Patch notes for Quantum Rise 1.0.3, released 11 December 2008

CRITICAL

We are changing the way the patcher behaves. Previously, if the patcher encountered locked files while patching it would suggest that you reboot to complete the patching (but allow you to cancel the reboot, in case you wanted to do something else before rebooting). Now it insists on a reboot before you continue. People will still have the option to close other programs before pressing the OK button to start the reboot. There were problems with locked files, reboot requests and Vista. That has now been fixed and should work normally on both XP and Vista.
The client will now check files and folders before starting the patching process. Previously, if it found extra files it would automatically move them to a temporary folder before continuing. Now it will suggest rebooting to complete patching (because these might be patch files for a pending reboot) or suggest that you should manually remove the extra files.
CHANGES

Need for Speed

In our continuing efforts to improve fleet fights, we have made various improvements that have resulted in a much better overall performance. CCP Atlas details these changes in The EVE Client - A Love Story.
We have made various performance improvements to UI rendering in the graphics engine.
Turrets and turret effects now work in the same way for both the Classic and Premium clients. A turret is no longer loaded into a scene unless it is either fired at you or you are “looking at” the owner’s ship. Now, iff you disable turret effects you will only see the turret models of your own ship or any ship that you are explicitly look at. This reduces the loading time of scenes with a large number of turret ships substantially and increases the framerate per second on such scenes dramatically in Premium but has no effect on the Classic client. If you disable turrets, any turret model that is already in the scene will continue to be there. However, warping away and back again will clean out turret models.
Sentry gun turrets will also behave in the same manner as ship turrets. They will not appear unless you are looking at them or unless they are firing on you.
Drone models can now be disabled. Disabling the models has an incredible impact in loading up heavy scenes on both the Classic and Premium clients. The impact on the framerate per second once the scene is loaded will only be measurable if your camera is zoomed in far enough for the drones to resolve into models. When drone models are set to disabled then the turrets are automatically also set to disabled.
You can now disable camera shaking which both disables camera shake when missiles hit and when you're in warp.
You can now disable ship explosions. Ship explosions had the ability to add heavy load in major fleet engagements and can now be completely turned off.
Tactical notifications can now be disabled. Warp scrambling messages and self destruct are two examples of these notifications. Please note that these notifications will still display if it is your ship which is being affected.
We have added a new option called “Hide all brackets” which is the inverse of the existing “Show all brackets” and will function in the same way. The two options are mutually exclusive so activating one will disable the other. This is a new and easier way to disable brackets.
Graphics General

We discovered that certain memory re-allocation behavior gave bad performance on Windows XP. We switched from regular memory heaps to low fragmentation heaps, which gave a tremendous boost to model loading on Windows XP. This change had no effect on Windows Vista, but the behavior on Vista both before and after is much better than on XP. Players who use Windows 2000 as an operating system must upgrade to Service Pack 4 (SP4) in order to connect to Tranquility since low fragmentation heaps are only available in Windows 2000 SP4 and above. It should also be noted that we no longer officially provide support for Windows 2000. The only supported operating systems for Windows are XP and Vista.
Bracket loading in heavy scenes has been substantially improved.
FIXES

Graphics General

A memory leak has been identified and fixed resulting in a much smoother performance overall.
Under certain conditions the graphics engine would find objects that did not exist in the scene anymore. This has now been fixed and will no longer result in performance degradation.
Found and fixed an issue where the graphics engine DLL could not be loaded on certain older hardware
Miscellaneous

An error will no longer be generated when jumping between two clones which both have implants.
Exploit Fixes

Several exploits have been fixed making New Eden a better place for everyone.

Technical

* Stackless Python has been upgraded from version 2.5.1 to version 2.5.2.

To quote the Python 2.5.2 release announcement: "This is the second bug fix release of Python 2.5. Python 2.5 is now in bug fix-only mode; no new features are being added. According to the release notes, over 100 bugs and patches have been addressed since Python 2.5.1, many of them improving the stability of the interpreter, and improving its portability."

For more information on Stackless Python and EVE, please read this Dev Blog.

Ships & Modules

* Ships with more modules fitted then the slot layout allows will no longer be able to undock. This can happen if the slot layout is balanced in a release and the ship is fully fitted during the deployment downtime. Simply unfitting the excess modules will allow the ship to undock again.

New Player Experience and User Interface

* The insurance, repair shop, medical and bounty station services have been transformed into windows to allow for welcome pages.

Graphics – General

* In an effort to prepare for future graphics projects we are collecting information about graphics cards. This will allow us to better target the hardware of EVE's player base.

Installer, Updates and Patches

* Unicode characters are now supported in the name of the installation folder.

* The uninstaller will now ask if you also wish to remove the settings and cache folders and all client hotfixes that have been installed.

Miscellaneous

* Multiple bug fixes were made to our GM tools and some new features implemented to improve our customer support.

FIXES

Ships

* Combat Recon ships are now able to use acceleration gates that allow Force Recon ships.

Modules

* An error message should now display when you try to activate a cynosural field while traveling faster than 500 m/s.

* Activation duration and the Capacitor usage of Sensor Boosters, Tracking Computers and Remote Sensor boosters have been reduced.

Drones

* Faction drones have been added as variations of other drones

Player Owned Structures, Outposts and Stations

* Structures requiring sovereignty to be onlined now require sovereignty or they will be offlined, thus if the sovereignty is lost these structures will become offline.

* Structures that can be anchored inside a Control Tower force field such as assembly arrays will no longer become incapacitated when damaged into structure.

Character Creation and New Player Experience

* A message asking if you would like to continue at the end of the beginner tutorial "Aurora: Crime and Punishment" has been removed, since it's the end of the tutorial and you could not continue if you wanted to.

