Planetary Annihilation: Total Annihilation IN SPACE

[KingIsaacLinksr]

I want to just say that I agree with Misery, if you want to debate finer points of SC/SC2 and sequels then make a topic for that. PA is not SC, and it's NOTHING LIKE SC, it is however made by the people who made the SC1 engine, not by the people who designed the SC races or by the artist who made SC1 or SC2 (as you can clearly tell, PA doesn't have an art-style, it has models textured with flat color textures that have white "grunge" shading at polygon borders, that's so lame and lazy I was tempted to call them out on it on their forum.

This is the one thing I don't get about PA and would be a legit complaint by me: why was the art style just so....basic. When I saw the KS, I figured that artwork was a work in progress but instead it seems like it was the final form and that was it. Really? Not that I require pretty graphics all the time but something more than that would have been nice.

[eRe4s3r]

I want to just say that I agree with Misery, if you want to debate finer points of SC/SC2 and sequels then make a topic for that. PA is not SC, and it's NOTHING LIKE SC, it is however made by the people who made the SC1 engine, not by the people who designed the SC races or by the artist who made SC1 or SC2 (as you can clearly tell, PA doesn't have an art-style, it has models textured with flat color textures that have white "grunge" shading at polygon borders, that's so lame and lazy I was tempted to call them out on it on their forum.

This is the one thing I don't get about PA and would be a legit complaint by me: why was the art style just so....basic. When I saw the KS, I figured that artwork was a work in progress but instead it seems like it was the final form and that was it. Really? Not that I require pretty graphics all the time but something more than that would have been nice.

It's even more jarring when you know how this texture is made. I am not kidding when I say that this is LAZY. No honest artist would ever create something like that and call it done (or textured). polygon-unwrapping and outlining is not texturing. And literally all a grunge border at the polygon boundary is, is unwrapped polygons (which you can do automatically via tool) and then -> Draw outline with brush. I don't mind clean textures, but clean textures can have details, dirt and stuff on them. Games don't need visual fluff to the extreme, but PA looks nearly entirely untextured. Even the planets. (Lava etc.)

Maybe it's the "curse" of being an artist, but I find that even more unacceptable than the tons of GUI issues (like how double clicking on a "unit icon" does not select all units of a type, no you have to click on the unit model, even when zoomed out. (Argh!!!!!) ;/

[doctorfrog]

It's even more jarring when you know how this texture is made. I am not kidding when I say that this is LAZY. No honest artist would ever create something like that and call it done (or textured). polygon-unwrapping and outlining is not texturing. And literally all a grunge border at the polygon boundary is, is unwrapped polygons (which you can do automatically via tool) and then -> Draw outline with brush. I don't mind clean textures, but clean textures can have details, dirt and stuff on them. Games don't need visual fluff to the extreme, but PA looks nearly entirely untextured. Even the planets. (Lava etc.)

I'm not an artist by any stretch, and it doesn't bother me much, looking at screenshots and videos. It seems like a lot of the game is played zoomed out pretty far.  >D Then again, I don't intend to buy the game for a good long time, it's hard to be bothered by anything about it.

Anyway, how are you going to get dirt on a unit that's literally built and destroyed within about fifteen minutes? Hell, why even paint 'em? Just spray a big X on it, it'll be dead soon and we'll need to identify the corpse as one of ours.

[eRe4s3r]

It's even more jarring when you know how this texture is made. I am not kidding when I say that this is LAZY. No honest artist would ever create something like that and call it done (or textured). polygon-unwrapping and outlining is not texturing. And literally all a grunge border at the polygon boundary is, is unwrapped polygons (which you can do automatically via tool) and then -> Draw outline with brush. I don't mind clean textures, but clean textures can have details, dirt and stuff on them. Games don't need visual fluff to the extreme, but PA looks nearly entirely untextured. Even the planets. (Lava etc.)

I'm not an artist by any stretch, and it doesn't bother me much, looking at screenshots and videos. It seems like a lot of the game is played zoomed out pretty far.  >D Then again, I don't intend to buy the game for a good long time, it's hard to be bothered by anything about it.

Anyway, how are you going to get dirt on a unit that's literally built and destroyed within about fifteen minutes? Hell, why even paint 'em? Just spray a big X on it, it'll be dead soon and we'll need to identify the corpse as one of ours.

Hehe, well with that argument you might a well just release games untextured in the (actually kinda neat) greyscale look that AO + default shader gives you. ;p

But since I backed this game I just expected more.

[Wingflier]

I actually like the art style, but I'm assuming the reason it's so simplified is to save resources for the user. Obviously on a game of this (unparalleled) scale, I'm assuming they have to take every shortcut to put less of a load on a user's machine. When you consider that we're having to create "ultra low cap" settings for games with graphics like AI War, I don't think it should come as a surprise to anybody that the textures and art style of PA would be basic.

[eRe4s3r]

It actually makes zero difference to performance whether your model's texture is flatly colored or highly detailed, it takes the same amount of VRAM And when you have low-poly units because yes, that impacts performance, then it's imo pure laziness not to make proper textures to counter-balance that and give them something to tell them apart. End result is I can literally not tell any unit in PA apart. Everything a giant blur of 1 color with no definition.. I actually have to hover units to see the hint text to know what I am even selecting there.

And in RTS games style should never come before substance. Telling apart units in a fire-fight is vital...

[Wingflier]

Admittedly I know very little about this (what taxes your video hardware), that just seems like the most logical explanation to me.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

And usually its the CPU that's the bottleneck, not the GPU. Especially with that many units out on the field.

[Teal_Blue]

As of 09/12/2014 at 3:09PM - Planetary Annihilation thread has 33 pages and 23,633 views.
Think it's popular much?

[KingIsaacLinksr]

As of 09/12/2014 at 3:09PM - Planetary Annihilation thread has 33 pages and 23,633 views.
Think it's popular much?

And?....

(Doesn't see what relevance this has to the thread atm).

[Aklyon]

I'm only seeing 10 pages anyway.

[keith.lamothe]

Perhaps the other 23 encountered an asteroid in a dark alley.

[Mánagarmr]

This was posted 10 days ago on UberEnt forums:

Player: Brad, can we please get an answer on the questions about the server. I know it would alleviate strain on the servers. Are we looking at more than a week after release?

Brad: i don't know what you're talking about, actually. what's up?

Player: I mean offline/LAN/player hosted servers.

Brad: those are coming shortly after launch. lots of work, lots of preparing, lots of worrying about edge cases still.

So at least they haven't backed off on their promise even though I feel it kinda strange that they didn't include it in the release.

[eRe4s3r]

Ugh... this game annoys the holy crap out of me

50 minutes play-time, this is what my ENEMY AI built (me + ai vs 2 AI's, all on "Normal" whatever that means) Sidenote: my AI was of the "wtf I pwn you" kind, as it was nearly as powerful as I was it just didn't go orbital for some reason, and didn't go tier 2 either. But it built orbital defense cannons everywhere.



And this is what happens when you try to move a big formation of units to there (fps dips below 10) and after the AI died it took another 10 minutes for ALL UNITS TO ACTUALLY GET THERE.



So this released right? This isn't some in-side joke and we are still playing Alpha, right?

Gah!

[doctorfrog]

I'm not experienced with this game yet, can you tell me what about those pictures upset you?

also: I miss mini-maps. 

edit: if you mean "this is all the AI built and then they just died," then lol