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Star Control: Origins - Star Control reboot from Stardock

CreamyBlood

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I played both GalCiv I & II over twenty years ago on OS/2, usually while at work in some network room. Think it was one the few if not the only native OS/2 games.

And yes, you can get great feedback on many games on this site. There's a lot of gamers with brains here, just have to sift through the noise. 2017 seems to have been a particularly bad year for that. But I'm sure you knew all this by now.
 
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Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
In terms of how they enter the arena or how they look?

It's how they're presented in-game. The ships look nice and all, but there were a couple of big reasons why the original Star Control ships looked the way they did.

To borrow from another poster here:

Compare the super melee ships, for instance, to see how Star Control 3 just didn't get it.
super-melee2.jpg

o5vlZDU.png

Thanks for these MRY they help me get my point better across. The key element to the visuals of Star Control ships is Shape and Color. The original SC1+2 ships all have distinct shapes and strong primary colors - you can identify each one at a glance, as per the upper screenshot.

But the lower screenshot shows the SC3 ships, and here is where things start to go wrong. They screw up both elements. Some ships like the Owa (2nd from right, top row), the Exquivan (the one next to the Spathi) and the Xchagger (far right in 2nd-to-bottom row) are good examples of the Shape & Color rule. (Case in point, I only have to say "the Spathi ship" and people (should) know where to look.) But the Herald (middle in top row) and the Harika-Yorn (middle in the bottom row) are very similar in appearance, both Shape and Color.

Because of how fast-paced a game of Super/Hyper-Melee can get, players need to be able to identify the ships and their heading at a glance, both their own and their opponents. This is why the Star Control games use a black background (great contrast) and why every SC fangame made still uses the red dotted line to indicate thrust - the actual appearance of burning thrusters makes it harder to identify ships, especially the smaller ones.

And because each ship is a 'come as you are'-design, players learn to recognize their strengths and weaknesses, as they are clearly defined.

SC: Origins currently looks like it'll break tradition on Shape, Color and 'set-in-stone' strenghts and weaknesses of its ships. Most of the ships I've seen so far are fairly similar in shape, and have a yellowish/light brownish-color scheme going, and the blue background doesn't help either. Therefore I must put forth the question: "How much of a Star Control game is this going to be?"

Obviously I can't ask you to make a game perfectly identical to the unique and once-in-a-lifetime Star Control 2 - but seeing as Star Control games have a few internal standards, it worries me to see them being ignored. Variety is a good thing, but should it be applied to every aspect of the game?

EDIT: Typo.
 
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Frogboy

Stardock
Developer
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Location
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I played both GalCiv I & II over twenty years ago on OS/2, usually while at work in some network room. Think it was one the few if not the only native OS/2 games.

And yes, you can get great feedback on many games on this site. There's a lot of gamers with brains here, just have to sift through the noise. 2017 seems to have been a particularly bad year for that. But I'm sure you knew all this by now.

Always good to see a fellow OS/2 user! GalCiv was my first real program. I literally bought "Teach yourself C in 21 days" to write it. The art in it, needless to say, looks like programmer art since I made that with the OS/2 icon editor (except the aliens which were made by my dormmate who is still a good friend 25 years later).
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
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Messages
5,703
Location
California
I loved Master of Orion but I made Galactic Civilizations before there was a Master of Orion.
Hm. Master of Orion was released on September 6, 1993. Your company's history gives this account:
Incorporated in 1993, Stardock focused on developing software for IBM’s OS/2 operating system. Wardell wrote the OS/2 game Galactic Civilizations between taking electrical engineering classes and teaching digital logic lab, and helping run the university Macintosh lab. Galactic Civilizations was released in Fall 1994.
Also, your original post announcing its release on Usenet specifically mentioned Masters [sic] of Orion as a point of comparison (I've included almost the entire post because it is such a wonderful bit of history -- it conjures up all my warm feelings for newsgroups, for indie creators, for 90s computers, hell, even little things like the mention of Egghead; I snipped the order form to avoid any inadvertent doxxing, but it was also amazing):
Submitted by: Brad Wardell (x90wa...@wmich.edu)
Source: Brad Wardell (x90wa...@wmich.edu)
Date received: 1994 October 9
Date posted: 1994 October 9
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You can now order Galactic Civilizations for OS/2 directly
from Stardock Systems Inc. (SDS)!

October 10, 1994. Stardock Systems, a leading developer of
native OS/2 multimedia software, began selling Galactic Civilizations
to end users today. Users are urged to try to get it from non-direct
sources if possible in the hopes that retail sales of GalCiv will be good
enough to encourage future titles from SDS and other OS/2 developers.