* An issue has been fixed where players were not automatically warped during the New Character Tutorial if they previously cancelled it and restarted the client while in a station.

NPCs

* Some NPC drones did not have a model in the premium client, this has now been fixed. The following NPC drones where affected: Spider Drone I, Spider Drone II, Mammon Drone, Asmodeus Drone, Beelzbub Drone, Belphegor Drone, Dragonfly Drone, Incubus Drone, Moth Drone, Scorpionfly Drone, Tarantula Drone and Termite Drone.

* Khanid Rookie now has proper tracking.

* The Amarr Navy Apocalypse has had its rate of fire reduced and damage increased to stop the laser effect from being a continuous beam.

Agents & Missions

* The mission "Vitoc Vector" has been fixed and re-enabled.

* The overseer structure from the mission "Angel Extravaganza" has been removed and the mission re-enabled.

* Rogue Drone exploration sites now properly drop when the first hacking attempt is successful.

Science and Industry

* A server side exception that cropped up when installing blueprints into mobile laboratories for copying has been fixed.

* The base manufacturing time of the warp disrupt probes and bombs has been increased to be in line with other charge type manufacturing.

* The base research and manufacturing times of the shield boost amplifier I blueprint have been changed to be more in line with other modules.

* The Ares Oscillator component manufacturing requirement has been reduced to be in line with other ships of the same class.

* The Helios photon microprocessor manufacturing requirement has been reduced to be in line with other ships of the same class.

* Laser Sensor Clusters components have been correctly renamed to Ladar Sensor Clusters.

* A typo in the item Golden Mykoserocin has been fixed

* Vernillion Mykoserocin has been correctly renamed to Vermilion Mykoserocin

Market & Contracts

* It is now possible to add market groups to the quickbar in the market window.

* The "View Market Details" right click option should now always open the market details tab instead of the last selected tab.

* Items and folders in the market quickbar should now be sorted alphabetically.

* An issue with adding items to the market quickbar overwriting already added items has been resolved.

* It is now possible to filter market orders by CPU usage, trained skills and min/max deviation from market average price.

* Market filters set in the settings tab can now be toggled on/off in the details tab for sell/buy orders.

Corporation & Alliance

* Added new operations filters to adverts; Logistics, Mercenaries, Role-playing, Trade.

* New filters for time zones.

* Corporations not in alliances are now listed as "none" rather than "unknown".

* "Days" has been changed into "Duration" for the duration of the advert.

* Min and max corp. members filter has been cleared up.

Graphics - General

* An issue where planets and moons caused a drop in frames per second rendering has been resolved.

* The mysterious "Star in the North" that has been baffling everyone with its mysteriousness has now suddenly and mysteriously disappeared.

* The ship jump animation is now also played in the solar system ships are jumping out of.

* Generating character portraits should now be working correctly.

* The 1152×864 resolution has been added back to the client, it is still broken on some machines but since it works on some we decided to put it back.

* Changing display adapters while in space should no longer crash the client or cause all windows to become blank.

* Character portrait rendering was becoming more erratic the more portraits where rendered, this issue should now be fixed.

* Portrait rendering has been improved to invalidate cached method call files it can no longer use; this should in turn reduce the size of the cache folder in some cases.

Graphics - Premium Graphics Content

* The station interior of Yulai IX - CONCORD Bureau in the Premium client was of Caldari design, the interior has now been redecorated in Gallente high fashion.

User Interface

* The jump tab in the capital navigation tool should now be working for characters that are not in an alliance.

* Moon icons should now be displayed in space regardless of distance.

* Operating system names instead of numbers are now displayed in the OS select menu when creating technical petitions.

* A grammar error was corrected in the ESC menu -> info window settings.

* The client should no longer crash while using the in game profiler (Alt+Ctrl+Shift+m).

* The scanner button in the HUD should now close the scanner window if it is already open.

* The ship cargo button in the HUD should now close the cargo hold window if it is already open.

* The fleet member list should now update when the structure of the fleet changes, players moved or invited, squads/wings moved or renamed etc.

* The right click option Add Bounty should now work when right clicking player characters.

* The error preventing the Capital ship navigation window from being closed has been resolved.

* We have added a right click menu option to the character sheet to allow you to view the market details of skills.

Mac

* Added ability to turn on tracing similar to existing Linux functionality, so that Mac ISD Bug Hunter volunteers and normal users willing to help out track down problems, can provide extra useful information when using the bug report system.

* Several stability issues were fixed, resulting in better client stability and experience for everyone.

* Fixed the graphics for the Cargo Capacity indicator.

* Fixed an issue where the in-game clock would start accelerating out of control resulting in forced client restart and destruction the client settings.

Localized Clients

* The Remove Advert dialog box should now be translated to German.

* The "Show only available" text in the lower right corner of the market window should no longer be out of bounds in the German client.

* A client side exception that popped up when receiving mail in a localized client has been fixed.

Miscellaneous

* Jump clones can now be installed at NPC stations again, provided that standing requirements are met.

* Solar systems will no longer be unloaded after 8 hours of inactivity; they will instead remain loaded until the next server downtime.

* A server side exception that occurred when plotting a route to an unreachable solar system has been fixed.

* A client side exception to do with scroll bars in some windows has now been fixed.

* A server side exception to do with missiles when they impact has been fixed.

* Rating petitions should no longer create a duplicate petition.

* Alert mails sent out by the server for monitoring purposes have been causing excessive load and have thus been reviewed, mails deemed unnecessary have been stopped.

* LogServer logging and formatting has been improved to provide even more useful information.

EXPLOIT FIXES

* Several exploit issues have been fixed, making EVE a better world to live in for us all.