Planetary Biome Concept Art: April 5th, 2013

aside from liking, not liking and suggestionposts it didn´t archive anything significant to my knowledge

shame hope this one does… jaja

Would love a few changes to the biomes, or inclusion of some others, like having the ability to miss-match all the different types of biomes if you wanted, like having an Ice mixed in with Earth and Volcanic biome mixed together with a Tropical one. There was a half-working mod that did this but it would only work in the System Editor because of the lack of client side stuff naturally but It would be nice if it was in game rather then an XML spreadsheet mod like that was.



I'm also preying that more work gets put into lava because it just simply doesn't look right to me. Understood how difficult it is to incorporate the cliff-like geometry features that are in this concept picture above, but if we could just simply get the lava at least to look like that it would be simply amazing. The current Lava graphics are just terrible in my opinion, the color is just so completely off, way too much orange with zero bloom on it ect... As we edge closer and closer to nearing the end of the main development cycle for this game, I'm fearing that this just simply isn't going to happen and for some strange reason, the devs feel the current lava effects are somehow "awesome". I'll let you be the judge peeps with a comparison picture below.



It just really would be nice if there was some sort of depth added to the lava right now just way to flat. You can see with the latest build below that is has barely even been touched since Alpha. Its literately the only thing I have a gripe with in this game.

I always thought banning thread resurrection was the stupidest.

Normally it's fine, but it can be abused too... do you remember the debate about nukes and anti-nukes where necromancy was used to summon an undead horde of threads?

I'm kind of hoping we'll see a lot more verticality on planets in general. Not only from an aesthetic but also gameplay perspective.

We can already create some pretty extreme height differences, and it sometimes does look kind of pretty, but units don't handle those slopes well, both in terms of pathing and in terms of weapon ballistics. I haven't tried the new pathing though.

Well one gotta assume that its coming. The terrain atm definitely isnt up to the quality it needs to be.

Ive said it before. i feel like im playing on round balls not planets.

The lava in that screenshot concept art, looks amazing, look how the lava glows and feels like its fluid. And the terrain being higher up. It just has to happen.

It will also add more tactical gameplay to the game. Then we can always discuss if we should be able to build bridges, ramps and such to go up, down and over stuff.

Unfortunately current terrain don't match the nice OP biome concept arts, current terrain is completely boringly flat and severly lack personality and strategic hotspots like heights providing better radar coverage and weapon range, valleys and canyons making natural bottlenecks and fortifications against enemy long range artillery (remember TA's mountains providing natural protection to cleverly built important structures against bertha's shells).

Resources are also way too much homogeneously dispatched, i want to fight for conquering and defending a valuable resource rich spot.
I don't want the terrain to be perfectly homogeneous without any spot being more interesting than any other on the whole planet surface; i want the terrain to have great personality and depth, attractive hotspots and less important areas, i want to be able to incorporate terrain into my strategy.

From an artistic point of view, the current terrain is also very far from the concepts, where's the personality of the biomes? I want giant mountains the size of 1/4 planet (think about Mars's Olympus Mount or other giant natural geological structures of extraterrestrial planets) or giant volcanoes whose crater are filled with tons of metal spots worth installing a base and fighting for.

I want Dune like biome with sandstorms and nice terrain pattern (and worms?), i want to be able to build a desert planet without water but without the ugly grey pattern you get when you lower the water level too much.
I want to fight urban wars on abandoned/postnuclear city ruins filled with tons of reclaimable skyscrapers, cars and metal structures like on some TA maps.
I want a planet editor that allow much more modifications (earlier posts talk about making a red Mars planet out of the desert biome)
I REALLY want a complete planet editor that allow completely handmade maps, because all procedurally generated maps eventually become the same (boring, flat and soulless) map!

How about some atmospheric effects? From Earth like atmosphere including clouds and climatic effects to different extraterrestrial atmosphere like for example Venus's corrosive one (such harsh atmosphere could have gameplay effects and slowly eat unit's life like the acid lakes on TA) or dust Mars like atmospheres.

There could be some candy eye effects like small (or less small) meteorites and comets randomly crashing on planet's surface, burning on dense atmosphere or hitting the ground on moon and planets without dense enough atmosphere doing some damage to unlucky units. (another environmental gameplay effect)

IMHO the terrain is one of the biggest improvement the game could benefit, for better gameplay, visual and immersion.