"Stores have been wary of OS/2 products because they have
not traditionally sold well. But with OS/2 3.0 (warp) on the
verge of release along with GalCiv being a mass market product
available ONLY on OS/2, we hope to see a good retail showing.
Once retailers see that OS/2 products can sell well, getting
future OS/2 products on the shelves will be much easier.
If they can't find it at the store, tell them to stock it
(and other native OS/2 software). However, if our customers just
can't get it at retail, or do not want to wait for their local store
to carry it, they always can come directly to SDS to get it from us."
said Brad Wardell, the project manager for GalCiv.

There are a number of retail distributors that stores will be
able to obtain GalCiv from such as Microcentral, Ingram, etc.
Moreover, users can expect to see GalCiv in mainstream retail
stores such as CompUSA, Egghead, Software Spectrum among others
in the weeks following OS/2 3.0's release.

Galactic Civilizations was produced in response to overwhelming
demand from the OS/2 community that a game be made from the ground
up for OS/2 that would demonstrate that OS/2 can be a superior
games platform. The OS/2 community's outcry and input to SDS are
responsible for GalCiv's existence.

GalCiv is a space based strategy game with a powerful multithreaded
32bit artificial intelligence engine to control several computer
controlled players against the single human player. It was
designed from scratch exclusively for OS/2. It uses OS/2's
native multithreading, multitasking power to deliver a rich
universe full of wonders, alien civilizations, political intrigue
and outright warfare.


Specifications:
OS/2 32 bit Presentation Manager Program.
MMPM/2 support
Very multithreaded
Multiple Resolution and Color Depth support.
Designed/Produced by Stardock Systems Inc.
Marketed and Distributed by Advanced Idea Machines Inc.


** The Game **

In the near future, mankind begins to colonize the stars. On
its first venture into the unknown, a colony ship called
the "Santa Maria" encounters a one way wormhole that teleports
it to a distant galaxy. This galaxy is already populated by
up to 5 computer controlled alien civilizations. It is up to
you to colonize the star systems of this new galaxy. Among
other things, you will guide your people through new technologies,
diplomatic negotiations, trade agreements, and of course defense.

The game is won either by uniting the various civilizations
together under a United Planets (by allying with everyone) or
by conquering everyone through sheer military might.

Because it is a native OS/2 game, GalCiv can have much larger
playing fields than competitors such as Civilization and
Masters of Orion. While you consider your moves, for example,
the AI is in a background thread computing its moves. As a
result, in a universe with thousands of planets, the time
between turns on a typical system is comparable to other
strategy games such as Masters of Orion (even though GalCiv's
universe can be set to be over 10 times as large). Moreover,
unlike most strategy games, the computer players don't cheat
to play well.

One of the most impressive features of GalCiv is its ability
to adjust itself to your environment. Unlike most games
written for a GUI such as Windows or Presentation Manager (PM),
GalCiv will adjust its size to fit the entire screen. Moreover,
it can also sense how many colors your systems can display.
For example, if you are running in plain VGA, the ships have
their own unique 16 color versions. If you have 256 colors,
you get a unique set of 256 color ships and graphics.
Surprisingly, there is even a unique set of graphics and
ships for 16.8 million color users!

"One thing that has bugged me about GUI games that I have
played is that they try to lock you to a specific resolution.
On those games, if you have a high resolution like 1024x768 then
their game only takes up 1/4 of the screen. From the onset,
we made sure that GalCiv would adjust the sizes of everything
so that whatever resolution you were running at would seem like
the resolution it was designed for, whether it be 640x480 or
1024x768 or anywhere in between" said Brad Wardell of SDS.

GalCiv supports many of OS/2's multimedia features as well.

Multimedia features include:

MMPM/2 support for:
Digitized Sound
MIDI Music
Playing of Ultimotion Video (which uses DIVE)

GalCiv also went through a very long (nearly a year) beta
program to help ensure that it works well on a variety of
systems and configurations. Moreover, the beta was very
public with new features debated on open usenet forums.

"In a way, the OS/2 community helped design this game"
said Brad Wardell.

GalCiv is intended for users who enjoy strategy games and
world building such as Empire, Simcity, Civilization, Masters
of Ori
on, and Warlords.

Requirements:
Comes on 5 disks.
14 megs hard drive space for full install.
386DX-25 with 8 megs of ram.
VGA (SVGA is much nicer).
Mouse

Soundcard recommended.

Quantities of GalCiv will be very limited at first as it is
just coming out of manufacturing and beta testers will be
getting their packages first. We will ship them out in the
order in which we receive your order.

