Dust and Footprints and Swirls (layers)

Re: Dust and Footprints

@Neutrino
I like the style of the concept trailer more than any other style of an RTS game that I've played in my life - including TA!
The units in the concept trailer have a extremly good readability, a cool unique look with intense colours and great animations.
I am totaly convinced that it makes no sense to add details at that point, because everythink is perfect as it is. I had never thought that way about a game before. Never! But this is a good sign, because Uber has shown to me, that it can work, if all components fit together perfectly.

And I think the reason why many people backed the game was not only, because it was announced as the spiritual successor for TA. Of course, this is one of the main reasons for many people. But I think another important reason is, that everything that was shown in the trailer was awesome - including the very unique style! (And the TA feeling - don't know how you guys have managed that)

I know it's pre-alpha. And sometimes the claims of the community seem unattainable. But nobody said: "Man, look at that style! This looks like ****!"
I think most people like what they've seen so far. And I like it, too.

But for many people (me included) it is very important, to let you know: We really love the style of the concept trailer! We don't want more, we don't want less! We love it.

Re: Dust and Footprints

Believe me, I get it. Most of this stuff is placeholder, things only get better from here. But wouldn't the time to voice opinions and concerns be before the more permanent art gets made?

That aside, if the terrain swirls are just [too hard/too expensive/not what you want], that's fine. The problem I'm having, is that everyone seems to be accepting the "worst possible implementation" mindset you preach about after kneejerk reactions, whenever the style gets brought up. It's annoying.

I understand it's hard to have a discussion based on something so subjective, so I'll just post my final thoughts here and be done with it:

44k+ people backed with that style in mind

the swirls really drive home the organic feel of the beach biome

even if you ditched the swirls, I'd still want to see ground units plowing through shallow water

like nano said, it's unique as hell. even more so than the current prealpha

SWIRLS MAN!

How many 2mil+ games release with first pass art

jk, i'm afraid of the answer

EDIT: Come release, UBER should release the kickstarter map as a custom map.

Re: Dust and Footprints

Eh, Airmech, Supcom2, TF2, your very own MNC actually. Basically any "cartoony" game from the past five years. It seems to be the new fad actually, a lot of games use this kind of art direction presumably for the same reason you do, it's cheap to produce and make look good.

I'm not too fond of it really. I like realism myself. A lot of people claim realism has no variety but I see a lot of different art styles within realism similar to how movies and TV shows distinguish themselves visually. But all these cartoony games are becoming a blur to me from how similar they end up looking.

I understand the reasons for doing it and you're certainly making something very nice looking out of what you have. But it's not what I prefer and it's not really unique.

I think you could do well actually to inflect it a little bit with that TA bleakness everyone loves. Make it a bit shinier, darker and grittier. Would help it stand out more and help solidify its intent as a spiritual sequel to that game.

Re: Dust and Footprints

I'd have to say that currently the art style looks a lot like Arimech. When I looked at your Alpha footage I thought;
"Hey, Airmech... Um... is it supposed to look like that Jon?"

It's not that that's "bad", it's not. But it's not the style you pitched.

The pitch video looked like the planet was painted by an artist with a big brush and a distinct love of twirling his paints into one another, or perhaps a dash of food colour dropped into slightly swirling water. The current Alpha style looks like paint by numbers. The Biomes look afraid to mingle with each other.

Sorry to be blunt. The art style's direction at present is too uniform, constrained and frankly it's a little duller for doing so.

My hope is that's purely due to with it being first pass and not because that's what you want the final game to look like (except in higher definition).

You're doing amazing things with the engine, planet generation, proposed unit counts, proposed match sizes, mechanics, and all that technical wizardry that you know so well...

And then you're playing it "safe" with the Art style? Taking away the standout, unique artistic feature, striping it down and repackaging it in some teeny-tiny little swirls in some of the decals that are completely LOST the moment you zoom out?

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C'mon Uber, the Giant Swirls are important to some of us... They're a feature that some of us thought you were going to be using to DEFINE your style. Please don't abandon them

Re: Dust and Footprints

Lumping all cartoony games together? That's kind of pushing it.

Understandable if it's not your preference though

Re: Dust and Footprints

There's cartoony games that stand out, Borderlands notably has a different look, I still don't like it but it's quite different. The recent Sonic games have this strange but somehow charming mix of realism and cartoon. Heck, Ni No Kuni seems to very precisely emulate an anime which isn't something I've seen ever before. I'm talking specifically about this kind of TF2-ish blocky flat kind of cartoony. Of which there seems to be an awful lot.

