Planet Size/Camera angle

I have been looking through the forums and watching videos again in preperation/hype for the alpha, and have a couple of suggestions that should be minor fixes going forward.

1. Make planets larger - in the early May pre-alpha stream, the planet used was definitely too small. Those bases were relatively small all things considered, and the other bases were basically within sight range. If that is deliberate, ok I can roll with that. It certainly spices up things, especially in galactic combat where you probably do not want to waste time scouting around a ton. Increase the planet radius by 50% as a start and see how that handles would be my first recommendation.

2. I acknowledge that it was mentioned in the same live stream mentioned above that the camera was no finished. However based on what I saw there, I would recommend tilting the camera by 45 degrees towards the horizon. An tweak to make this adjustable would be great, but the camera showed in the stream was too vertical, if that makes sense. I personally do not want to see a top-down view of the units, I would prefer to see a bit of their sides Plus a tilted camera is more in line with what strategy players will be expecting, which while sometimes you want to break their expectations I do not believe that is one that should be broken.

Anyways that was just what I have seen from the videos. I did a search for these two things but did not really find what I was looking for. These may have been fixed by the upcoming alpha, but if not I was just going to drop them here as suggestions.

Cheers!

In retail game there probably will be no limit for planet size, it's only depends on server hardware. Also there is screenshot made by Uber:
http://planetaryannihilation.tumblr.com ... 8784994422
You might see that this planet is much bigger than you seen in streams.

I agree with you, it's always nicer to have a bit of an angle on the viewpoint, rather than a directly top-down view. Then again, it worked in TA so might as well work here!
The thing is, i assume we'll be able to rotate around the planet freely, it might be awkward if units travel along the south pole, and you need to rotate "upside-down" past the south pole to see the units "north" of the south pole.
Even worse if the camera system is limited so it stops moving once you hit the north or south poles as in some games, then you wouldn't be able to see the units directly below xD

As for the planet sizes, if you "really" watched the livestreams again, you'd notice they said they indeed will have bigger planets, the ones shown were smaller than half the size of their default "planet size slider".

Great idea though, now i know how to spend the day!
Planetary Annihilation Twitch channel here i come!

Of course, the camera will have to have some constraints, especially dealing with a planet. Rotating around a planet could get confusing. It is my feel that the strategic view will be locked on north on top south on bottom. Then you can rotate the planet as you like to the right and left. You will be able to slide up and down along the curvature of the planet from the north and south pole but I strongly don't think they will enable you to turn the planet upside down. Then, if you get close enough, you will be able to do what you could do in Supcom and swing the camera in any direction. I hope they allow the camera to look straight up so if you know you are going to have a small moon land on you, at least you can watch it coming from planetside!
The free rotation camera should stay where it is once you have placed it too like in SupCom 2. That way, if they implement the window-in-window feature to help you keep track of your empire, you can watch something at ground level. Perhaps the progress of a nuke or something.

There is no set planet size and the camera does tilt.

Neutrino has spoken, it is so.

I don't know if anyone has mentioned the sun in all of these discussions, but is it's size manually modifiable, or is it relative to the planets around it? Know we aren't going for true scale, but a Sun that is smaller than the worlds around it would be ... weird.

The sun is currently hardcoded, will probably change that but don't expect real solar system scale. The entire scale of the game isn't "real" so the size of the sun seems like a silly thing to worry about.

You know, regardless if the scales aren't real that people are definitely are going to trying to achieve real universe scales either through mods or other mysterious ways. It's not a matter of If, but when

That doesn't even make sense. Think about what you are saying. On a real universe scale the orbit of a planet would take a YEAR of wall clock time. How does that make sense under any circumstance?

Because clearly, realism > fun! Duh.

Regardless of realism, I think sun should look overwhelming over the system. Bigger than all planets together. It will give both epic view and explanation of the fact that you can't blow it up.

Part of the question relates to the mention in the latest livestream about the celestial mechanics having a more real physics slant to them. This would seem to me to allow for a "natural" solar system setting where planetary transits were affected by the mass of the sun. By extension, this would also apply to the moons' relationships to their host planets, etc.

The size of the sun and its related density represents different phases in the sun's lifecycle and it would be cool if the color of the sun (and the ambient lighting on bodies in that system) reflected that, i.e. typical yellow (our sun), red giant, white dwarf, etc.

Actually yeah, a huge sun looming the the middle of the system would look quite nice, it'll probably be changeable in the system editor

Obviously not top priority for alpha build 1.0 =P

Yeah pretty much this. As much of a space nerd I am and love Kerbal Space Program I must agree with Neutrino here. There is no way a scaled star system would be fun in any regard. It would actually take decades of real time to finish a single battle.

Totally agree. If there something we can't destroy it's should feel realistic.

I don't mean we need some real-world scales, but sun should be much bigger than other planets.

not to mention even if you sped it up so 1 year was 1 hour the day-night cycle would look like a strobe light and some things would still take forever.

Years are not always longer than days.

For example Venus

right but a fast orbit isn't as silly looking when you're zoomed in as a fast day night cycle

if proportional space-time scale is the aim it's going to look like a strobelight.

Thanks for the link though, the more you know

Speeding it up is changing the scale though. Now your units are effectively shrunk which is what we actually have.

This is like trying to talk about relative scale between rts games.... it's a ball of hair.