CCP has published another blog entry about the new character creator system that will be implemented with the last part of EVE Online's Incursion expansion this month. Players will have much more control and detail when making new characters (as seen above). These hi-res images will replace the current character portraits, meaning that all players will have to make new ones.

If you're insterested in saving your current portrait in hi-res, EVE is urging players to log in and use the capture portrait option while it still exists. Also, to avoid slowing down your computer, EVE has come up with a simple system to handle so many hi-res images:

"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."

Head on over to EVE Online's official site for more detailed information on the new Character Creator and Portrait system.

The New Year is always a rather emotional time for me. While a brand new year is when most people decide to make big changes in their lives, it also happens to be a time when most people realize that they're just too lazy, and thus continues the circle of life. As for me, I had two big gaming resolutions coming into this year: one, to give more meaningful coverage to the deserving MMOs, and two, to stop trolling so much in my online gaming (I'm sorry if you've ever met me in League of Legends). Of course, it should come as no surprise that a day later I was forced (forced, I tell you!) to break my second resolution during a session of late-night gaming angst, so this pretty much leaves me with one solid resolution. What is surprising, however, is just how easy it is to stick with my first resolution, and so I thought I'd share my thoughts on an MMO has been hogging a fair amount of my attention over the past month or so: Perpetuum.

CCP has posted the final installment of its "Celebrating the Creative Player" blog series for 2010, and the most noteworthy addition is a video showcasing the new character creator tool that will be coming with Incursion 1.1 in January 2011.

The video shows the creation processs for both male and female characters. Check out the video after the jump to see what you will be able to do in EVE Online next month.

The EVE Online contests keep coming! CCP asked players yesterday to vote by Jan. 10 for their favorite entry in J!NX's T-shirt design contest. Now the team is asking players to help narrow down the field in the Create a Starship contest.

There are currently 40 semi-finalists in the Create a Starship contest, and CCP needs the public to whittle it down to 20. From there, the CCP Art Team will select the winners. Voting is open until Jan. 12, so head over and pick your favorite starship!

CCP has made a handful of noteworthy EVE Online news announcements as we prepare to head into the New Year. Here's the rundown:

• Hjalti Daníelsson, aka CCP Abraxas, has published the final chronicle for the foreseeable future while the team works to flesh out the lore and make it mesh with the gameplay. It's called "The Book of Emptiness, Part Two."
• The voting for J!NX's EVE T-shirt design contest has begun. Cast your vote for your favorite entry out of 85 designs. The polls close on Jan. 10, 2011.
• CCP Zymurgist will be hosting an in-game New Year Market in Amarr, Dodixie, and Rens on Jan. 9, 2011 beginning at 19:00 UTC. Celebrate the New Year with gift giving, trading and more!

EVE Online Technical Director Jon Bjarnason just published an informative blog entry outlining the improvements that are coming to the Contracts system. The new Contract search feature is in beta testing on the Singularity test server, which means you can turn it off for the time being or play around with it and provide feedback to help CCP squash any bugs. The feature should go live on Tranquility as part of the main Incursion release in January.

Bjarnason explains how the new system will let you search through public contracts and also provides a list of other contract-related features and tweaks that have been added in response to player feedback. Check out his blog entry for all the details.

It's almost time! The halls are decked, the stockings hung with care, and you've probably got some time off from work or school. It's the perfect time to get in some extra gaming, and why wouldn't you? Almost every MMO is running an in-game holiday event. With all the new zones, special items and festive quests, it's pretty much a digital winter wonderland. So to make things a little easier, we've compiled a list of in-game holiday events to help you narrow down which game to play!

Looking to get your creative juices flowing this holiday season? You're in luck because there's still time to take advantage of the J!NX design your dream EVE T-shirt contest. You still have until December 24 to sumbit your design. Public voting will begin on December 17 and runs until January 10.

Head on over to the official contest page for full details on how to get your T-shirt made!

In the newest EVE Online dev blog, CCP Optimal announces that a newly designed NeoCom will be implemented in the game to increase customizability for pilots and make the growing number of EVE features easily accessible.

The beta version of the new NeoCom should be on the test server before Christmas and is scheduled to hit Tranquility as part of the main Incursion release on Jan. 18, 2011. For more details on the NeoCom revamp, check out Optimal's dev blog entry on the official site.

The second installment of EVE Online's Incursion expansion was originally scheduled to launch tomorrow, Dec. 14, but CCP has found it necessary to push the deployment back 24 hours to ensure a smooth delivery. So what happened? As you can see in the above picture, one of the blades for the Singularity test server was completely fried due to a short circuit, which meant that Singularity needed to shut down for several hours for repairs. Considering the test server was unavailable prior to the launch of a major patch, CCP decided it would be best to push back the launch. According to the post, this was just a contributing factor in their decision.

Incursion 1.0.1 is now scheduled for deployment on December 15 from 10:00-15:30 UTC. This is the patch that will remove learning skills from the game. You can read the patch notes for more details. As for the final portion of the Incursion expansion, the Incarna Character Creator will be implemented in mid-January 2011, followed a week later by the Sansha Incursions.