General Category > Stars Beyond Reach Beta Discussion
Rece Identity, Cartoon Videos, Marketing, Player Habits, Immersion
crazyroosterman:
--- Quote from: x4000 on September 30, 2015, 07:55:24 pm ---Yep, it all makes sense, but bear in mind this is the 11th hour and there's not time to change any of that anyhow. Those sort of art concerns are things that take months to implement, literally. A few specific notes:
1. With the roads, those are subtle enough to not be garish and overwhelming. We had a lot of experimentation with different things, and this was what looked best, which was ultimately the deciding factor.
2. In terms of racial tinting and whatnot, that sounds good in theory, but a big problem we had for a while was players being able to tell the 70+ various buildings apart. These are citybuilder problems that are common; 4X games don't usually run afoul of this because they don't have the volume of buildings we do. You've only seen act 1, which is less than 1/5th of the buildings I'd say. Anyway, so we use color as well as shape to differentiate buildings by function. Trying to do that AND racial tinting means that one or the other wins out and in general also makes for conflicting color palettes at various points. We went with the somewhat neutral road backgrounds based on those providing a bit of a racial feeling without it overwhelming the more-important-functionally-speaking colors that help players in a citybuilding sense.
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hey I was just wondering why the race persificly landers were changed to everyman landers?(same for every race)
gnosis:
--- Quote from: x4000 on September 30, 2015, 07:55:24 pm ---Yep, it all makes sense, but bear in mind this is the 11th hour and there's not time to change any of that anyhow. Those sort of art concerns are things that take months to implement, literally. A few specific notes:
1. With the roads, those are subtle enough to not be garish and overwhelming. We had a lot of experimentation with different things, and this was what looked best, which was ultimately the deciding factor.
2. In terms of racial tinting and whatnot, that sounds good in theory, but a big problem we had for a while was players being able to tell the 70+ various buildings apart. These are citybuilder problems that are common; 4X games don't usually run afoul of this because they don't have the volume of buildings we do. You've only seen act 1, which is less than 1/5th of the buildings I'd say. Anyway, so we use color as well as shape to differentiate buildings by function. Trying to do that AND racial tinting means that one or the other wins out and in general also makes for conflicting color palettes at various points. We went with the somewhat neutral road backgrounds based on those providing a bit of a racial feeling without it overwhelming the more-important-functionally-speaking colors that help players in a citybuilding sense.
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Yes I agree completely about the 11th hour.
As far as colors are concerned: you could use masking and apply the color to some parts of each building. I'm sure you're familiar with that technique. Oh well perhaps in the future.
x4000:
We completely redid the lander in every way, making it into one giant building instead of a loose collection of buildings. We thus had to redo it from scratch in modeling, painting, etc. Overall about 2.5 solid weeks of artist hours. Going through the painting process again 8x was just way too expensive, and there were other things that would look nicer. Plus, why would just those buildings have a color difference? Etc.
In terms of the coloring of just parts of the building, that can be done, but it gets into the color clashing I was talking about. Also it gets into issues of having an extra draw call per building, or at least an extra index in batched draw calls, which will affect the framerate if done enough. Probably not a killer since we're just talking about player buildings, but it is always a consideration.
There's also the thing that you never have two sets of player buildings around at once, so there's no possibility of confusing one for another. That said, it's a fair point on there. Cath is nearing the end of her current workload, so potentially at least mocking something up there might be good. I'll run it past her.
crazyroosterman:
--- Quote from: x4000 on September 30, 2015, 08:19:50 pm ---We completely redid the lander in every way, making it into one giant building instead of a loose collection of buildings. We thus had to redo it from scratch in modeling, painting, etc. Overall about 2.5 solid weeks of artist hours. Going through the painting process again 8x was just way too expensive, and there were other things that would look nicer. Plus, why would just those buildings have a color difference? Etc.
In terms of the coloring of just parts of the building, that can be done, but it gets into the color clashing I was talking about. Also it gets into issues of having an extra draw call per building, or at least an extra index in batched draw calls, which will affect the framerate if done enough. Probably not a killer since we're just talking about player buildings, but it is always a consideration.
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that's unfortunate but understandable if only money wasn't a thing you needed to worry about .sigh. I really did love the way those landers looked but though there's more important things to focus on I guess.
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