CCP has recently published a Dev Blog detailing their continued commitment to improving the wonderful visual experience that is EVE online.
As they stated,
Revamping every* ship in EVE is an intense process, leveraging the entirety of our art team from concept artists to tech artists and programmers to QA. It takes extreme staff coordination and resource commitment, not to mention a lockout of publishing while the work is underway (lest an incomplete asset somehow make it into game without appropriate textures and shaders). Overall, this overhaul of every hull is oeuvre hell.
We’ve done it twice in the last six months….
The result of that research is “V5++,” a complete reworking and repacking of all ship texture maps into a new system which works with new shaders.
For more information, we encourage you to read the dev blog in full at the eve online website: http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/the-many-additions-of-v5plusplus/