HAHA @ eet cant use spaces

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I'd say its definitely far, far ahead.