Planetary Biome Concept Art: April 5th, 2013

In one of the livestreams they had a bunch of planets orbiting each-other, so I'd say that would be more than possible.

On a different note, is that a section of a ringworld that's beside the metal planet, or is it just a texture sample?

https://smnc-cdn.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws ... public.jpg

This image seems to be plenty big.

I'm really hoping barren biomes will have awesome things such as light coloured ejecta sprays, dark coloured mare, etc.

And, of course, having colour sliders so we can play around with the colours would help immensely. Then we could turn a barren biome into a Mars biome and a volcanic biome into a toxic wasteland with green gunk instead of lava.

I, for one, will be quite satisfied if water worlds end up being some combination of archipelago and ice biomes.

And I do hope transitions between biomes are done well. Otherwise you get patchwork worlds, which will look just plain weird. Limiting how many biomes can be on a planet of a certain size would help as well. An easy transition, for example, is having channels of water/rivers between biomes.

All good apart from the swirls, though I assume they're simply features of the concept art and won't make it into the final version.

They look both unnatural and would make ship warfare a pain.

Other than that the biomes look great!

Biomes looking great... I really like the metal one.. looks a lot like Cybertron ;-D

The color palettes you guys are using are really incredible. Very much enjoying the concept art.

I am a little wary of the move back towards the swirls, as I share some concerns with other posters that if the swirls are too small the naval units will not be able to effectively maneuver, and in addition the swirl will not have enough land mass to host any significant land forces which would lead to land and sea units effectively abandoning the area.
If the swirls were instead more continent or sub-continent sized geological structures instead, then this would provide enough land mass to use and sea area to navigate. I would be cool with that, although I will say I really am looking forward to the Beta when I can try it out for myself!

If you guys didn't see it, we posted an update that has the link above for the high res version, and also more. (http://www.uberent.com/pa/2013/04/05/pl ... s-updates/)



and



Because of the resolution and aspect ratio, they're a tad small for full wallpapers, except laptop screens, but they're formatted perfectly for the cover art on pages like Google + and Facebook.

Beautiful art

If the biomes themselves have enough customizable variables, you could just take the desert biome, make it red, and change up the rock formations to be a little flatter and plainer than what the preview shows off. (I guess you could have those on Mars, but they're probably less common.)

I'm not big on the swirls, they appear in some form or other on almost every planet. And as a geological feature, which would not occur naturally except in rare instances. Whereas in this universe it happens all the time.

That consistent theme between disparate planets because quite distracting to me from an otherwise fantastic display of the biomes.

I'll admit that ocean planets and naval wasn't something I cared about, but the idea of fighting around icebergs kinda sounds fun.

yeah, because history shows that big ships and icebergs go well together.

Yeah, I think the same. I really dont like idea of them, I have no idea why people like them. For god sake, dont make swirls :x

They allredy said that they would include the swirls in some way (try too), so get used to seeing them in atleast one biome.

But a easy solution to "ships getting stuck in them" is simply to make them to shallow for ships (Cant enter them = cant get stuck in them).

Can't wait for more.

Yes. Yes they do.

If planets have snow poles then they should be aranged on their orbits and rotate and revolve arround the sun in such way, that light from the sun makes pi/2 (or close to pi/2) angle with the normal to the planet surface at the pole (there always should be approx pi/2 angle between sun ray and normal to the surface of the planet at the pole).

while this is undoubtedly how it works in real life, i utterly do not see why this matters in a game.

Exactly what I was thinking, no point in over complicating it.

One thing I didn't see in the concept art is water in the metal biome. That setup leads to some massive naval battles (Seven Islands) and would be cool to see it in PA as well.

You made me smile.. Icebergs as weapons anybody? :mrgreen: