activate through the preferences panel. I did that, relogged, and went in to see what I could see.

Window Pains

They resized and reset all my windows!

They unlocked the Overview from the Selected Item, Drones, and Fleet windows. Not the most annoying thing in the world, but since they went and reset all the windows, I am still nudging those damn windows to get them lined up as I like.

Then they made the freakin’ Fleet window huge! I use that window every day to coordinate my mining operation… primarily it allows my hauler to warp directly to my miner… but now it is multiple nested levels, so it took me a minute to even find my miner when my hauler invited him to a fleet.

And, of course, the Fleet window stuck itself between the Overview and Drones windows, screwing up my window arrangement yet again and shoving the Drones window practically off the screen.

Now, I am sure that the new Fleet window is very useful to some people out there, but it was a pain in the ass to me almost immediately.

Minor gripes, yes, but I cannot imagine anybody who plays the game thinking, “You know what this game needs? Windows that take up EVEN MORE SPACE!”

I Fly Ugly Ships

Then there is the Trinity graphical update. What about that?

Detail.

That is about all I can say. Everything has a lot more detail.

I could see a lot more edges, nooks, corners, and what not on my Mammoth and my Drake.

But it is like seeing a older television news anchor on HDTV. You realize that the you never knew really how old he looked, how many wrinkles he had, or that he has hair visible growing out of his left ear and a small drop of sweat on his cheek.

So my heavily textured ships do not look much improved. Meanwhile, the Hulk, a ship with a more smooth appearance looks about the same. The only really startling difference is that they took away the smooth yellow-orange beams of the mining lasers and replaced them with little silver blue pulses that are, graphically, a serious step down. They do not even light up the asteroids around them like the old beams used to.

Space itself looks about the same. Since I spend most of my time zoomed out enough that space is what I see most, I have to say I am, so far, very unimpressed with the graphics update.

Maybe that will change with combat, but I don’t see much “there” there at the moment.

Other Issues

They felt the need to enable EVE Voice. I had to go in and turn that off.

They broke EVE Mon, my most favorite EVE utility. I am sure it will be fixed soon though. [Fixed now!]

My section of the universe has gone down a couple of times. Not a big deal. Certainly to be expected after a big upgrade.

Oh, and one more thing.

CCP TRIED TO DISABLE MY BRAND NEW COMPUTER BY DELETING THE BOOT.INI FILE WITH THEIR INSTALLER!

Yes, I am somewhat pissed about that. It is a good thing I was on and got this message:

I actually downloaded the upgrade considerably after that time and still had the issue. Let’s hear it for truth and accuracy!

The link in this message sends you to a forum page that starts off with a post that, while technically correct, is not very helpful if you do not know what you are doing.

Of course, that is because they link a Microsoft Knowledgebase entry (Microsoft KB Motto: Only helpful if you know what you are doing, and usually not even then!) and then let it ride, with only a vague offer of more help to people whose machines were actually disabled. (And whom, thus, are probably not reading the forum post!)

While I am usually one of the more understanding people when it comes to companies making gaffes like this, I have managed to go 18 years in development and QA and not actually ship something that disabled a customers system on an install.

CCP, you screwed up!