In this Developer Blog, CCP Atlas shares with us some of the changes that he’s recently made to the image archives for the Fansite packages.

Read is here.

Warning! Nerdy 3rd party developer stuff ahead!

We’ve recently made some changes to the Image Export Collection package that I think you will like.

Structural changes

The structure of the image export collection has recently been changed a bit to make it more consistent and easier to use.

Instead of a single archive, now there are three.

• Types
• Renders
• Icons

The reason for splitting these up is that the complete IEC is much bigger than it was before and this way you can just download what you want.

Since player alliance logos are no longer shipped with the client those have been removed from the IEC as well.

There is no longer a ‘blueprint’ folder since all the blueprint icons are in the Types archive.

Types, Types, Types!

Previously the package contained renders up to 256×256 of the renderable objects (ships, drones, etc) and the raw image sheet icons for other types (such as modules, exotic dancers, etc).

This meant that in order to show an icon for a specific module, say the Pithum A-Type Explosion Dampening Amplifier you would need to find the base icon which isn’t named anything similar to the typeID and then overlay that icon with another icon for the ‘deadspace’ indication. Not a fun process.

To fix this we are now exporting every type in the game as a separate icon so you can always reference it directly with typeID instead of having to assemble it by hand. What this means is that there are a lot more images than before since the same image is used for many different types and there are a total of 18 thousand icons for each size that is available, 32×32 and 64×64.

The new type icons are available in the Types archive but if you want to roll your own all the same icon sheets as before are available as well. The Types archive is simply an addition to the previous image collection. For completeness’ sake there are type icons in the archive that may not have a proper model.

Here are some examples of the types icons available in this archive:

Beautiful ships

We have now replaced the 64×64, 128×128, 256×256 renders with a single Renders archive containing 512×512 antialiased renders of all the models such as ships, drones and structures (note that we currently don’t have 512×512 variants of the tech 3 ships available and those images remain as 256×256 for the time being).

The renders are no longer split up by category and are just all in the same folder.

Here are a couple of renders:

Parting Words

In the near future we’re hoping that the type icons will be available through the image server on eveonline.com. When that happens you shouldn’t need to get the Types archive if you are building a website and can just link directly to us, saving yourself a bit of space and bandwidth. We’ll let you guys know when that happens.

I hope this new layout is convenient and helps you in developing awesome applications and websites for our favorite MMO.

Jon Bjarnason
Technical Director
EVE Online, CCP Games