Le Lighthearted Aesthetics Thread... Le.

I think they said in some livestream that those big swirls are axed.. could be wrong though. They make no sense from a gameplay perspective and in my personal opinion the aesthetic goes a bit over the top.

I'd also like to see taller mountains - look at that awesome mountain at the south pole! If we have lumpier planets in future with real valleys, mountains would need to be more imposing. I like the black blocky equatorial mountains in this image too.

No, they are still a possibility:

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Problem is, that's a carefully hand-crafted planet in a completely controlled animation. Getting it to look closer to the pre-vis at this stage is going to be hell; too many concessions have already been made.

Gameplaywise it may make sense... but the visuals have suffered for it.

I'm not sure that mountain size would be as big an issue - isn't the biome terrain tied to a certain radius around the CSG or whatever it's called?

Also swirls could be useful in gameplay in defending coasts from naval attacks; it might make it harder to send a fleet of boats right up against a base, or provide space for defensive emplacements but not for the economic bulk of your base.

Larger planets render the mountain tiny. Smaller planets render the mountain comically large. Terrain features don't scale with the planet they're on, nor do they seem to be able to be procedurally scaled whatsoever, due to how that would warp the textures. Planet size can (I think) limit which entities are added/subtracted from a planet's surface, giving larger planets a larger pool of things that can spawn and smaller planets a more restricted pool.

And some people get their panties in a HUGE twist about the terrain features being too big already, in a relative sense, compared to units and the planets... they claim that they're unrealistic in a game about space-kill-bots in space...

Idiots.

You anticipated what I was going to say so thats kewwl.
Yeah mountains are too small. Only Blizzard players who have never played a 3-D map like the deserts in TA would think mountains were too big. I really hope we get proper hills and valleys on large planets.

I never really got why everyone wanted the scale to be so bloody realistic. I mean this is a comic style game after all, right? The trailer made that pretty clear.
In my opinion the graphics have already pushed away from this quite a big amount and I'd rather go the other direction: put emphasis on the unrealistic scale and the simple aesthetics. Swirly landscapes and stronger colours just like in the trailer would be just the right thing to give PA a unique and timeless look. Currently the planets look pretty dull, like 'hey lets make this realistic' - but in a failed kinda way.

Am I the only one who loves playing on smaller planets and seeing buildings and mountains stick out of the planet? This is just awesome style right there.

Hope that makes any sense.

So instead of just focusing aesthetics on the terrain, I was thinking it would be pretty cool to see Jet trails of bombers.

I also hope the Anti orbital ION cannon guns shoot continuous laser beams at their targets just so i can see lasers shooting out of my base that I made.

I forgot to post this here a bit sooner... I posted this originally in the 'more nostalgia' thread.

(Copy paste, cuz I'm lazy…)
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There could be something like a terrain scale limit.

Small planets have small rocks.
Big planets have big rocks.

Each terrain piece would have a scale size property, so it would only be used if the planet meets that scale or is larger. If you have played on a small lava planet, then yeah, those volcanos do stick out too much. So with this limit you can prevent that from happening, prevent giant objects generating on tiny planets. So only the really large planets get these really huge plateaus and mountains.
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That should fix the problem with having HUGE mountains in the game, without having them generate on tiny planets. It would be a whole lot of work for the devs, hopefully they have terrain objects assigned in groups, so they don't have to add properties one by one for every single object.

I'm sorry to report that, as of last livestream, the Swirls seem to have faded from the aesthetic vision of the game. It is unlikely they will appear in the release version outside of the intervention of modders.

I am saddened that the game, as Neutrino put it, evolved and did away from them.

Indeed this is very sad. Evolution much for the worse.

This disappoints me too.
I wouldn't want swirls to be obligatory however - I was thinking how Coasts could be controlled in planet generation with a slider:

Very Smooth --- Smooth --- Earth-Like --- Rough --- Very Rough
Very smooth would result in coasts swirling. Smooth would be what we have now, with the Earth Like having a mixture of beaches and cliffs as Neutrino indicated he wanted to see more of. As things got Rougher, we would see more cliffs and jagged-edged rocky continents, with Very Rough resulting in jagged geometric shapes (without looking absurd, as with the Swirls).

This would really allow us to mix up continent shapes and provide greater variation in terrain, rather than CSG being restricted to particular biomes.

I've made suggestions on ways to allow greater control and variation in planet generation before in this Biome Crossover thread by tying CSG mountains to height range, as opposed to biomes, which would mean on wet planets with forest, mountains would generate in forests if you had a high height range. I know we're seeing CSG in jungles, but it'd be cool if we could control these things, and have forests/jungles grow over entire mountain ranges/mesa 'deserts', and create flat deserts/tundra.


I played quite a lot of Spore and loved the degree of control it offered when editing worlds. It'd be great if we could have more control over how maps generate.

After seeing a picture of a lava planet. I think it would be really cool to have lava planet metal spots be orange colored or molten that give off light.

Maybe ice planet metal spots are iced over.

I almost want lava to also bubble up eventually, but i'm sure that is further down the polish road.


Eventually I hope we can get an option to change the color of planets. I would totally be down to play on a cheddar or swiss colored moon.

I hope they stick to the concept style. It looked so nice and simple in the trailer, now its just a bunch of hills and boring mountains