Needs a banana for scale... (Design document update 9)

[Draco18s]

That last screenshot looks gorgeous, but the planet looks stretched towards the left oddly.

[Mánagarmr]

I'm not sure what a minimap accomplishes that can't simply be accomplished by a "zoom out max" button that gives you an overview of the system with your glorious tactical icons. Do we really need to see the map all the time? I guess playtesting comes in to this, but I've never felt I really need the minimap.

[PokerChen]

1) Planets in the asset store look nice and I'd agree on how much unnecessary work it is to reinvent the wheel, though I'm not sure how much you can mod them. From a player perspective, to convince them that the planet has billions of people living on the planet they'd expect to see, say, global traffic in "low-orbits" and night-side lights. It something that Sins did a bit (plus except for the fact that the actual interplanetary trade ships took up CPU), and Stellaris never did (and was pinged for it as a minor malus).

2) Minimaps probably do not need to be on screen IMO, given Homeworld standards of spacebar == switch views. I'm imagining a combination of Sins and Homeworld where you'd be able to get from closest planet view to furthest system view within ~3 seconds, and then switch over the galaxy view as in HW/AI War Classic.
If we'd like a schematic minimap nonetheless, I'd probably want the galaxy view in my minimap about 70% of the time, and system view 30% (with a toggle). We are talking about 3 layers of effective abstraction: planet-system-galaxy.

[Pumpkin]

Good things, overall. One more time, I think specific topics might be divided into their own threads. Minimap stuff, etc.

I first thought the planet was actually in the middle of the map and would form a sort of obstacle (Sins do that, IIRC), but as you precised later, it's still a background thing, just like in AIWC. Phew.

I'm looking forward that video thing.

That last screenshot looks gorgeous, but the planet looks stretched towards the left oddly.

That's what I thought before I realize the image was larger than the forum. You can pan to see that the planet is round.

[eRe4s3r]

That last screenshot looks gorgeous, but the planet looks stretched towards the left oddly.

The projection method used causes this + the odd sectioning of the shot, in gameplay you would never be able to slant the camera downwards like that to frame the planet that oddly ;p

I have to bring something else up, NLIPS (Non linear inverse perspective scaling)
Any thought upon that x4000 ?

When zoomed out, small units would be extremely tiny next to big units (which looks nice, but makes selecting them impossible), to accommodate this games like Homeworld projected the scale of smaller ships up the further you are zoomed out. (hence inverse scaling) which resulted in "selection" ability at all zoom levels. Visually nlips off obviously looks better, but gameplay wise I never considered NLIPS something I can live without in Homeworld 2....

aside that instantly the immediate thing I notice, there needs to be rim-shader on those asteroids and some "dust" volume around them that gives a smooth transition (visually) of bg to asteroids (which are not visual BG). Anyhow

Until we see effects and ships, I don't really know what else to write It looks OK, but making space look nice isn't the hardest challenge ever, making ships and things in space look like they belong there... well be sure to also take a look at Everspace for ideas

[Vyndicu]

I'm not sure what a minimap accomplishes that can't simply be accomplished by a "zoom out max" button that gives you an overview of the system with your glorious tactical icons. Do we really need to see the map all the time? I guess playtesting comes in to this, but I've never felt I really need the minimap.

Sometime I would have more than one things going on and I could miss a critical warp attack.

It is easier to glance at a solar system mini-map and recognize trouble spots and take care of them. Rather than press an unusual hotkey that only exist in AI war classic to see a color change on the AI war classic wormhole hole. At least people can immediate understand "red stop sign" and don't have to read stop. At least that is the effect I am going for.

[x4000]

It's funny that you bring up NLIPS, eRe4s3r -- that is something I'd like to do instead of far zoom icons, potentially.  We shall see if that's feasible at all, but I want to do a feasibility test at least.  A lot more detail can be crammed in that way, and there's less of a disconnect between the zoomed-out and zoomed-in views that way.  In any case, there are a number of things I'm experimenting with in that area.

Regarding progress today, it's been a bit on the slow side.  I've been quite unhappy with how certain techniques have turned out for ships, from a mix of performance (draw call usage) and visual end effect.  It's getting closer, but I've been doing a ton of stuff with custom shaders and other tools in order to get the draw calls as low as possible while still doing something with the maximum detail and quality.

That's simply something that is taking a bit of experimenting, but I think I'm on the right track now.  I thought I had that closer to worked out last night, at least for a first pass look at things that I could show you, but it just wasn't something that gave the feel that I wanted, even though it looked pretty nifty (in motion in particular, since it used a lot of heavy rim lighting that kind of accidentally recreated a sense of specular lighting in an unlit shader, heh).  A freaking cool effect, but not something I feel like would be as clear as I want, etc.

[TechSY730]

Given some of those screen shots, will we have the option of a "free camera" mode?

Could be great for getting epic screenshots.

[x4000]

Probably, yeah.  These shots were all taken with the actual game camera, incidentally.  It folds forward when you zoom down enough, rather than just zooming in infinitely close on nothing.  So you can already get some pretty epic shots (I'd think) without actually needing a different camera.