There has been quite a bit of talk in the past about atmospheric conditions and the ability to add weather effects as well which I'll show a picture of in a second. I would love it if this game could include those things, I think the problem people had with that stuff is that it will hinder you're ability to actually control you're own units if for example you couldn't see them clearly because clouds are blocking your vision and would just get annoying to the player, this is largely because of how far out you can zoom, which of course is limitless from surface of a planet all the way out to the solar system.

One of things that I talked about awhile ago was having various weather effects on different planets to add more enviromental effects for more immersion to the current planet you're looking at. Example would be Tornadoes on a Tropical planet, Rain and Lighting storms on a Earth planet, Ash clouds on a lava planet that make fallen ash fall down on the planet, like rain but just ash, Desert could have sand storms or something. I think it is too technically complicated and time consuming to add such a feature set though and to be fair to Uber, was not part of the original kickstarter idea, but I do think it would be kool though.

Now for the picture I wanted to show as an example, This is from a completely different game, but it still shows you that it is actually possible to make such atmospheric conditions and weather effects on a sphere planet.

The problem of atmosphere blocking the view is yet another issue of the off scale problem.

With a better scale, the atmosphere would be way higher than what it's now, and won't obstruct the view of land units until the camera reach a very high altitude, and then the icon appears and the game don't suffer any lisibilité issue at any time.
Atmosphere also isn't obligatory dark black clouds blocking all visibilité, but havint some sort of visible "air" layer that make the objects entering it burning and adding to the visual consistency, and even helping increasing lisibility between the surface+air layer and the orbital layer.

example: when the camera is high enough to reach orbital unit, the atmosphere blur the terrain so the land and orbital don't interfere visually. Orbital being much more higher if the scale is corrected there is also less visibility issue.

Lava planets actually used to have pools like that, they were removed because of... pathing or something...

I think it would be cool at if a certain point you zoom out you see the planets as they look in the op concept art image. I hope they keep updating the planets because right now they are a little bland. I think the metal planet is the one that seems the most complete since it has depth to it. I'd love for the tropical biome to look like the concept art with lush jungles and flowing rivers.

I think terrain in general needs some work but it appears that that stuff is coming so I can't wait for the planets to start to look as good as the concept art.

Hopefully we'll all be able to mod this sort of stuff now so if uber doesn't update the biomes and stuff we might be able to

I'm pretty sure that they're going to fiddle around a bit more with the biomes en heights. Jon did said he still wasn't that satisfied with the biomes. We'll see.

dude.....
do you even realise?

Just wanted to revisit this because its still important to me. I think if the lava could like the picture below, it just simply would add so much visual quality I personally feel the lava planets are desbrately lacking right now. Lava needs to be rich, and vibrant, which were currently just don't have. This is what I mean before about the actual color of the lava is just FAR too orange, you take a look at this picture, its mostly a vibrant yellow, with some orange. PA's lave just simply looks horrible, textures aren't that great either to be fair really... Games as old as unreal tournament and populous the begining I feel did it better currently and those are decade old games.... -sigh- just please don't leave it as it currently is Uber, at least bloom it up a bit.

Personally waiting for a finished mod that revamps the biomes so that we have cliffs (like aevs' one) plus revamping the biomes' palettes.
The Mountain Biome is the worst, followed by Lava's mud-coloured rock (volcanic rock is black). But oceans could do with a revamp too.

Anyway once such a mod becomes a reality (if it isn't already) and is widely used, Uber might be more open to doing something about these, as they did with Team-Coloured Fabricator Streams. Forum polls and our comments on such things as art rarely lead anywhere, but they're good to have just to show players' opinions, thus providing some sort of list of priorities to the dev. process.

That said, the only time Uber really seem to change their stance is if there's a shitstorm or if they are actively asking us to contribute on something of limited scope which they don't mind leaving up to (what I wouldn't blame them for perceiving as) the unpredictability of the Forums. For instance, Faction names. Nobody's going go mental over an ugly-looking (Mountain) or illogical (Volcanic) biome, they're just going to try to ignore it.

Wow I've never seen these pictures...that's incredible...and also kinda depressing when you compare it against what we have in-game at the moment.

The unrealized potential of this game hurts so bad.

I really miss the textures and terran features from alpha. Those cliffs and sworls........

I remember the livestream where they showed the progress of Lava planets, and they showed this:



Then went to one more like the one in your post, and I was just...

WHY, THE GEOMETRY LAVA LOOKS A THOUSAND TIMES COOLER THAN THE DECAL LAVA
(taking into account how the geo would look given the same amount of time to be the same quality art as the rest of the final game)