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CCP Games recently released a new developer blog post offering more details about the Character Creator feature included in the EVE Online: Incursion expansion. Featuring all new art for each bloodline, race, and gender, the creator is the first step in providing station avatars for players in 2011.

As our players are probably aware of now, we are shipping a new awesome character creator as a part of our last Incursion release this January. We here at CCP believe that we are making history - a milestone in how character creation should look and feel in computer games with the capabilities to finely sculpt the appearance of your character with such incredible detail - and this makes us very excited. But creating a character is only the first step. What happens to these character portraits when we are flying in space? Is my computer supposed to handle rendering dozens of these portraits when I open my address book? Or even thousands of portraits when trading in Jita or taking part in a fleet fight?

This was the problem that we were facing for Incursion - rendering characters with all the details that we want to present to our users takes up a lot of computers resources - resources that we want you to be using to blow up spaceships rather than rendering portraits. Based on this, we decided to render all character portraits server side and let the EVE client fetch the portraits from our web-based Image Server, just like normal web browsers do when loading up web pages.

EVE Online: Character Portraits

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