This month marks the arrival of EVE Online's new character creation system with the deployment of the final phase of the Incursion expansion. The new character creation system came with more than a few challenges on how best to handle resources, render images and prevent any impact to server or game performance. Luckily, CCP has come up with a way to allow fast rendering of the new portraits in high quality server side using the web-based image server to prevent game performance and server issues.

There is one other item of note in the blog. Once the new system deploys, players will have to recreate their character portrait using the new system. So if you've grown sentimentally attached to your current portrait, you might want to log in and capture it before the new system goes live and they are no longer available.

The next phase of the Incursion expansion is scheduled to deploy on January 18th, 2011.

Source
EVE Dev Blog