Terrain Doodads need more role than being 'just' obstacles.

Remember in Total Annihilation where plateaus, mesas, vales, valleys, depressions, craters, mountains, hills, embankments etc. all serve function of being more than 'just' impassable obstacles?

In TA, you could not only build things on them, but you could also get units to climb up there to defend. On top of that, there were more interactions between each of the terrain features: you could have mountains on top of mountains, depressions with plateaus, deep usable valley between systems of karsts. Right now, in PA, most terrain doodads simply serve as uncrossable obstacles or as eye-candy and nothing more.

In a nutshell, what we want is this:



And not this:



Terrain features need to blend in seamlessly that can be used strategically and tactically, instead of just being 'obstacles'.

I suggest that we all go on demonstration to compel Uber to implement the changes by shaving our armpits and wearing our rancid armpit hairs as moustache wigs, and post our pictures of us doing so here, until Uber changes it.

Yeah i think this would be very interesting to see with 1v1 games.

I've not heard Uber say anything about these features, but i sure hope they come with at least V1.0

Battling on Mount Everest would be epic

Well you arent alone. sadly we are pretty much in the dark atm.

They dont really look part of the planet atm, many of them look like there are just placed there.

Many biomes also lack doodads, and yes even the water lacks stuff.

STill hoping for more mountains and stuff, where we can actually build stuff, cliffs and such. Natural bridges over deep canyons and so forth.

Not to mention just that the ground layer wasnt naturall perfectly flat, but instead had imperfections, and more stuff like in the screenshot. That would help as well.

We want this:



not this:



Even TA had more depth then the current Lava planets:

Yeah that lava biome, shows how the current one looks completely flat and boring, it looks like paint on a round ball. The planets suffer so much atm from being completely round, like a perfect sphere.

Just some depth where the lava is down a few meters and has an actual glow. It makes a world of difference, and help break up the roundness.

Well brad said we would never get this same quality (which are proof of concept) but that they had planed to improve this.
As far as i am concerned, i'm a bit disapointed because of this :

1) procedural generation planets was intended to avoid having to spend too much time to design planets and being able to generate hundreds of different planets. This of course makes sense. Unfortunately, not only the procedural generator does not introduce any variety which help to distinguish planet 1 from planet 2, but in addition, as stated by op, terrain doodads are just obstacles. And this situation has never changed since the very begining of alpha

2) I can perfectly understand that improving biomes is a complex stuff. However, biomes being 200.000$ stretch goals, i had assumed lots of stuff would be put in improving this procedural generator. So far I see no differences playing on different biomes, except on metal planets where there's no water, except "visually". It's all about flat spheres with obstacles

3) I thought Neutrino had stated he would look into this further but after these long years of dev (I know it's not only about making biomes), I'm still not seing any improvement.

I know Neutrino says he's fed up with reading players complaints, but this is a very very early concern.

And depths could also be applied to coasts when there's water.
Definitly i do not understand why all this stuff has not evolved over the dev cycle.

It was there in first video:

Yeah totally. It would help make the planets seems more like planets and less like round balls with stuff on them.

Im a bit nervous as well, that it hasnt improved. I mean maybe we will be hit in an update soon with huge improvement and changes to all biomes as they add gas planets.

But the silence about it, is making me nervous.

Woah where is that from, dont remember seeing that, That actually has some mountains and look at those clumps of tree's that actually looks like dense forest and vegetation. :O

Frankly i would not bet on it, unless they are working secretly on this ....

Yep but you could hardly allways put units on top of terrain.

I hate that the lava on lava planets is on the same height as the ground. You can't differentiate between impassable and passable ground. On "normal" planets you can clearly see where the water begins, on lava planets it's all muddy. Also (!), I'd like to see the lava do be like the water, not being a texture on the ground.

More mountains, cliffs, and canyons? Count me in!

By "imperfections," do you mean "strategic building/landing points" or "asymmetrical landforms?"

I'm looking for:

- Vasquez rock formations on all earth/ice/lava planets,

- Icebergs on frozen worlds,

- Rift valleys on all planets,

- Erupting volcanoes on tropical, volcanic, and earth worlds,

- and snowstorms.

These landforms/phenomena would make planets much more interesting.

In Supreme Commander, maps contained cliffs where you could safely build structures out of reach of enemy units. PA's worlds would never be complete without any of the above features.

Which is why i think procedural generation was good for the development cycle, but unless they can take it to the further step, and editor with a large set of brushes is pretty much something which can't be avoided in the end. And perhaps it would avoid having these incredible planet building time which make PA one of the slowest game to get in when starting

Well, people say that (theoretically) user made planets will be huge in filesize, as current generated planets sometimes take about gigabyte. At this state, planet it's only a few parameters that a fed to generator, so they are 'cheap' to save and download, but generated planet is what uses lots of resources.
So, in theory, user made planets can be problematic.
But. A few well designed dev-made planets that everyone has by default might be an awesome thing. I.e. Earth that many people would really love to see, some carefully balanced maps for tournaments, and maybe some with special and unique design that alter gameplay. That would be really cool, but I won't wait for something like this, because I understand how hard it is to implement.

I'm wondering if its down to a more technical issue when it comes to doodads and what can be classified as passable terrain. The only thing I can possibly come up with as to why we have seen almost zero improvements on the biomes as a whole is the new AI pathing design that has been implemented into PA which has caused a lot of needed out-of-the-box thinking and limited on what they've been able to load up on the biomes. How units move around canyons for example might have caused a hell lot more units getting stuck then what was deemed playabled. I remember an issue back in alpha that caused a lot of units to get hung up or stuck but can't remember all the details. From that standpoint it would make sense, the only problem with that of course was that the this new AI path finding technique is supposed to make this sort of stuff a hell lot better then what traditional RTS games have used in the past for AI pathing.

Didn't mean to to go off topic on with the lava stuff on this thread but felt it was all still relevent as we're talking about biomes as a whole and I too was looking forward to seeing some absolutely incredible different biomes myself but all the random procedual generation seems to all be the same, and there are thousands of seeds I don't understand how so many can so look almost the same except for a different position for a lake or moving a planet crack 20 clicks north. Was expecting a little more than that heh and yes of course by no means not saying its easy either, far from it, which was what is so incredible about this game, that it had the ability to do all this stuff in an RTS game, revolutionary!! just a little sad we didn't see more stuff implemented with the biomes.

Would be so kool if they did actually just come out with a release out of no where and say "here, this is what we have been working on the for last 3 months, what do you guys think?" and we're all having an orgy on how awesome the new improved biomes have got, but me, like everyone else in here, am worried that just simply might not be the case. I'm guessing its something that will be worked on after launch, like many other things I guess. They've obviously done it and implemented it before, the screenshots ppl have posted above in last years alpha video are proof of that, so something has happened so why they stopped doing doodads for the biomes

I do believe technical issues might be the case here.

You guys should have a look at Aevs' Cliffs mods (one server, one client - you need both). They're limited to a single planet type at the moment but they work well and show you what can be done with (I think) minimal changes. Also makes for some great maps!!