Thoughts on Art Style

I have to admit, I was a little worried about the art style of PA at first. I tend to prefer realistic looks rather than the cartoony style but after playing around with the Alpha i'm really impressed. I think it fits perfectly - well done Uber!

I like it much more than supcom 2 - in fact i don't like supcom 2's style very much at all but i can't really put my finger on what makes PA feel so much better. Maybe it's just because it feels more mature, more like TA.

How are you guys liking the style?

p.s. oh and I'm liking the scale so far as well, it's nice to see the advanced buildings are much bigger than the basic ones.

I was always looking forward to the style, but had some reservations. I have just played my longest game "without crashing". Wiped out one opponent and moving onto another, "well thats how I saw the battle". Game crashed again, but I am becoming increasingly impressed, with the scale, Art style, explosions "just love those explosions" the animations seem just right. All this on an Alpha, what more could I ask for? maybe a little longer gameplay. Seems like each time the game is getting longer, before a crash. Just updated my graphics card drivers and this seems to have made an improvement. I'm loving this game. :geek:

I prefer realistic style like you.

But I like this style. It's quite simplified but well represent the role of the unit and building. Not just mere squares and triangles.

I strongly dislike the current "cartoon" feel.

Grittry realism better suits this kind of game IMO.

FWIW, aside from the commander, this is all first pass stuff with relatively little completed visually.

I like the current style, lets the engine use more of its muscle to deal with massive amounts of units. At galactic level, your machine or the Uber servers (which they said would be doing the heavy lifting) will be using a lot of power just to keep track of the sheer number of units and bases, and having that run smoother is more important to me. For instance if you run a Sins of a Solar Empire game with 300 planets, you're going to come close to crashing even when zoomed out just because of the hundreds of little trade ship icons it has to account for.

Also when the style is as coherent as it is, everything fits, and even the blast marks etc. look good in the world. Even some of the ways they have dealt with texture tiling seem unique to me. referring here specifically to the little 'eddy' swirl you see where terrain types meet. That's a great way to make the terrain look unique and new where it comes together, and when we start seeing seeded planets where different terrains meet in wild combinations, it will go a long way toward making them not look like a patch-work quilt.

Also I think the simple style will benefit modders, as you can just swap guns off of units and their simplistic shape will make them easily identifiable.

Definitely prefer it to the over-done "realism" (which is never even remotely realistic).

The only part I don't like in it's current state (Yes I know, Alpha) is the 'building' particle. The way it spews around just looks terrible. A more concentrated and/or swirly stream (same type of particle though) would work better, IMO.

I'm okay with the current looks of units and terrain. I am hoping they add more than the single explosion effect we currently have though. It's a little bland to see units die in the same explosion all the time.

TA had a number of different explosions depending on the power of the weapon used or the type of unit dying, even cool ricocheting debris that went flying and bouncing when units exploded. I'd love to see that make a return.

No doubt they will add more mate, it's alpha.

Art style is clearly unfinished, which is completely ok. I think it will be a fun and unique style. Lasers and giant robots were never really made for realism style graphics.

I've been looking at the units, specifically the navel units, and I was wondering about why so many robot vehicles look like they have cockpits.

An example is this ship here: Are their tiny robots in there running the ship? Maybe so. I thought it might be cool, though, if most of the ships didn't have any control rooms, and they just ran themselves like the gigantic death machines they are.

I like the art style, but if it was more cartoony it would like it even more. It is just that i think they need to make one or two more steps towards awesome. Huge swirls all over the place brighter colours and so on.

And yes I also dislike the cockpits for robots.

There was a huge discussion about cockpits in general somewhere here on the forum.

But... If you wanna go for realism and say, hey those robots are real and the units are designed for them, than well, maybe you will have units with a very unfamiliar design and it might be very hard to even distinguish their roles and functions on the battlefield as a player. You look at the ships and you know immediately what they do...

The cockpits add a more human like look and overall the ships are very easy to read... I think that's why they are designed that way...

About the design in general, I must say I like it so far... I just think that a few structures are a bit too large, like the mass and energy storage...

Look at the kickstarter video... The aim was that video, so far it's looking pretty much like that video so they are doing a great job on the artistic front.
I have no idea why some people started complaining since alpha, because since the very beginning it was said that they aimed to make a game that looked like the trailer.

I'm loving the style, also during gameplay you're mostly zoomed out for tactical purposes.

While most of the stuff in game is just a first pass. Some might even be placeholders, I'm really loving the style. The structures looks amazing and the units I've seen so far are really good!

While I wasn't a big fan of the swirls at first, I like how they fit with the textures and the overall geometry of the world (units, natural objects, etc.)

double post. :?

I think the visual design is very strong. No real opinion of the UI though, as it doesn't really exist yet!

There is a certain samey blandness to the units and base buildings, but that's exactly the same in the Supreme Commander games so it seems to be a theme. Still, there is something satisfyingly chunky and tactile about the units. I'm sure the animations will help emphasis the units individual character.

Personally speaking, I'd like to see a camera angle that drops me to the planet's surface, much like the utterly stunning Wargames Airland Battle.

Clearly we're not playing with the full deck yet, so I'm hopeful that the shader, environment and unit detail will ramp up to create something eye-poppingly lovely.

The visuals are decent and nicely consistent. I'm sure though once the game comes out there will be groups generating "realistic" (well realistic as any SciFi image is) looking mods for the games ASAP. Hopefully someone will do a Biotech/cybernetics hybrid skin that could be rather interesting .

The only issue I have with the current style is that its hard (for me) to tell units and buildings apart from each other. At the moment a lot of them look very similar.

But its early alpha, so I'll only really start complaining when this is still the case in beta.

In some of the YouTube videos it looked a little cartoony at first. Then I played a game and I like the look for the most part.


My one grip is that the explosions need a little work. (Keep in mind, the current static mini smoke clouds may just be place holders.)

- Small explosions need a little more fire instead of a short flash of light. Are they explosions or smoke bombs?

- The little smoke clouds need to be animated instead of just fading after a bright flash of light.

- Big explosions need to dump the current static mini smoke clouds (that travel along the ground) in favor of a circular expanding ring. I was impressed by the center of the explosion that the commander generated on death, but the static mini smoke clouds seem a little on the cheap side and out of place.