Spaceships and asteroids look crappy?

I 100% agree with you. The ships look entirely too bland and my main problem with the game (which is still very good) is the way the frigates move in combat. The ships just sit there and trade shots and i was hoping to see some movement by the frigates. They could have had the frigates move during combat automatically while they trade shots with other ships. That is what made Homeworld and Nexus so great, it was the combat and the way units responded to their enemy while trading shots.

I'm going to go back and make sure that I'm not missing anything or that I need to set something in the options to make this happen, but the combat in this game and the look of the ships (especially the TEC ships) need some fixing.

Hi Uplink64.  Souns like you might have a display problem.  Could you please send me a screenshot for review?
You should be seeing much more than older games.   Can you notice the bumpmapping? reflections? bloom?  Its possible these are not working properly. 

the ships are definately on-par with HW2, although they have a bit less "detail", they certainly look better.

in any case I'm surprised they look this good, the game is about scale so you shouldnt expect a miracle. although, a miracle has been delivered.

yeah... sounds like a bug, either that or you didnt turn up your settings.

i remeber i turned up the ship detail all theway and idk made the ships looks like bricks ...turned it down and it went back to normal...i mean unless left is the most and right is least.(refering to how i moved the slider in game..and thats MY right and left)

Ya, the game starts you on medium from the get go, so you should check your settings.

Make sure you turn on bloom and all effects to highest in the effects menu as well. And also you might try playing without AA to see if that might be causing any graphical problems.

I don't think this is related to the OPs problem, but around the edges of ships and asteroids I often see little white (1 pixel sized?) dots. Its slightly distracting, is there an a graphic option that could be causing this?

whatever it is , its not normal... post a picture and your specs.

Lol like homeworld 2? This game looks tons better than Homeworld 2 Something must be wrong.. About the 1pixel dots, try turning off the Ship Mesh Highlight thing in the Effects setting, might be some driver error on your side ?

I think i may have experienced the same problem you experienced, i have an 8800gtx and when i scaled the settings to highest the textures weren't as good they seemed really bland but when i restarted the game everything seemed to take effect.

Guys, the main problem does not sit with settings, but more in the design of some of the ships. The reason HW2 and Nexus had better ships is because the textures gave the ships that space military look. I can see the ships detail just fine, but the textures just make the ships look bad.

Like I said before, the TEC faction is the one with the most problems because they are a human race. I can understand the Advent and Vassari ships looking the way they look, but the TEC ships need some working.

here is 4 different instances of little white pixels that glimmer all over asteroids and other objects as they rotate and move around. this mainly happens when at a distance. what it seems to be is the "reflections" from the surfaces of these objects. cause when you come in close, they look okay...

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Game Settings:

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Specs:

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Monitor: 36inch Magnavox LCDTV

You need to go to EFFECTS and change the settings there.  You're running on default settings which are set to medium.

Since we're on the topic of graphics here, what's the no masking antialiasing option do? I'm assuming that since it's between no antialiasing and 2X, it's somewhere between those two in terms of quality / performance?

On the AA note, I can't seem to enable AA, no matter what the in-game setting. I'll try enabling it in the driver...but the jaggies are everywhere! I've got a 7800 GS.

Here's a couple screens of my ships with the settings and specs i just posted. The ships look great, but if there's a way to make them look better, by all means, let me know.

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what makes you guys think of "bricks" when you look at these ships? these things are awesome looking. especially that mighty carrier. dayam!

are you referring to me? here's my effects menu:





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i agree that the ones in sins dont look as good as the ones in nexus but they do look waaay better than the ones in hw2.

if som1 could mod sins to make ships look like the ones in nexus that would be great.

BTW the game auto blurs textures at angles, you get the full resolution of a texture looking dead on at it. I beleive its their texture filtering method. For instance, if your looking at the side of the ship, the top most textures will be blurred. Its to speed up game performance. When looking at a TEC Capship, wich are pretty angular, look at a side, dead on and zoomed in, youll see the textures in their full bumped and specular glory.

Grim; that's present in all modern 3d-games. I forgot the name of it though, uses 2x, 4x, 8x and such.

Once more tools are released, I'm going to see if I can make the bump look better on ships; which will make them more complex looking.

Sins is designed more for lower-class computers, not ultra-modern ones. Which means that many models are low poly.

I have all the settings set to Highest and the game runs smooth. The graphics on the ships come out clean and look great. Also the ships do move and fire at the same time. Just the big capital ships take a little longer to move when firing their beams. Overall this game rocks, I have only played 2 hours on easy computer and never fought the computer. I got my butt kicked by the pirates cause I pissed them off.

Stardock and Ironclad, Great job and presentation! Sins is welldone and everything you would want in a space RTS. Keep up the goodwork!

Its the texture mip mapping that makes it look fuzzy when you look at ships at an angle. This is necessary to keep framerates reasonable. If there was no mip mapping the game would slide show on the best of systems. Nexus, and HW2 both have the same mip mapping feature.

What those two games have that Sins does not is real time rendered shadows. Both Nexus, and HW2 performed very poorly with shadows enabled. Even with the best of hardware available at the times of their release. HW2 especially had problems with the shadow feature. Though im sure after 5 years since both those games the hardware caught up. A dual core with an 8800 should run HW2 like a dream.

Obviously the rendered shadows were left out of Sins so that the game can be played on the widest range of systems possible. Sins is NOT a "computer elitist" game. It was never intended to be one. However I think the graphics are pretty damn good considering the graphics scalability. Most if not all of the textures are 1024 to 2048 resolution. Which is the standard of today. Models are pretty high poly for a game that renders 100's of units on the map at once. All things considered on top of the good gameplay, which i think is more important than shiny graphics. I think the artwork of Sins is what makes this game shine.

bump

The only ship which I found rather bland was the TEC, Dreadnaught.

The ships do tend to just sit ther and trade shots, if you leave them alone. Personally I think it makes a lot more sense to grab those fleets and move them. Drag the attackers into the firing arcs of your orbiting Gaus cannons, lead them to a different phase lane where you have a new fleet heading in, and so on. It's entirely possible to get really involved in a fleet battle and move things around to bring in flanking, fake retreats and so on.