Re: Dust and Footprints

Okay... just to say it: My post is about everything else, not the swirls. Because everybody writes about the swirls. I wrote about the rest of the style.

What I love about the concept trailer are the intense colours (planet and units). And that the units have a great readability, also when zoomed out. The design is simple but beautifull.

Re: Dust and Footprints

The fad of triple-A games going dirty brown and grey is equally as abhorrent to me.
I don't want "Gritty" if it means everything looks like a faded photo with coffee stains.

And why should PA be "Gritty" anyway? I'm smashing apart Asteroids, moons and planets with wild abandon... and robots!
Sounds like an 80s Action B-movie to me...

Re: Dust and Footprints

The brown and bloom meme has been blown out of proportion I think. Gears and UT3 did it sure, and Call of Duty was awfully brown and grey for a while but BLOPS has kind of turned even that around. Other than that there aren't that many games that really did it.

As for the grit I don't mean Gears style blood splatters and rubble everywhere. I mean a sense that maybe these robots aren't completely clean, few subtle scratches and blemishes here and there should do wonders. And just a general sense of contrast with shinier metals and deeper shadows really. I think the test renders almost did it really but the gameplay seen so far has been fairly flat looking.

Re: Dust and Footprints

I kind of miss the specular component in the current shading of the buildings. It all kind of looks like dull, cheap plastic toys and not like huge metal buildings. Lights alone don't make it look any better, at least not during "daytime". If bare metal is exposed, then I expect it to look like such, with a high specular component and slightly irregular normals to simulate a bumpy, scratched surfaces.

Similar thing with the ground, I see texture, but it lacks such a simple thing as a normal map making it look way to clean, despite the texture and details like the little rocks.

I know you are trying to get at least close to the art style you have showed in the kickstarter video, but right now it looks kinda cheap. Not like an surrealistic artwork, but more like half done.

Re: Dust and Footprints

Battlefield 3
Clive Barker's: Clive Barkers Jericho
Killzone
and 2
...and 3. Dear. Science. It's. SO. Brown!
Red Faction then
...and now
Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter
and The Second Encounter
Operation Flashpoint; somethimes they're brown and sometimes they're all GREEN

And this is JUST first person shooters. Would you like an extensive list (with images of course) of other genres?

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Back on topic. Swirls? Pretty please with a "tripling-my-pledge" on top?

Re: Dust and Footprints

ITT: more swirls plz

i like swirls tho

Re: Dust and Footprints

Not even half of those are even brown. How do you expect me to take it seriously when you try to include Serious Sam of all things as an example of brown and bloom?
Battlefield 3 ironically is just about every single colour except brown. Red tones being conspicuously absent except for a few standout moments.

Seems to me like you just don't like realism and try to justify that with a buzzword.

(what a surprise)

Re: Dust and Footprints

Just to leave a bit of opinion here:

I am fully with nanolathe on this topic!
The graphic style presented in the kickstarter video was awesome and in the end it was what grabbed everybody's attention. I think the ultimate goal should be to get the graphics and style as close to the kickstarter video as possible. The combat livestream
looked a bit washed out - I was missing the strong contrasts and colors of the kickstarter video (maybe the fact that the combat happened on the dark side of the planet added to this), the unit readability and the swirls.
Being a professional 3D artist myself I completely understand you can never exactly match the concept with the final graphics, but again - the goal should be to come as close as possible.

Re: Dust and Footprints

Battlefield 3 is one of the 'brownest', with brown in this case meaning the completely 'ununique' style of basically trying to go for photorealism everywhere, and add bloom where the textures weren't high-res enough, and not have a single patch of uniformity anywhere to set any kind of tone. Heck, I think Call of Duty 1 was smarter in that regard: due to the engine and computing power limitations many more textures were smooth (y'know, like real surfaces are) before bullets started flying, and then they weren't anymore for an actual reason rather than just being gritty by themselves (thinking of an emo wall puncturing itself with a power drill right now).

The cartoon style of PA is very different to that of TF2, Airmech, or SMNC. I find it's much more of a pastel game oriented towards yellow with that fantastic offblack background of SPACE. TF2 was more of a sillouette game, where the shape of a character mattered way more than it's actual visual content, but it had detail where it mattered: the control points, the weapons, the cart, and some character details, like the belt pouches and grenades people carried around. Plus the hats, of course.

