HAHA@TRISTCANTQUOTE!

HAHA @ eet cant use spaces

sorry, I'm retarded when I have no sleep

you didnt need the rest <3

PS, we need your love on IRC, kryo's hate of all thinks pink and space pony like is just destroying everything we once held dear.

The Graphics in this game are great. mind you id like to have a play with the other races lol i know i go on and on lol.    

Warning:
The following post is one gigantic minor nitpick.
It's a criticism of the texture resolutions and won't improve any part of the game significantly. I just like to gaze at the planets.


The planetary textures are very nice. They have lots of details.

Like this mountain with its glaciers.


Or like this volcanic planet with it's floating plates.

But those details sadly are very hard to see, because the textures have so low resolution.

Sometimes the textures are very blurry.


It's like they're out of focus.



Because of this, the nice details which are included nearly vanish. Also the cloud textures (which move independently from the rest of the planet, btw. are even lower in resolution and look very fuzzy.

Compare it with the following picture taken from one of the Apollo missions to the moon:

You can see the clouds clearly and their edges are visible.

The seam here is very visible.


The night lights are very diffuse.


Too much bloom here. You can hardly see the textures of the ice planets.


Speaking about seams, this background textures have the same problem as the orange one:


The green and the dark blue background also are very blurry with lots of compression artefacts. They don't come from the conversion to .jpg but are visible in the game also. They also have seam problems.



The north resp. south poles of the stars. (This was what I've meant in my post above. The planet's north/south poles are ok. Sorry for that.)


Normally a sun looks like this:


But after loading a save game they look like this:


It looks like the distortion effect gets out of control:


Happens with every type of sun.


A close up of it.


Speaking of the distortion effect. Imho this effect happens too fast and is on a too large area to look good. It should change slower with smaller areas too. Not so small as in the pictures above, but something in between the current one and the one seen above.

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Btw. it's not that I think the textures look bad, it's just that they're not perfect enough for my taste. I just like watching beautiful high-res planets.

I didn't even noticed the suns looked like that! Everytime I looked at a sun it was distorted, as though the glass filter on photoshop went crazy.

i don't know if it was mentioned, but a ship that is "leveling" up should be as is, but blink. a blinking icon will be hard to miss. even when the planet is not selected on the master bar on the left, the little block that represents it (or ships of its class) should still blink. so either the actual ship icon blinks or the smaller square block representation should blink. Also, when actually looking at the ship exploded cloeup view, it should blink in some way.

Well, about the textures. The sun is an animated shader, not much can be done to fix the poles. Compression artifacts in the skyboxes are due to DXtexture compression. what video card are you using? the bloom on your ice planet is rediculous.

And the Clouds I've brought up before, not sure what the final verdict will be. Truth be told man, you'll never play the game zoomed in that close. So zooming in to see if the textures will be that crisp at that distance is rather silly. If you look at the planets are the lever you play at. They look fine.

I've a Radeon 9800 Pro AGP with 256MB of Ram. It's an oldy but works quite well for my use.

I dunno if it's bloom. It's the reflection from the sun on the ice planet. And yes, it is ridiculous.



Well, I've said that I like ogling planets, didn't I?

A bit more seriously, in my stile of play I do zoom very near to planets. And since planets, suns and the background texture are the only "map objects" you see in space games they have to be as pretty as possible to me.

Imho they're just not crystal clear enough for my taste, not photo realistic enough. What, they didn't promise us photo realistic graphics? Ups, my bad.

I could definitely see where someone nit-picky and even perhaps a little OCD might complain. I've just been too busy saying "oooooh preeettttyyy" and drooling when I've seen Sins screenshots (I never played HW 2 so I guess I haven't been jaded by that). However, one questions...do GREEN stars actually exist in the galaxy? I noticed them first in Gal Civs 2 but I'm seeing them again in Sins. I know red, blue, yellow, orange, and even brown stars exist in the real universe...but green? Are you devs just messing with the people who don't know any astronomy or are there REALLY green stars in the universe?   

When I painted the textures, they were 4 times larger than they are now. Issue is. It takes up too much texture space. ends up being an extra 40 megs or something stupid. That's enough for about 15 ships or something. I agree though, the clouds could look better. Wasn't my choice to go where they are

Congrats for your good yob. I really like them and their amount of detail. They do look very "organic" to me.

Imho I would immediately sacrifice some performance for those 4 times larger textures. It would probably look awesome zoomed in on the planets. With my graphics card I would get beautiful standstills every 5 or so seconds from the game then, probably.



Then name me the evil villain the prohibited you from doing it your way! I then will slay this Overlord to return cloud texture haven back to us all!

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Again a bit more seriously:
I understand it of course that you can't use oversized textures which will bloat up graphic memory usage by such a large amount, just to make planetary textures look better in a zoom level in which a normal player never plays anyway.

I just would love it, if the possibility where there to make those textures available to us crazy players that don't rally care about frame rate at all.

Anyway, I have probably bothered you long enough with my nitpicking, so I'll shut up.

For now.

no worries man, and I agree, I'd prefer my work be shown the way it was intended, but o well. As for the clouds, bug Craig;) haha. the ones right now were first pass. He may intend to upgrade them later. More important things right now

No, no, no!!! I paid for Sins of A Solar Empire, not Geometry Battles in Space: Quest for the Giant Cirle!!!

Edit: Oh, and I really like the graphics some of the effects are amazing. However it seems the game gets slower as things progress making my 10+ hour games kind of hard to finish without getting annoyed.

Oh, and for some reason planets, not stars, lag my scrolling and zooming sometimes. I am guessing it is my graphics card, but I have no other problems with any other effects or models except planets.

Oh, and can you make the city lights mroe vissible, like what they looked like in the earlier pictures, just less bright. And also include lights for the ships orbitting the planet on the dark side.

Eh, your distaste for the system doesn't change the fact that its a very effective system that works quite well. Sometimes the complexity of the icons currently used makes them hard to read at a glance -- simplifying them really is a good idea. Though simplifying them all the way down to basic geometric shapes, ala SupCom, probably isn't a good idea -- as things stand now, the icons turn to face the direction the ship is headed, after all. Geometric shapes would make that harder, or at least less clear.

Um, no. I have not one problem. Why? Because, if you play this game enough you would know what a ship looks like from a 2D side view, and that is the symbols they use. And that should not be changed in any way shape or form.

The problem is that the icons are a little muddy, hard to read. Sure, its a representation of the ship. Doesn't change the fact that they become hard to read -- especially if you're zoomed out a bit on the larger grav wells.

Thanks Vandenburg.

No worries, all the issues with the sun are on the todo list.
The skybox artifacts you are seeing look extreme  - you will see a bit of this in any space game skybox, but what from what I saw in your JPG's something looks wrong.  The skyboxes have gone through a number of changes for Beta 3, except the light blue one - which may be replaced/revised eventually. This may resolve it.   

The ice planet is intended to be highly reflective, but from your other screens it looks like your bloom is not behaving correctly. Will look into this.

I'm wondering if this is related to the ATI bloom issues I've had on my cards?

HW2 starting position, nothing special @ 1024x768

vs.

SoaSE Beta1 tutotial starting position @ 1280x1024 (resized to 1024x768 for comparison)



Is SoaSE 'looking' (remember we are not making any gameplay comparisons here) like a game 4 years ahead?

I'd say its definitely far, far ahead.