Ordering GalCiv:
Below is a form you can use to order GalCiv. You can cancel
your order any time before your package is shipped to you.
This way, if you find it at a store, you can purchase it there
instead.
[snip]
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Maybe it was inspired by Edmund Hillary. :D

That said, I didn't have much memory of the original game, and was talking about Galactic Civilizations 2, the one that released a 15 years ago or whenever it was. I had some limited recollection of playing the Windows port of the OS/2 original. However, when I went looking for screenshots:
gamehi4.jpg

You certainly presaged Master of Orion II here by marrying the Civilization style of colony building to the MOO gameplay. It's kind of uncanny how proto-MOO2 this looks.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
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Messages
5,703
Location
California
Ooh! I found the original beta testing solicitation from November 1993! It also mentions "Masters [sic] of Orion" as a point of reference:
The game has many similarities to Empire, Simcity, Civilization, and Masters of
Orion. It is, in some ways (though inadvertently) a mixture of the above into
one high performance OS/2 game.

...

Frequently Asked Questions:

# How is your game different than Masters of Orion?

1. GalCiv works off of a Quadrant approach like most science fiction
novels/shows. You view space in terms of quadrants, not the whole galaxy at
once!
2. Star Systems can have many planets in them -- not just one. You
could theoretically have a star system with 20 planets that are just fine for
living on (we've never seen it but it is possible).
3. The difficulty levels affect the AI, not where you start the game.
For example, the hard level of GalCiv penalizes the computer players less than
easier levels. Masters of Orion seems to just place you in a terrible place at
the
beginning more often and allows the computer players to just produce a lot
more than they seem possible (we have no affiliation with MicroProse so we
cannot confirm for certain if this is what they are doing but that is what it
looks like).

4. Most importantly, because the game works on a quadrant level, you
know who is coming to your star systems (assuming they are within sensor range)
and you can attempt to stop them with your military long before they can even
touch
your star system. In MOO, you can literally be helpless to stop a computer
player from just appearing NEXT to your planet and destroying it with bombs.
It also has a shout-out to Spaceward Ho! I'd forgotten that game -- I guess it was a key inspiration for both MOO and GalCiv.

November 15, 1993:

Stardock Systems Inc. (SDS) is pleased to announce the need for beta testers
for "Galactic Civilizations" (TM) multimedia strategy game for OS/2 2.1.

Galactic Civilizations is (as far as we know) the first commercial PM
based game for OS/2. It takes advantage of OS/2 in ways that most applications
don't:

* FULL MMPM/2 sound support
* Software Motion video
* Heavy use of threads
* Work Place Shell aware
* Advanced Artificial Intelligence algorithm.

This game was designed from the ground up to take advantage of OS/2
2.1. It is not a port and it wasn't written to be ported to other platforms.
It is for OS/2 2.1 and above -- PERIOD.

The game has many similarities to Empire, Simcity, Civilization, and Masters of
Orion. It is, in some ways (though inadvertently) a mixture of the above into
one high performance OS/2 game.

Game Features:

- Up to 7 Computer Players against you at once.
- Variable sized Galaxies.
- SDS/AI (tm) .75
- Several different difficulty levels
- Support for 16bit and 24bit color as well as 16 and 256 color modes.
- Unlimited saved games.

Brief game description:

The game is set in the future. The human race has managed to build a
gigantic starship called a Colony Wagon. This Colony Wagon can hold up to
50,000 human colonists along with data banks that hold all of the world's
current technology bases.
During its maiden voyage it encounters a wormhole and is never
heard from again. However, on the other side of the freak wormhole, it finds a
vast area of totally unexplored space. Your starship must find a star system
with planets capable of
supporting human life. Once you set up a colony, you come to
realize that you are all alone and must advance mankind in this unknown area of
space. You have available to you a list of technologies you have within your
grasp enough to research.
By researching new technologies you can build new things
such battleships, starfighters, galactic wonders, planetary improvements, etc.
These things help your people by making them happy, more resourceful, and more
productive.
Unfortunately for you, there are also up to 7 other players who have
one advantage over you and one disadvantage. Their advantage is, they already
know what stars are out there since they didn't just zip out of a worm hole.
Their disadvantage is that they are just
getting into colonizing other worlds so you
have a small technological advantage over them.
Once you come in contact with the computer controlled players, you can
ally with them, ignore them or try to conquer them. The game ends when all of
the remaining players are allied with each other (not an easy thing to do) or
if yo
u technologically advance to the point where you basically are omnipotent. Or
(of course) you destroy all the other players. You can become powerful by being
very rich via trading with other players or having a large and powerful
military.

Your primary goals are:

- Develop new technologies
- Colonize new worlds
- Overpower your enemies
- Keep your people happy

Things that aid you in becoming powerful:

Developing technologies that allow you to build newer weapons,
planetary improvements, and Galactic Wonders. Planetary improvements includes
things such as Planetary Entertainment Centers, Military Academies, and
Currency Exchange O
utposts. Galactic Wonders can include such things as Dyson Rings (NOT spheres
-- impossible!), Deep Thought, and The Star Terror Project.
As your technology advances, so does your weaponry and trading. Your
first star ships don't even have weapons. In later stages of development, your
starships can destroy entire star systems!


