For Backers Only: Planetary Biome Concepts

This is way more biomes than I thought there was going to be, usually there's usually a couple generic and undefined ones in RTSes but these just look amazing. I cannot wait.

Irony. So much of it.

They definitely look better than SupCom's trees: http://www.toomai.es/images/products/TH ... A_ss07.jpg

They fit the art style for sure. The problem with bumping the tris count is it actually would look worse -- as if they were attempting to make a smooth tree, but couldn't afford it in the gpu budget. As it currently stands, they match the art style, don't attempt to be realistic, and play to the strengths of the style.

The only thing I'm interested in is if the trees crunch when run over (like in SupCom). I know it wasn't like that in the last few livestreams, but pre-alpha, so I'm interested if it's planned.

I'd like trees to work something like this: viewtopic.php?f=61&t=45992

essentially you could move through them but they would fall to any type of fire.

you could have some buildings have thrusters to "hover" in place, for example, a floating air factory, floating power generators, etc

Thats a generous amount. I could not be hyped more for this game.

These biomes are fantastic. I really like both styles of tree and think they are befitting to the overall look of them.

I also like Garat's comment that a given planet archetype can have one or more biomes. So an 'earth' one could be configured to have roughly the proportion of sea, jungle, desert, ice etc that earth does, or a mars one may have primarily desert but icy caps.

I'll be looking forward to how that all works in terms of generating the planets. I love the procedurally driven idea of sliding up/down the params to get a given result. My questions would be:

a) Beyond the sliders, if I wanted to actually control where certain biomes are (eg icy caps on a desert planet) would users be able to 'paint' broadly where each biome is on the planet

b) Once a nice planet is generated can we save those and reuse them in other games later if we are inclined? I guess this would be via a saved planet file or something - or if it's a purely procedural planet with no 'biome painting' I imagine there could be a big 'seed' number that could be entered to regenerate that planet. Just guessing now