Thoughts on Art Style

Effects work is all 100% temporary. I plan on redoing all of it with real art once we have time to put more work into the fx system.

it was mentioned that this makes ships easier to read, i like it

Love the art style. The swirls, the tiny planets (which are huge maps actually) The edges of rocks, the blocky trees.
I showed my friend the KS trailer last year and I lost my **** when his first comment was "why are the graphics bad? Dont we have the technology to make it look real?" and seriously, the world could not be more bland to me. I got over that realism "high CG" hump years ago. Realism does not in any way dip into my mind as memorable or thought provoking.
Sure, get the robots to begin acquiring mud texturing as it tromps through the jungle (mod idea?) and get the atmosphere effects and blooming and realistic sunset. There is something magical about putting something cartoony into a hyper-realistic lighting engine. Pixar being the top dogs in that realm.
Ever play minecraft with raytraced lighting but on a block based texture pack? (explicitly referring to using Disco's OCD tex pack with Amazing shaders and depth blur)
Its mind blowing. It immerses me into a surreal world.
Kerbal space program was another one that my same friend suddenly decided that he hated because it had little green aliens instead of hyper realistic astronaught models which would have killed load times and also just made the game feel less realistic due to scale. My connection and care towards characters is lowered as the uncanny valley drives itself into a hellish dip reminiscent of Enron stock. Skyrim was dry and I could have cared less about killing and robbing my quest giver after saving their cat or whatever I had to do to squeeze gold out of them. Realism is stale. Just like Mocap without animation tweaks. bleck...

I love the blocky robots because it feels like my lego creations of my childhood have finally decided to come to life and destroy eachother.

Good job uber, keep art as art!

It's like Warhammer 40k, where when you have a vehicle, you have to have crewmembers despite the fact that the unit is entirely capable of running itself.

I always thought that the reason ships and vehicles have optical sensors where control rooms used to be is because the technology was adopted from human military.

I have to disagree, if only because Skryim is not, nor is it trying to be, realistic on any grounds. Does it have a certain 'realistic' flair to it? Yes, but it's incredibly stylized.

I would prefer more color, like in the Kickstarter video.

I hate the dark gritty realism games. its like they only think there exists 3 colors, grey, brown and black.

even Starcraft 2 is colorful but still kinda dark gritty.

Im not sure how much work it would be or if its possible But would be kinda cool with some themes. maybe it would be possible by the community to some extent. The problem ofcourse this might open up for cheating, by doing stuff to skins and such.

I don't think a game with 600m diameter worlds is ever going to look anything but cartoony, so I guess even in the most "realistic" of cases, you're going to want to have some kind of compromise.

But I do think having things look realitstic-ish makes them look cool.

I've just been watching some Alpha battles on youtube and I'm really impressed with just how good the game looks already. Kinda come full circle; liked the Kickstarter trailer, disliked the more realistic texture they put out several months ago and now it's back to having a more stylized look to it I love it.

I recently rewatched the kickstarter trailer and was happy to see how close the game is to that original video! It also makes me excited for more features to be added since they have so closely captured the initial vision thus far. I love the cartoony style. I am more excited for this game than I have been about any other games for a while. I love playing the alpha and look forward to each patch!

It's not that they look 'cartoony', it's just the color palette we have to work with uses a lot of bright colors. They're easier to read, but at a cost of atmosphere. Of course, it's worth it when you crush your enemies beneath the treads of a massive ball of neon pink tanks. :lol: The way the units move probably contributes more to the feel than a palette will ever do. If they move realistically, they'll appear more realistic. Unfortunately that's currently not the case, but I'm sure they'll figure out a way to keep the units from sliding around in large numbers.

Maybe they can darken the palette for the galactic war, it's not like readability is a problem for AI players anyway.