Frequently Asked Questions:

# How is your game different than Masters of Orion?

1. GalCiv works off of a Quadrant approach like most science fiction
novels/shows. You view space in terms of quadrants, not the whole galaxy at
once!
2. Star Systems can have many planets in them -- not just one. You
could theoretically have a star system with 20 planets that are just fine for
living on (we've never seen it but it is possible).
3. The difficulty levels affect the AI, not where you start the game.
For example, the hard level of GalCiv penalizes the computer players less than
easier levels. Masters of Orion seems to just place you in a terrible place at
the
beginning more often and allows the computer players to just produce a lot
more than they seem possible (we have no affiliation with MicroProse so we
cannot confirm for certain if this is what they are doing but that is what it
looks like).

4. Most importantly, because the game works on a quadrant level, you
know who is coming to your star systems (assuming they are within sensor range)
and you can attempt to stop them with your military long before they can even
touch
your star system. In MOO, you can literally be helpless to stop a computer
player from just appearing NEXT to your planet and destroying it with bombs.

# How is Galactic Civilizations different from Civilization?

While the names may imply some similarity, the primary things they have
in common are:
A. You try to improve your lot with research and making your people
happy.
B. You compete against other civilizations (hence the word in the
title).
Galactic Civilizations takes place in space. The combat system is
radically different. Your starships have hit points. This way, it is
impossible for a brand new battle ship to be destroyed by some scout ship
simply by having a really bad defense roll.
Galactic Civilizations relies far more on trade than
Civilization. In Civ, no matter how much of a trader you are, the other
players will simply destroy you once they can militarily. In GalCiv, you
establish TWO-WAY
trade routes. Other Civilizations may find themselves financially dependent
on you. Unlike other strategy games, when you run out of money in GalCiv, you
don't lose your social improvements (which is what would happen in an ideal
society
when at war but show me a society that doesn't cut the military before social
security!). In GalCiv, you will find your starships being decommissioned when
you run out of money and you don't get any money back for selling them! A
warmongering Civilization will
think twice about attacking someone who supplies 25% of
their yearly income. Income necessary to maintain that massive war fleet of
theirs.
GalCiv has a working GOTO system.

# Your game sounds like Spaceward HO. What's the difference?

Spaceward HO shows you all the planets you can go to. You know where
they are. In GalCiv, you are free to move anywhere on the map and only know
where star systems are (and hence planets) once they are discovered. Moreover,
GalCiv
works on a star system basis, not a collection of planets. Finally, GalCiv's
planets aren't just specialized worlds. In reality, worlds are typically a
mixture of many things. They aren't either MINERAL worlds or good for living
worlds.
They are a combination of many factors. GalCiv reflects these realities.

# What's so great about your AI?

There is nothing particularly wonderful about our AI except for the
fact that it can be implemented on a PC. The only game that we are aware of
that tries to provide a truly good strategy AI is WarLords2. Unfortunately, it
is a DOS
game which means that the computer players sit there and do nothing while you
move and then have to move while you sit there watching a status bar cross the
screen. Most non-moving decisions can take place while the human player is
doing something. For example, a typical human player takes a few minutes
to complete
a move. This is more than enough time for all computer players to take care of
his bookwork and strategy evolution. Since GalCiv is a native OS/2
application, this bookwork takes place in its own thread
while you move. Even during the
actual portion where the computer players move their pieces, it is done in a
thread. For the few seconds that this occurs you are free to do other things
such as look at statistics for the game or review your worlds.
Let's say, for example,
that they had a 1mhz 386 system and it took 3 minutes for the computer players
to move. While they were moving, you could look over your star systems,
projects, o r even the wealth of statistical information available to you
(we like statistics). The point is, you are never stuck looking at an hour
glass. Some games do have their computer players move fast but none of
them (that we're aware of) do it without requiring the computer players to
cheat. The GalCiv AI does not allow cheating (besides, it's harder to
program them to cheat, we'd have to come up with a second set of rules for
the computer!).


Availability:

The game is scheduled to be released Spring 1994. An early Alpha is being
shown this week at Comdex in the following places:

PSP booth in the main convention center.

and

Programmer's paradise at the Hilton.

The alpha is pretty rough but has an early version of the software motion
picture video interface that IBM wanted to show at Comdex.


BETA TESTING REQUIREMENTS:

Beta testers that are selected will be asked to send $10. Before you scream,
the $10 is mainly a token fee. We have no way of separating the people who are
truly interested in helping us develop a quality OS/2 product and the ones who
want a free look at a new product or worse, free floppy disks. The $10 fee
should
scare off most if not all the non-serious beta testers. We're sorry to have to
do that but just put yourselves in our position and I think you'd agree. We
are only going to have a couple dozen beta testers so we're obviously not going
to get rich off of the beta testing.
=================================================================
To apply for the beta you must have:

OS/2 2.1
Super VGA running at 1024x768x256 colors (we have not optimized for other
display sizes and color depths -- though 16bit color and 24 bit color is
supported even at this point).
8 megabytes of memory
a 383sx-33 or better system.

