[Suggestion] Visual Enhancement of Planet Terrain

A few days ago, @nicb1 posted a new thread asking for lava being displayed as a liquid in the lava planet biome. I recently saw some footage from Grey Goo (an RTS in development) here (https://www.greybox.com/greygoo/en/) and I noticed that they followed an approach to the terrain visual details similar to what I suggested in the aforementioned thread (which I attach below for reference).

I know Grey Goo and PA have very different visual styles but I think the same principles for making maps feel more vibrant and alive apply. What do you guys think?


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I like the visual style overall and, apart from minor tweaks ( fixing lava as discussed in this thread so that it resables the original concept art, some details for the oceans and few other small things), I think the biomes look nice and pretty from the purely static point of view. But I would add some small animations that give "life" to the biomes, just as some simple examples:

• Earth planets: Waves or ripples in the oceans so that water looks like a real liquid and not a transparent gel, as it does a bit now.
• Lava planets: Make the already nice-looking volcanoes really cool by animating them into active volcanoes with a small geyser of lava at the top, a couple of lava rivers flowing along the sides and a small pond of lava at the base. An animation of released gases and some small bubbles on the lava oceans will also work quite well into making the biome look more "alive".
• Desert planets: Add some dust animations, something like small dust tornadoes or just an animation that conveys the effect that air is blowing by showing some thin dust clouds.
• Moons: Moons are dead environments so they should remain as they are!
• Ice planets: Same kind of animations used for desert planets may work for ice planets by changing the colour so it looks like snow in the wind. An occasional geyser in some non-pathable landmarks like cracks will also be nice.
• Metal planets: Add occasional sparks or bolts around the annihilaser area and maybe more varying ilumination effects from the internal lights of the metal planet.

These are just some exaples that come to my mind, of course, they must all be implemented in such a way that unit and structure visibility remains clear at all times. For this reason, I think, non-pathable landmarks like volcanoes, cracks, mountains, the annihilaser, lava oceans, etc. are the perfect things to animate a little bit as they will not cause any issues to unit and structre visibility.
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I just noticed that the sun's surface is actually (gorgeously) animated, here is a (obviously) static image of it:




A similar kind of animation could be used for lava oceans or even water oceans. Just a hint to point out that Uber has already done very interesting "animated textures".

The sun surface animation is very beautiful (go check it in-game) but nobody really notices since the sun itself is too bright while a game is running (the image above is somehow darker because the system is loading). In the same vein of the recent post by @jables , I think showing off this visual quality more explicitly in the game will certainly add to the new player experience.

Completely agree, hopefully change will come at some point soon.

Something like this...

https://github.com/jbouny/ocean

Demo: http://jeremybouny.fr/ocean/demo/

Yes please!

My addition: Make the tropical biom (waterplanets with small islands) more tropic: Palm trees + white sand + turquoise water color.

I also like the some of the aliens worlds from TA like acid and crystal. Obviously Uber could do it's own twist and not copy these, but the idea still holds.

Hopefully water gets overhauled at some point too. Needs waves, ripples, reflections and maybe splashes. Also could use flora, coral, and other underwater features. Flowing rivers and creeks could be really neat too.

I'd also like to see lava become more of a liquid that boils, bubbles, and oozes. You could even have some lava shielded amphibious unit.

Yes! 100x times that.