As a backer who has had yet to participate in the continuing discussion of the development of PA, I figured I'd go ahead and create a serious post reflecting on the vision presented in the Kickstarter trailer and what it means to the team and backers, from the creation of the trailer to the ongoing development of the engine, assets, UI, and gameplay. It's been touched on in the streams, and if it's been discussed here before, feel free to delete this thread. In the meantime, I'd like a civil discussion, hopefully without a flame war about art direction and adherence to TA. To begin, it's been at least a month since I last sat down and had a solid viewing of the Kickstarter trailer. I've had plenty of time to play other games, work my two jobs, hang out with my friends, and generally avoid being zealously analytical of the development process as the game has come together. After viewing the recently released gameplay stream (awesome work, by the way!), I feel like I'm beginning to see both convergence with and divergence from the vision laid out in the trailer. I personally find almost nothing to disapprove of in the trailer. I absolutely ADORE the art direction, which seems to be on-track. The way the apparently deferred lighting plays over surfaces looks fantastic, and Mavor seemed to already discuss that, so I'm assuming it hasn't yet been fully implemented in the gameplay client as of yet. The animations were exceptional, whimsical and full of life, especially in those battle scenes. The explosions…are beyond excellent. If those are a definite target, I’d be the happiest guy alive; explosions in SupCom were disappointingly bright and obstructive compared to those initial screenshots in the PCGamer reveal so many years ago. And while the UI was obviously over-simplified for the trailer, the shapes and color scheme fit in perfectly, and I’d love to see that as a basis in the final game (because I do fully understand that the very TA-like pre-alpha UI is not final). And those camera movements…egads, so smooth and, for lack of a better phrase, next-gen for an RTS. Unrealistic as a final gameplay implementation, but just partly replicating those mock-up camera movements would be amazing next to the *pre-alpha* camera in the gameplay trailer…which reminds me of Spring and makes me want to vomit. UI and camera in that engine felt like a poor-man’s implementation unfit for the much meatier game underneath. But, open source…what are you gonna do. I understand that I probably have an unhealthy attachment to the trailer’s vision, and that my own delights might be someone else’s bane. But I feel like this is a great reason to kick off a solid conversation about that trailer as a render target and what it means to backers. And maybe we can even use this thread as a place to ask questions to the team: How much is the team relying on the trailer as a target for the final product? Has there been a consensus that anything in it was ultimately a bad idea? A great idea? If you could render a new trailer at this point in development, would it look different?
He's also correct. Obviously we've put more work in to the units and planet since we did the trailer, and they'd likely look like what we showed in the live stream if we were to update it, and some of the UI might be modified a bit, but the trailer still stands as something of a benchmark to match (and surpass).
I'm definitely interested in how you're going to handle effects like smoke and fire. The common approach is particles but have you considered doing it volumetrically like in the trailer? It'd certainly look much better than particles.
The effects in the trailer looked great anyway and I have high expectations for the explosion effects. :mrgreen: Please no SupCom white flashes. Explosions in SC were pretty boring.
^Gonna have to agree with that. What's funnier is they had all sorts of cool explosions they could have used and they just went with little white flashes :lol: I think... it's mostly good and a little bad. They got a lot right in the trailer, but I do hope they don't follow it on things that would seem out of place in a real game. So far they've increased fidelity where appropriate (units and to an extent, planets), so I'm not particularly concerned. The real test will be in making stuff they didn't show in the trailer.
Graphics-wise, Supcom2 was far more superior than 1/FA. Not just because of the time difference, but Supcom2 just had more flashy things, better explosions, everything really. The gameplay was pretty bad but it looked fabulous.
SupCom2 looked better, but in practice it's not very readable during combat. The flashy explosions tend to obscure both the attacker and the defending unit.