==================================================================

The final release will require:

OS/2 2.1
VGA or better graphics
8 megabytes of memory (total on system, the game only needs a couple megs but
we don't want people running it on 4-6 megs of memory, we don't want hate
mail).

If, after reading the fee and the requirements you still want to beta test
please send email to the GalCiv project manager at SDS:
 

Frogboy

Stardock
Developer
Joined
Jun 10, 2009
Messages
86
Location
Michigan
That said, I didn't have much memory of the original game, and was talking about Galactic Civilizations 2, the one that released a 15 years ago or whenever it was. I had some limited recollection of playing the Windows port of the OS/2 original. However, when I went looking for screenshots:
gamehi4.jpg

You certainly presaged Master of Orion II here by marrying the Civilization style of colony building to the MOO gameplay. It's kind of uncanny how proto-MOO2 this looks.

Thanks for posting that. Great read! Holy cow, the programmer art. It burns! IT BURNS!

I am pretty sure you are right that MOO1 shipped before GalCiv 1 for OS/2. I was responding to the belief that GalCiv was a clone of MOO and I had started working on GalCiv for OS/2 well before MOO existed.

I was copying Civilization, not MOO. ;)
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
Yeah, "clone" was probably the wrong word. "Kin" maybe would've been closer. Re: programmer art: "Surprisingly, there is even a unique set of graphics and ships for 16.8 million color users!" Clearly we're just looking at poor downsampled art. In full color, the game looked like this:
latest
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
There have been many, many failed attempts to modernize this pillar of the game [Star Control 2's lander sequences] (Star Control III)
Honestly, I thought SC3's solution was great: remove the lander sequences. I guess I liked them well enough in SC2, but they got old. Like Hyperspace flying, the lander was fat that I felt was rightfully trimmed.
The colony management in SC3 was its "lander sequences" and was worse.
 

Cael

Arcane
Joined
Nov 1, 2017
Messages
20,294
Why haven't you received a tag yet?
Why haven't he for claiming I have been banned from this place before? Last I looked, calling out someone for lying isn't a crime or even a bad thing, unless you are of the SJW affiliation.
 

CreamyBlood

Arcane
Joined
Feb 10, 2005
Messages
1,392
Some good finds there MRY , they bring back memories. You know how here we have wars about people that appreciate games vs the unwashed masses?

Back then, even before the WWW actually existed, we had internet, mostly ftp, usenet and lynx and crude WWW (Unix browser Mosaic?).

Anyways, we had Operating system wars. IBM vs Microsoft. IBM was really damn good at tech but embarrasingly clueless at marketing. Probably arrogant, thought they ruled the world. Billy Boy was really good at PR and marketing (Rolling Stones) but obviously shit at tech to this day.

How many years did it take them to get to anything close to OS/2? Win2000 SP3 or something like that? Which was still fucked? And in 2017 we have a holy shit meatballs and convoluted, bizarre and weird thing called Win10. Over two decades later.

Anyways, I was an OS/2 religious fanatic. Bill won. Such a bummer. To think what could have been. Computers that worked, were secure and made sense. Oh well.

I bet you any money there are still some OS/2 machines running ATM machines somewhere on old dusty hardware. Still working.

Enough derailment and trips down memory lane.

EDIT: I bought GalCivs off the shelf at Egghead, to show support. Remember when Gamestop sold PC games and their shelf space started shrinking? Get the analogy? Well, in OS/2's case, loyalty and being a screaming zealot on the internet didn't work. Ho hum. So goes history, eh?
 
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Frogboy

Stardock
Developer
Joined
Jun 10, 2009
Messages
86
Location
Michigan
Back in the day, I used to run a BBS off my Commodore 64. My friend and I who modded it (it was called C-net) became really good friends and he works at Stardock today (wrote our forum code).

But walking through where we all come from illustrates why I'm here as opposed to say a CM who answers to the Communications Lead who answers to the marketing manager who answers to the Director of Marketing who answers to the VP of BizDev who answers to me. :) The best way to find out the unvarnished core gamer views on things is to hang out on RPG Codex and listen.

With regards to the aliens, I wanted to show you guys a 3D model of one of the Measured (one of the aliens). There's many of them in their scene as they communicate through movement and vibration as a group.

11.21.2017-12.34.png


This also helps better demonstrate the art style we're going for in game. This isn't concept art. This is literally one of the aliens fully modeled as it is intended to look.

It's not meant to be cartoony but rather a natural progression of what was in the classic games. Now, translating that into the engine is very challenging, especially if you want to run on a wide variety of hardware.

The difference between this and what you see in the game is a limitation of what we can do in the engine with being able to target a reasonable minimum spec. This is one of the reasons why so many games these days pick a particular "look". Artists don't have a lot of trouble coming up with cool looking stuff. The hard part is making things look good in game while still running on reasonable hardware.

