Cheers! Sorry for being slow on the response here. Glad that you enjoyed the new video!
There's a lengthy writeup that accompanies it, if you'd like:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcengames/ai-war-ii-0/posts/17525611) I noticed that these ships have a lot of looping patterns where they fly and shoot. Is it possible to make them fly in the Y direction (perpendicular to the plane)?
The flying and shooting in the Y axis is indeed possible, yes. It's just visual fluff and doesn't mean anything, but it's part of the whole "my job is to lie to you" section of it.
2) Can you randomly spawn visual effects? For example, 30% of plasma damage recipients give off a shield blur effect. 15% of kinetic damage victims give off a scrap metal effect (sparks maybe). Same thing for the sound effects.
Regarding randomization of effects, that is actually already the case -- there are a number of explosion effects in place, and each of those has random bits in them to start with. So you get a variety of explosions, and I expect that will increase. For sound effects that will be much the same, yep.
Shots that are fired and shots that hit are all able to have their own effects as well, so you notice that the current ones give off orange sparks, but a plasma blast would not do that. These are also sub-randomizable in two different levels, so it's mainly a matter of how much time we have to work on this.
3) Can you give the planet effects? For example, a world showing burning effects, or a science-fiction like green gas.
It is possible, although right now the planets are drawn using one draw call via a very custom shader set developed by FORGE3D. Adding onto that is possible, but I have basically only two options with it.
Option one is adding more shader code to make things happen on the GPU; I've already done some of that, mainly to alter the effects some. But that's not really something I'm super comfortable with, just because I'm not as fluent in that language.
Option two is adding some form of particle effects or transparent "wrapper" or whatever else around the planet, but that has a high chance of looking bad. I've experimented with that sort of thing quite a bit for suns, but was unhappy with the results. One of the problems with this approach is that there's a whole lot of data that is being generated by the planet shader that _only_ exists on the GPU, and so it's impossible for me to know where things like landmasses are from the C# side of things. The massive parallel powerhouse that is even a cheap GPU knows, but that's it.
4) I don't much care for the asteroid ring. It reminds me of a sumo wrestling ring reminding me where the border is.
You can turn it off if you don't like it, but reminding you where the border is what it's sole purpose is, yep.
5) Can you randomly spawn background effects? For example, having a star twinkle every once in a great while is just a nice visual polish with very low graphic impact.
It's somewhat possible, depending on what the thing is. Bear in mind that this sort of thing usually gets missed by players in general, or they see it and start freaking out about what the significance of it is to gameplay.
But even more to the point, the skyboxes used here are actually not true skyboxes, but rather are projection cubes that are more efficient and which simulate things that are infinitely far away.
Given that, I can't accurately know where a star or any other piece of data is in the background relative to your camera viewport. So making an existing star twinkle would be really hard. Adding a new element that's like a shooting star or a star twinkle or whatever would be substantially more feasible.
I'm asking about random effects because I think that doing small polish items that don't affect thousands of items on the screen has the effect of bringing life to the scene that's playing out without bogging down the graphics card.
Where I can, I'm doing things like that, such as with the explosions and whatnot already. There's only been one shot type shown so far, and less variety in explosions than I'd prefer, but it's something I'm sensitive to in the gameplay environment. Sound effects are in some ways even more important to me when it comes to not having overly-repetitious sounds that become grating.
For the most part I'm going for variety in the actual actors and foreground bits rather than focusing on the more distant background, although there are a variety of planet designs of course.
I was also thinking about the relative size of something like a golem compared to the ships that we saw in the video. In my mind, I have images of golems inspired by the Kakurenbo short film, or maybe that film mixed with some of our earthly stone cultural sentient monoliths such as the moai statues, terra-cotta warriors, and some work from the Maya and Aztecs. There are lots of great stone monolith inspirations to draw from.
You should see some of the videos from the first campaign. The spirecraft in particular are freaking HUGE. I'm not sure exactly what the golems will look like, but to me I really like the variance that we came up with for the Zenith in SBR. That was partly based on the variance that goes all the way back to TZR and Phil's original golem art. I like the idea that the Zenith are more varied and don't conform to one precise style, which is a nice counterpoint to the more monolithic spire.
