The best easiest ways to make the game look better

1. A better skybox. Not a real picture, but one that at least has whitish stars and a darkish background. Yellow-green stars and blue background looks ****. Don't make it just black and white stars. Add some crisp lookin and colorful nebulae to it.

2. Make distances closer to those of a real star system. To give you an idea:

Diameter of Earth: 1
Diameter of the moon: .27
Distance from planets to the sun: 4544 --- 463,500
Diameter of gas giants: 3.9 --- 11

They don't need to be exactly that, but even if you divided the bigger numbers by 3, those huge distances would really give an "epic" feel.

Completely agree on the skybox thing, @superouman's skybox mod is soooooo much better compared to the default

Travel time from Earth to Mars, 6-9 months?

Just make spaceships faster..?

i like the default actualy

Travel time of light from Earth to Mars: 4 minutes to 24 minutes

Couple hours seems reasonable to me with save/load, although it would bust some computers. Just play on single planet systems.

P.S. A plane goes around the Earth in 44 hours. A hummingbird goes around the planet in 12 seconds or so. We are talking ratios up in this bitch and not whether speeds are realistic.

And in Star Wars they go between SOLAR SYSTEMS in a matter of minutes and no one gives a **** because it looks cool and fits into the story.

Sounds like you guys are just afraid of DEXTREEM CHANGES because you don't have the imagination to understand how they would make the game better. So you invent fake objections like "it would take to long to go between planets".

Sorry, I thought you were going for realism, since that was one of your arguments:
"2. Make distances closer to those of a real star system."

If you had your way, the game would probably have 8 bit graphics and sound

Did you ever take a look at how heavy the color banding/ dithering at that background is? I could understand that somebody does like the coloring---but the actual background?! No way!

It's not an argument. I'm saying that that's what I want. Because it looks awesomer than a baby toy solar system.

And if I was born in a little baby solar system maybe I would think that was cool, but I don't. That's just the way she goes.

I'm not sure that would be playable. This site really neatly shows the true scale of our solar system:
http://www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com/

Cool website. Why not playable?

Have you scrolled from Earth to Mars? I mean with your scroll button? It takes forever, especially given the tiny sizes (to scale!) of the planets on that website..

Anyway, my point is that you need to have distances that are way less than the real distances. Otherwise travel time would take very long and all of the planets would be reeeeaaaally tiny in the solar system view in PA. You wouldn't be able to see the other planets from your home planet for example. Well, as a tiny dot maybe, just like how Jupiter and Mars look like just another star from here on Earth.

The current solar system graphics remind of me a baby's toy mobile. Definitely not awesomesauce.

for a second, I thought you meant the hummingbird animal and that you lived somewhere with freak hummingbirds that can travel around the planet in 12 seconds.

1st one is honestly up to debate, I like the default just as much as the costum skybox.

2nd Longer distances make travel time legitimate sin. If you mean like "Space" then yea make them larger but be sure that the "Speed" isn't changed. Can be hell trying to break a player that has 3 mins to prep for your invasion.

wow I just installed @superouman's skybox mod and I just jizzed my pants.. wow!

my icons make the game look better

@jamesw100 technically you can already accomplish this, but only with some elbow grease (and also some of your computer's ......now mix them together. EWWW! what d'you do that for?!)

what I mean by this is first add superouman's Skybox mod in PAMM.

then add cola colin's unit shrinking mod to make the planets bigger by comparison (warning! this breaks teleporters)

then edit the game files to allow yourself the creation of huge-*** planets and gaz giants, maybe change that of the sun as well. Guide on how to do that here : https://forums.uberent.com/members/cola_colin.5269/

then create your own system...... here's where the computer elbow grease comes in..... you need a ton of RAM, a good cpu, and a good graphic card to do this with reasonable results.

here's me playing with someone on a 3000 :


Big planets cost alot more RAM then a ton of small ones. (you won't be overdoing it with 64 gigabytes if generating a system including a 6600 Radius planet (here's one such planet :


, a graphic card with 12GB of dedicated ram wouldn't go astray as it would allow you to display all of this on screen. All of the black patches I get are from texture not loaded on screen because I only have 1Gb of ram.)


admitedly an UBER take on this would yield much better results and be much appreciated.

the scale as is in this game is very underwhelming.