We think by the time the game releases, we'll be able to hit this look.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
CreamyBlood Yeah, early Internet was an interesting place. BBS days were even more ridiculous. Waiting until there was a line to connect to in order to get my turn in on Barren Realms Elite or LORD... good memories.

Frogboy
This is one of the reasons why so many games these days pick a particular "look". Artists don't have a lot of trouble coming up with cool looking stuff. The hard part is making things look good in game while still running on reasonable hardware.
Eh, I would disagree with that. Most games' boring art is a product of aesthetic/art choices, not the dictates of hardware. To pick an easy example, there's no hardware reason why Star Control 3's aliens had to look so offputting. Currently, much of the problem is just the dog-chasing-its-tail phenomenon of AAA developers going for what gamers are buying and gamers buying what AAA developers are selling. (Hence, the long stretch where everything had to be brown.)

With respect to this art, for instance, I doubt the quantity of polygons is really necessary to make it "look good in game," and in any event, you could always use prerendered loops for dialogue rather than doing them in real-time. The quality of the alien art seems less tech dependent than artist dependent. I mean, take MOO3's aliens:

They look pretty nifty to me, even after all this time.
 

Frogboy

Stardock
Developer
Joined
Jun 10, 2009
Messages
86
Location
Michigan
It's not the pixels really it's the lighting.

The aliens in MOO3 were pre-rendered. They're not in-engine (as you mention).

The GalCiv III aliens are pre-rendered too (not in engine). I.e. Videos.

Example:

image_39.png


Jenna, the Earth Commander from GalCiv III, is a fully 3D character. However, she is pre-rendered and then played in game (i.e. not-in engine). Thus, you can't do lip syncing or animation related to the dialog at the moment. In short, we couldn't do her in-engine.

So when designing a character that's going to be in-engine.

The latest Master of Orion does this:

11.21.2017-13.13.png

This alien is in-engine.

The self-shadowing is very impressive. They did a really good job here. I suspect that most of the new MOO budget was spent on this feature. However, I also suspect that the 3D model of this character looks spectacular. It's just a matter of how much time and budget they want to spend replicating their perfected art style in engine.

Civilization V (and VI) also have in-engine aliens. And I know in the case of Civ V, the leaders were the majority of that game's budget.

Thus, when designing an in-engine character, you try to balance these things:

1. Cost
2. Quality
3. Reasonable Hardware requirements

It's not a "pick 2" situation because you try to find the right balance.

So let's go back to Star Control: Origins and the art style there:

11.21.2017-13.19.png


Humans are...well, the worst since we're so used to them.

But you can compare the Commander from the Terran Alliance in GalCiv III and the Commander of Star Control.

The Star Control one is much more stylized. But she has to talk and react. There's 11 hours of dialog in Star Control so you can't really have pre-rendered scenes. It has to be in-engine. So you pick an art style that can handle that and interact with light (which is a strength of the engine).

Here's one last example: Civilization VI.
11.21.2017-13.26.png

In-engine, full lip syincing, etc. This is V2 of the Civ V leader engine. Still cost millions to do but they are able to deliver their chosen art style on screen as intended.
 
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Unkillable Cat

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With regards to the aliens, I wanted to show you guys a 3D model of one of the Measured (one of the aliens). There's many of them in their scene as they communicate through movement and vibration as a group.

11.21.2017-12.34.png


This also helps better demonstrate the art style we're going for in game. This isn't concept art. This is literally one of the aliens fully modeled as it is intended to look.

Cool critter.

It's only today that I've fiddled more with the SC: Origins beta, and I also watched the Star Control 2 Post-Mortem video from GDC '15, where they touched upon one aspect of the ships that I failed to mention earlier: The ships themselves are a part of *showing* aspects of the alien species. The Spathi are cowardly so their ship is fast and fires backwards, the Melnorme are all about colors, the VUX about dragging the enemy down to their level so that they finally have a chance of destroying them, etc.

So just now, while I'm typing this, I booted up SC: Origins again with the intent of playing the Measured ship and seeing what it told me about them.

The Measured ship is not like the other ships. Top-down perspective it looks like the Arilou saucer, but it's more like a tumbling ziggurat. Its propulsion is unique in that it's (almost?) inertialess - you press a direction key, and the ship moves in that direction, instead of the steering/accelerate controls that (almost) all other Star Control ships use. Their primary is a projectile whose trajectory and speed seems to be based upon that of the ship when fired, and their special is a force wave that serves as a great defense mechanism. Overall an interesting ship.

But what did that, combined with the above image, tell me about The Measured?