Airmech clearly goes for the gritty style that was mentioned previously: most of the machines are very detailed with rivets and welding lines and color stripes all over the place. It reminds me a lot of the early Transformers aesthetics. Also, it's very rounded, with curves composing the edges of most buildings and vehicles.

SMNC is very in-your-face about itself: there's 'neon' EVERYWHERE, with holograms and blinking lights just about anywhere you look, to drive forward how commercial the battles are from a lore perspective. There's also a lot of detail in each character, with every inch of armor and clothing having little elements that help to further characterize them. There isn't grit on many of them though, only on the tough-guy characters like Veteran, Gunner, and Tank.

All in all, what turns me off from 'realistic' games isn't that they try to be realistic: I'm perfectly fine with that. It's that the things they can't make realistic yet, like light (BLOOOOOOOOOOM!), look completely incongruent with the rest of it. In fact, I played BF:BC2 for quite a while and greatly enjoyed it, but that was because i ran it on LOW settings on purpose so i could see the cracks in destroyable walls, which made the game far less detailed and actually looking GOOD. As in, many many textures didn't have prebaked bullet holes in them for no good reason.

As for cartoony games, i don't care if they're a cheap aesthetic to go for, it's very easy to make it look unique. Think about Braid, Machinarium, Doodle Cannon, LIMBO, Borderlands, Megaman Legends, Wind Waker, Pokémon Stadium. All of these games were made in a cartoony style rather than a realistic one and every single one can be differentiated almost immediately. Realistic games on the other hand, end up being differentiated by what color filter was put over our lens of access into the games world.

Re: Dust and Footprints

Thats due to the lack of post-processing. Post-processing corrects the colors and adds HDR (high dynamic rendering) which is creates the strong contrasts and intense colors you are describing.

Yet I disagree with you in that the style of the kickstarter video should be copied 1:1. After all it was just a simple preview with simplified models, low resolution textures and little environmental details. The final game requires more detailed models and terrain than the kickstarter video and the swirls need to be reevaluated too, at least under the aspect of usability in the actual game. Sure, they are part of the art style, but that does NOT mean that every planet is going to consist of swirls solely.

You also can't expect it to look just the same, the Kickstarter video was rendered using a raytracer, that gives features like indirect lightning and alike for free, but these effects are incredibly difficult to add in real time graphics. That cartoonish, smooth, yet lifelike look can't be replicated with any modern real time graphics engine, it's actually cheaper to add more details and to hope that people won't notice the inaccurate lightning system over the sheer amount of details.

Re: Dust and Footprints

Back to footprints and tracks.

They may or may not have an impact on gameplay. Specifically if this

happens then the tracks affect gameplay because they are an extra source of intel. Then people with slow computers won't be able to use reduced decals because they would be at a disadvantage.

Re: Dust and Footprints

Make the reduced decals include footprints anyway. The baseline will be higher but it'll be more of a core feature. You don't have to punish players with slow machines. You could reduce the fidelity of these tracks or something along those lines. Heck, if it comes to really slow comp could we maybe have the footprints be processed by the server rather than the client?

Re: Dust and Footprints

Thats whats going to happen anyway. Otherwise, how would your client know about the existence of tracks if you did never see the actual unit in the first place? If footprints and tracks are meant to give away any intelligence, then they must be handled and communicated by the server, not by the client. Only the server can tell you whether a unit was at that specific location or not.

Re: Dust and Footprints

Giant swirls are not defining their style. Giant swirls are a map feature and as has been mentioned multiple times, a bad one. (It also doesn't look good. )




Also as we can see from this pictures, PA is brown enough to even please the shooter crowd.


To be serious, I like the art direction the current game has. I don't see issues with it being washed out (even on those low res screenshots). The livestream was mostly on the dark side, take a look at the upper left on the top screenshot and you can see much more vibrant colours on the day side.

Personally, I think it looks much better then the kickstarter visualisizing at this stage and I can only imagine how much better it will look in the future.

What defines their style is imo the colour palette they use. Its a "cartoony" one instead of the faux realism modern shooters go for (and then apply bloom to it for horrible lighting effects that makes you think the artists have never been out on a sunny day) in that there are more pastel colours.

Add to that the incredible looking shadows on the terminator zones and it just looks beautiful. I have to say that in every second of my posts about the graphics, but the colour you guys use are very well chosen. I hope they stay that way, even when you'll eventually add post-processing.

Also, one has to add, having textures that show no tiling, from whatever zoom distance or angle you look at it is an incredible achievement and makes the game so much more pleasant to look at.

PS. This forum needs a spoiler tag to hide large images. :/