FYI, this just went out on the Kickstarter "wire", but here's a prototype before-and-after for some of the planet graphical changes that are coming later this month. Remember, THIS IS A PROTOTYPE, the planet-sphere is way to angular, the lighting isn't done, the shaders aren't all in place, the shorelines aren't quite right.. but this gives you strictly a before/after idea of the texture resolution changes alone. I also describe a lot more about how we've improved the engine to dynamically unload un-needed "huge" textures and other things in the Kickstarter Update Post.



Or a direct image link here.

very nice

wow, that looks way better than that...pixel mess it was before :). Did your new guy (forgot his name, sorry. I'm terribad with names) had anything to do with this?

Are they still going to warp/stretch depending on your relative position to them?

yeah massive improvement, very nice

That looks a lot better, chunky edges and weird coastlines aside.

Ryan, they do that because you're projecting a 3D view (the game world) onto a 2D surface (your monitor) Distortions like that are present in most first person games.

The closer to the edges of your screen, and the greater your FOV setting, the more you'll notice it. And it happens with everything in the game, not just planets. The part of the screen directly in front of you is perpendicular to your line of sight, but the edges are at an angle since the screen is flat. So, the game tries to compensate for that by stretching things so that they actually look correct. It's the same principle as writing text on streets disproportionately tall - it looks fine when looked at from the driver's seat, but looks odd when viewed from directly above. The problem is that a single FOV setting won't fit for every configuration of monitor and head distance. Also, moving the head around breaks the illusion.

You can minimize the effect by measuring how many degrees of your view the screen actually occupies (which depends on the size of the screen and the distance from your head) and setting the game to match. I don't know off the top of my head how the FOV is actually defined (e.g. greatest dimension, or diagonal, etc.) so you might have to look that up.

I guess I'm in the minority being one who just doesn't give a damn what the planets or other background paintings look like. Hell, I don't even care what the ships look like so long as I can tell them apart.

I'm here for the targets that run away and/or shoot back, plus the content that makes those interactions happen and gives them meaning, not the graphics.

I expect seeing it is the first step in being able to go there.

We're constantly chastised on every possible outlet about our graphics. So, you could say that having pretty background stuff is also a means to an end of having more targets flying around.

Will the planet sizes (relative to the rest of the background) be increased to go along with the higher quality?

I guess I'm in the minority being one who just doesn't give a damn what the planets or other background paintings look like.
You're not the only one. People don't look at that stuff after a while, but a lot of people totally dismiss a game that's otherwise really fun because of "outdated" or "crappy" graphics.

Will the planet sizes (relative to the rest of the background) be increased to go along with the higher quality?

Not immediately, but maybe in the near future. The new textures for Itan and stuff are pretty freakin' cool, and it'd be kinda sad if they're relegated to this little ball off in the distance. Many of them were like that because the planets didn't have enough detail previously, and it might be cool to change things now, in some cases.

Down the road, when we roll a whole procedural planetary generation system, I intend to have some of them filling half the total field of view. I want that feeling of vertigo from looking "down" on a highly detailed landscape, far below. But that's a little beyond the current priorities.

You have no idea how fun it would feel to be fighting "over" a planet. Close enough that it fills most of the background.

For the record, I have gotten motion sickness from combat before.

I have some idea :). I agree, it'd be pretty awesome. It was something I wanted all the way back in the beginning, but.. there were a lot more technical limitations back then.

There were a couple of scenes from movies that kind of inspired it, like in the movie "2010" where they have to do a bit of a spacewalk from the Russian ship to the Discovery, there are some really cool scenes of them floating over.. I think it's the moon Io or something. Maybe it's Jupiter (I haven't seen the movie in a long time). Anyway, it really gives you that kind of "vertigo in empty space" thing.

I dig it, but it really requires a huge amount of detail in the planet surface to pull that off properly. The whole procedural thing will be interesting, since the textures will probably need to be uncompressed, and we'll have to unload them on the fly. This current graphics update is a good test for some of that.

about those proc planets...does that mean that we, when they're introduced, can fly into gas giants and hide there? Or fly through canyons on strange planets? Dive into the atmosphere of a planet?

Also will there be differences in how good a ship can handle gravity/pressure? Meaning, that you could enter a gas giant and just go so far in there that the people chasing you will implode?

The first goal for procedural planets will simply be to generate awesome-looking detailed planets for background usage. However, we will be specifically engineering the system to make it a lot easier for us to generate fully-procedural, land-able terrain down the road. But that's a much bigger leap than just "making awesome procedural planets".

I would certainly like people to be able to skim through the outer layers of gas giants, and yes, it would make for interesting challenges related to gravity and heat resistance (with really massive bodies like that, I'd like to see some gravitational impact to where you could slingshot around a gas giant or some such.. but who knows. "I'd like" a lot of things, heh).

i'd like shields!!!

Yes, TRS, shields are a 2013 thing. Procedural planets are a 2014 thing. No one is getting their priorities mixed up :).

stop listening to TRS, shields are stupid, Make me able to hop turrets on my ship, launch from it, fix CtC, Deneb, Conq station keys, then maybe we'll talk about stupid shields

the damn things already can take a beating from 6 players and still escape without shields!