Not much, but there is a strong hint that they're not from our dimension, based on how their ship isn't bothered by gravity and inertia. They may be from *above* or *below* or possibly even that bizarre dimension known as *Australia*. They look like a lifeform that started out low on the food chain (a plant, bottom-feeder or even a virus) but somehow managed to survive long enough to achieve sentience. The race's name suggests that they may be proud to the point of arrogance due to their origins, and seek self-justification by constantly measuring others against themselves. Or maybe they're just totally freaked out by being on a plane of existence that has three dimensions and they're just learning about concepts like length and height, and LOVE to measure these *anomalies*.

Time will tell whether I'm even in the ballpark with this, but it's a nice exercise.
 

MRY

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Frogboy None of what you're saying is wrong, but a lot of it seems to me to be question begging. The baseline question is whether the main limiting factor on "cool looking" art in computer games is technological (i.e., "the hard part is making things look good in game while still running on reasonable hardware") or aesthetic (i.e., the hard part is conceiving a distinctive, iconic image). But you seem to have restyled the question into whether a series of technical requirements (i.e., the ability to "talk and react" in distinctive ways over 12 hours of dialogue) is feasible without a certain technology (i.e., real-time 3D) at a certain level of cartoon-realism.

I'm not sure the proposition you make is itself true. (There are relatively old real-time 3D games with memorable cartoon aliens, like Outcast, not to mention newer games like V:TM:B or MOTB that did perfectly fine.) But it seems to me that more fundamentally it embeds an assumption about what is necessary for art to "look good" (i.e., that it needs to be real-time, reactive, hours of unique animation, etc.) that is at odds with the experience that we all -- you included! -- experienced. There is plenty of game art that satisfies those criteria but doesn't look particularly good; it just looks like everything else out there. Conversely, there is plenty of game art that satisfies the functional requirements of a Star Control clone without being real-time, reactive, uniquely animated, lip synched, etc., etc.

The alien you showed is plenty neat, but I don't think that having an alien that looks so neat is a tech constraint. This is also a neat, memorable alien:
starflight-2-trade-routes-of-the-cloud-nebula_11.png

So I'm skeptical that the question whether your game's aliens will be aesthetically interesting and memorable (as opposed to technically impressive) is a technological limitation. And I don't believe that the industry is bursting at its seams with visionary artists -- I think like much else, the industry has a way of conforming people to a fairly narrow set of techniques that fill the perceived market need, which isn't the same thing.

Perhaps we're just talking past each other, though.
 

Alienman

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Frogboy This will be a bit off-topic, but since you are in this thread. You guys still own the Sins of a Solar Empire IP? Any plans on doing something with it if that is the case?
Love that game.
 

flyingjohn

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Wait a moment,game companies spend millions to make animated leader scenes?
And not to mention the art style doesn't even look memorable or impressive for most of these games.
 

Frogboy

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The Measured ship is not like the other ships. Top-down perspective it looks like the Arilou saucer, but it's more like a tumbling ziggurat. Its propulsion is unique in that it's (almost?) inertialess - you press a direction key, and the ship moves in that direction, instead of the steering/accelerate controls that (almost) all other Star Control ships use. Their primary is a projectile whose trajectory and speed seems to be based upon that of the ship when fired, and their special is a force wave that serves as a great defense mechanism. Overall an interesting ship.

But what did that, combined with the above image, tell me about The Measured?

Keep in mind we are still in a beta so audio is still stand-in mostly.

What are The Measured? They are the bureaucrats of the Scryve Empire. They are a huge, sentient land reef that organizes the empire.

What does their ship do? Primary weapon are paperwork canisters. Secondary weapon is the demotivator (which is supposed to say things like "Yea, going to need you to come in.." and "Hmmm. Going to need you to fill this out..." (right now it's just a generic sound effect).
 

Frogboy

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Frogboy None of what you're saying is wrong, but a lot of it seems to me to be question begging. The baseline question is whether the main limiting factor on "cool looking" art in computer games is technological (i.e., "the hard part is making things look good in game while still running on reasonable hardware") or aesthetic (i.e., the hard part is conceiving a distinctive, iconic image). But you seem to have restyled the question into whether a series of technical requirements (i.e., the ability to "talk and react" in distinctive ways over 12 hours of dialogue) is feasible without a certain technology (i.e., real-time 3D) at a certain level of cartoon-realism.

I'm not sure the proposition you make is itself true. (There are relatively old real-time 3D games with memorable cartoon aliens, like Outcast, not to mention newer games like V:TM:B or MOTB that did perfectly fine.) But it seems to me that more fundamentally it embeds an assumption about what is necessary for art to "look good" (i.e., that it needs to be real-time, reactive, hours of unique animation, etc.) that is at odds with the experience that we all -- you included! -- experienced. There is plenty of game art that satisfies those criteria but doesn't look particularly good; it just looks like everything else out there. Conversely, there is plenty of game art that satisfies the functional requirements of a Star Control clone without being real-time, reactive, uniquely animated, lip synched, etc., etc.

