Aesthetics thread

Whilst the mechanics of the game are the most important aspect by far, aesthetics help to create a sense of immersion and provide character. It's the aesthetic qualities of a game that can often raise it from a good game into a legendary game. It's the little touches and so on that people remember nostalgically years down the line, so I thought it would be worthwhile to have a thread devoted to ideas of this nature.

One thing that I would love to see is units flying to bits under certain conditions, a well-loved feature of TA that was sadly missing from SupCom.

Also, planes doing acrobatics like TA (and also sadly not SupCom).

There are bound to be some great ideas out there, no doubt many of which are more original than my "make it like TA" suggestions.

So any ideas for graphical, sound-based or other effects, please share them.

'twas in SupCom. Both of them.

I'd very much like it if it became three-for-three.

There's certainly no barrel-rolling of aircraft in SupCom, but you've made me unsure about the exploding parts. I'll check later. Either way, they definitely don't have the chunky, chaotic feeling of things exploding in TA.

Just so this doesn't stay focused on copying things from TA, here a few more things that could be considered under this subject:

Commander gating: a violent explosion? A Star Trek-style materialisation? A hypercube forming from the terrain before opening to deposit the commander?

Water: waves? Impact splashes? Ship wakes?

Terrain: smoking volcanoes? Pipes on metal worlds that can rupture under fire and spray out steam?

I want to see volumetric smoke/clouds, though somehow I doubt this will be doable in real time on PA scale without supercomputers :<

if it looks like the trailer, I will be more than happy with it
i love the look, the small lights covering the buildings, hard edges, everything ^^

i'd love to have shell ejection for ballistic weapons, since it's purely visual it could probably be done by the client side, and the shells could fade away after some time.
or they come out glowing and burn away.

Another thing I'd like to see: a unit that is a cube whilst it is being built, but when completed it folds out into a bot of some description.

Guess who wrote the flying bits code in TA?

Elijah and I were talking about some cool physics stuff for PA yesterday

Would'nt it be fun if you were focusing on the battle on the planet itself while you suddenly see the wreckage of your just-launched, expensive sattelite you just launched plummit into the ground, because of a hostile incoming armada? ^^

How about a more gradual transformation from a fully coloured unit to a burnt out piece of wreckage.

Persistent wreckage is a fantastic feature, but I always found the sudden change a bit jarring. Perhaps a ring of flames sweeping across the coloured surface leaving the burnt surface behind it...

This is very encouraging.

You seem to have the essence of what's right for this game in a way that nobody else could. Not to disparage Chris Taylor at all, he was of course a major part of making my two favourite games ever, but it was very sad to see SupCom 2 derailed by what I assume were very largely economic concerns.

I didn't think we'd get another worthwhile RTS, and the fact that the man who wrote so much of the integral features of TA and SupCom is making the game he wants to see unconstrained by bean-counting publishers, fills me with a warm fuzziness that I never expected would happen.

Mexican wave for Mr Mavor please!

WWWWWWwwwww

Commanders may not gate anymore in PA. In the concept pitch video it arrives at the planet by rocket.

Me myself would like to see the commander arrive like a astroid falling to the surface leaving a small impact crater (possibly in some sort of pod, or by itself if it has some sort of rockets built in to slow the decent at the last minute).

I loved the planes in TA. What I'd really love to see is planes flying in 3d, going up and down to avoid other aircraft and actually dogfighting in the skies instead of just going headlong at each other, launching missiles, and then fly through one another.

Proper dogfights are hardly ever seen in RTS games but it looks so much more awesome!

Another one that'd be really hard but probably really cool as well, is bots fighting on with parts missing. If you don't feel pain, there's no need to stop fighting just because you lost an arm or a leg.

There's a gun effect that I think would also be very nice. I've used my considerable graphic design skills to demonstrate what would be tricky to put into words, please see the below image. The electrical points would fire a beam between them, and this would create a ball of plasma or similar sci-fi handwavium. Once the ball reaches a certain size, the mirror behind it focusses the ball into a solid, hitscan-type beam that lasts for maybe half a second.

This would have a use on a support unit similar to the Sumo from TA or the Percival from FA. Very slow reload time, and perhaps up to a second charging time from the point of acquiring its target, this causes a lot of front-loaded damage but the slow reload means it is defenceless against fast-moving units en masse. I'm thinking longer range than any direct combat unit, but lower range than mobile artillery or dedicated sniper units.

If my skilful diagram doesn't make it clear enough, it would be a similar weapon to the beam weapon that Combat Girl has in SMNC.

It would need approriate sound effects, I'm picturing an electrical crackle, rising in pitch before a very bassy discharging noise (like a pure bass note, no distortion or harshness to it).

*CrrgrggrggrgrgrzgrzgzrgzzzzgrzgzrzzzzzzzZZZZZZAAAAAAAAP*

I hope for actual paradrops, asteroids and unit cannons are cool, but nothing compared to a good ol' airdrop, something like seen in the first UEF mission in SupCom 2, but not just beaming them down, actually dropping the units

Eukanuba, you should really check out the BlackOps mods, we've come up with some crazy weapons over the years, in particular I think you'd like the Speacial Weapons Disruptor unit.

Mike

I've given BlackOps a couple of goes, it's really good but not knowing the unit interactions and so on kind of intimidates me into not playing it.

As for the commander gating, could they not arrive in a drop-pod that impacts leaving a huge smoking creator? Or if they gate in, I do like the explosion that they appear in, nothing says "I have arrived" like smoking ruins.

Also, something that was missing from supreme commander was the more urban/metal maps of the TA era. There should be battles fought in wining streets of long abandoned cities, or in the very cold-grey resource filled expanses of large industrial arreas (ala metal-maps)

I think it's a really interesting direction that they're taking with PA. There are several things from the concept videos and pictures that suggest to me that they are maybe trying to reduce the apparent level of tech. Though they also state that the robots use, and are indeed themselves, super-refined technology, perfected over millennia. So a little contradictory IMO, but I really have based that only on what I have seen and heard.

I mean we're looking at the removal of shields for starters. We've been talking about rudimentary space travel (on the forums at least), mainly because in the concepts we're seeing rockets and transports rather than slip space and warp drives. It's pretty rudimentary and TBH, I quite like that idea. It's reflective of a race of killer robots whose main purpose is not space combat, but to spread from planet to planet like a virus, expanding, overwhelming and eradicating the enemy and anything else that stands in their way.

I would love to hear from someone involved what their over all vision of the game is from a technology point of view, but maybe I'll just have to wait for another live stream to see some more. I like the kind of crazy unit concepts that follow the TA tradition, such as the unit cannon as seen in SupCom2. It fits in with the low-tech approach that really made TA feel gritty and believable. It was exciting building mad units like the buzz-saw and was incredibly satisfying turning it on your enemy and watching the results when it was finally finished!

Regarding aeroplane mechanics, it would be nice if they moved up and down more. In FA dogfights all happen at the upper limit of the planes’ height, which makes it difficult to watch using the freecam and also looks a bit boring and forced. For some reason the fighter planes tend to be angled up at an unrealistic-looking angle.

Torpedo bombers have a nice effect where they go into a dive before dropping their torpedoes which makes watching them much more interesting.

I propose that all bombers should swoop around a bit more, and also that fighters should have a degree of randomness to the height they fly at so that air units look generally more dynamic and interesting.

The way the bombers fly in the trailer is very good, nice and low so they look more dramatic.

AA weapons would have to be done slightly differently to balance his but I don't see that it would necessarily add any unfair randomness to gameplay.

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