For Backers Only: Scale Tests - Renders

Agreed. The units in TA did a good job of this, even the lightweight, popcorn units, like the Peewee. The fact that they left wreckage that had an affect on the battlefield also contributed to their sense of substance. Supcom lost a little of that, though I got over it quickly. In fact, coming back to FA after other RTSs, like Supcom 2, I realized that the units in that game were pretty substantial too.

And it's not just in RTSs. In any other game, I've found if movement doesn't have some semblance of friction, and a bit of chunkiness to it, it feels very amateurish. (For example, in the FPS genre, Quake 3 is one of those games that completely nails it, and yet nobody would dare say the game is slow or cumbersome. )

For those of you that have incorrectly identified the commanders throughout the topic, here they are from left to right:
Progenitor commander, Alpha commander, TBC*, Kickstarter video commander, Theta commander.

* Appears to be an as-of-yet unannounced commander.

I'm liking the scale of the buildings and such. I'm really in favour of the units being small enough to actually be effected by the terrain. I'm hoping that it's going to make some terrain impassable for some units and give us a real advantage to selecting one type of unit over another. Also the buildings appear large enough compared to the units that they should prove a realistic obstacle to attacking units.

The size of the buildings relative to the units also gives me a real sense of where you are heading with the art direction, which is impacted in a big way by scale. PA bases are going to be sprawling, awe-inspiring complexes, full of industrial looking buildings that look like they really could build killer automatons. They look like they're going to be really detailed and quite prominent due to their size.

It's one thing having cool units. But I think it's important to focus a lot on the buildings as it's something you spend a lot of time looking at and it really sets the mood of the game. It's clear here that the buildings have had considerable time spent on them already - even if this is just concept stage work. Personally I love it, they look industrial and efficient - just like you'd expect. I think the no-frills look is important as the robots have no need for fancy detail. This is no nonsense stuff and I am seriously digging it!

Nice Uber, definitely helps to give a good sense of relative scale. Thanks for the info.

Looks lovely, what more can I say?

I'm for units and buildings not being that different in scale ala TA or StarCraft. It doesn't look as sexy in screenshots but in an actual match it means you can see your base, bots, planes and such on the one screen without zooming in and out continually or having to represent stuff with icons too much.

When the scale is too diverse the smaller units look terrible. For example the mech marines and scouts in Supreme Commander. Like in this screenshot you're not zoomed out enough to be at a scale to be convenient for base building. If you were would the units look good?

If we're going to have battles running on multiple planets/battlefields it's going to be vital to keep the game clear and intelligible on screen. Scale diversity doesn't help much in that regard.

The buildings look to clean in my opinion, there need be dirt/dust on the sides since it's in a desert.

They were just built less than an hour ago.

Mike

I see your point, but they shouldn't stay clean forever.

Play the same game for a week and you'd have a point.

Mike

What if an agent is amphibious and needs two layers? (I know, "sample"...)

wrt. clipping: imo soft collision constraints are a necessary evil, because the limited flowgrid resolution means minimum unit spacing cannot always be ensured and skating effects mostly arise from coldet trying to maintain strict lateral separation (in my experience when implementing the flowfield movement model) while ignoring basic physics. I'm quite looking forward to the approaches PA will take to solve this.


(Spring gets away with it too, see for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6578hTKM1jE and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CgANudrm0s)

I have to say it - "WOW" at these pictures. They look amazing. I'm very much enjoying being along for this ride.

The Theta Commander looks like he has fist cannons.

The EVER RELIABLE, ROCKET PUUUUUNNNNCH!

It had to be done!

Mike

Looks like I am late to the party but DAMN this looks AWESOME. I am really liking the scaling in this as well as the overall aesthetic. Cant wait to see more content like this.

Wow, this art is just gorgeous. Love the tiny humans!!!

As always, it feels like Jon is reading my mind.

THIS. This is how games should be made. Where we (the fans) get to see and enjoy all the behind-the-scenes stuff that is usually hidden away and never released. I love seeing the thought-processes and experiments that go into building new worlds.

(wipes away a tear)

loving the ascetic, keeping that cartoon vibe from the video and enhancing with the color pallete and the blocky shapes, awesome.
love the unit cannon and general unit sizes

Amazing images, the scale is great looks like it makes sense. Just give those commanders some awesome details and textures of course when the time comes. Great work keep it up, nice to see all this unfold from the start.

These look just incredible, excellent work! I'm glad that Neutrino is very keen to get the scale right, as it is properly off in Supcom.

I'm sure that this is not news, but just in case here is my opinion on some of what was wrong with Supcom's scale: If the alleged size of the maps was correct, then the LABs ran at 170mph, and even the Fatboy reached 70-80mph (with ludicrous acceleration). The only thing to say that the units were the sizes they were alleged to be were the trees. One big, big scale issue was that the ground textures were not very detailed when zoomed in, adding to the impression that everything was two feet tall and skating on ice.

Most of the SupCom units moved at credible speeds in vanilla but they had to speed everything up in the first few patches because units took forever to traverse the maps.

Looking awesome so far!