The alien you showed is plenty neat, but I don't think that having an alien that looks so neat is a tech constraint. This is also a neat, memorable alien:
starflight-2-trade-routes-of-the-cloud-nebula_11.png

So I'm skeptical that the question whether your game's aliens will be aesthetically interesting and memorable (as opposed to technically impressive) is a technological limitation. And I don't believe that the industry is bursting at its seams with visionary artists -- I think like much else, the industry has a way of conforming people to a fairly narrow set of techniques that fill the perceived market need, which isn't the same thing.

Perhaps we're just talking past each other, though.

These are good points. We are talking past each other a bit (my fault for not including the key variable originally): For modern games to sell well, they have to have to meet a certain threshold of visual fidelity. So when designing aliens and choosing art styles you also have to take into account about the cost to light them and animate them in-engine.

The alien from Starflight is awesome and could totally be done today. There's no technical constraint holding back creativity. Only art styles. Thus, if I were to ask for modern versions of the Starflight races, you'd have people argue over whether the style should be "realistic" or "stylized" and if styleized how stylized.

Does that help?
 

Frogboy

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Wait a moment,game companies spend millions to make animated leader scenes?
And not to mention the art style doesn't even look memorable or impressive for most of these games.

You are preaching to the choir. When I retire, I will try to write a book on all the inside stuff that goes into making a game these days.

But let me give you guys some background on a couple topics that many of you already suspected:

Cut-scenes. Cutscenes routinely represent a good portion of a game's budget. Why? Because they work for getting attention in the media and elsewhere.

High fidelity aliens talking and such. They represent the biggest single line item in these games. They add zilch to gameplay. But you have to have them to get mainstream coverage. They're basically marketing.

For Star Control: Origins, we cut down the intro cut scene to almost nill (and it was still very expensive) so that we had budget for the Universe Builder (the in-game system that lets people literally create their own Star Control adventures). For us, that feature is our most expensive feature. But that budget had to come from somewhere which in our case was the intro cut scene. BUT not having an elaborte intro cutscene is going to hurt us a lot in marketing.
 

MRY

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For modern games to sell well, they have to have to meet a certain threshold of visual fidelity.
Do they?
maxresdefault.jpg

720x405bb.jpg

ss_052d698926073e8d407a864f0e63a486af24ec0d.1920x1080.jpg

372092-stardew-valley-playstation-4-front-cover.jpg


Shot11-Jorji.png
ss_410f986c039306545b31560c32b2d39d7cf8771b.1920x1080.jpg

Factorio-header.jpg

Anyway, it's all a little silly because the abstract question of what constitutes good game art, and what conditions can produce it, or what kind of art can sell games, doesn't bear on the concrete question whether your game's art captures the feel of Star Control 2 in an appealing way. I think it does, whatever crazy executive philosophy may lie behind it. :)

EDIT

Cut-scenes. Cutscenes routinely represent a good portion of a game's budget. Why? Because they work for getting attention in the media and elsewhere.

High fidelity aliens talking and such. They represent the biggest single line item in these games. They add zilch to gameplay. But you have to have them to get mainstream coverage. They're basically marketing.
I actually disagree on these points. First, cutscenes can and do add a lot to a game, even to a non-narrative game. For instance, the intro cutscene to Master of Orion 2 shaped my relationship to the game, lending it a mystique, gravitas, and excitement that I'm not sure it would've had without the cutscene. (This point can be even more true for narrative games.) Whether "high fidelity" is necessary for aliens or not, the quality of the alien talking portraits makes a huge difference. It's one reason why Star Control 2 is so memorably good, while Star Control 3 is so memorably bad.

It's true that these features have outsize importance to marketing (like how WEG's trailer of Primordia consisted of all the closeups and explosions in the game), but that doesn't mean their importance to the player is trivial.
 
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Frogboy

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One thing those games have in common is emergent game play.

Ultimately, I think we agree on the same thing: The aliens gotta look good. :)

You can work really hard on aliens and still fail (Star Control III). You can spend tons of money on cut-scenes and the game can fail (Grey Goo).

If there was a recipe for success in games, I'd definitely want to read it.

Ultimately, good games comes down to having good people involved. I wrote about this some in the 25th anniversary article for Star Control II:

http://www.littletinyfrogs.com/arti...25th-anniversary---On-the-shoulders-of-giants

Star Control II combined really good gameplay with amazing creatives and those creatives were created by what turned out to be like the ultimate dream team. Aliens created by famous Sci-Fi artists, the guy who created Darth Maul, Guardians of the Galaxy aliens, etc. Animation done by the guy who went on to do Monsters Inc. and directs the Minions movies. Writing by a host of incredibly talented Sci-fi writers and of course the music.

That is one reason why Star Control II is such a hard act to follow. Mere mortals must tread carefully.
 

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