I always feel like I'm walking the tight rope between cheerleader for the project and troll of the project. We have a long time to work on the game and we're doing very well schedule-wise. But taking Galactic Civilizations into the 3D (engine wise) has many perils. 

Internally there was some confusion on the overall visual direction for the game. For me, it should LOOK like a game. Early on I made clear that I did not want it to look like Homeworld or something. That's my issue with 3D, I don't think these games look very realistic so instead I want to make it look like a game.  But in my view, too much of our graphics look like a simulation and not a game. So we're in the process of "punching up" some of the artwork and graphics so that there is more contrast, and an overall "cleaner look" to the game.  Our ships will be very detailed and so will our planets, but we want the ships to be more stylized than realistic.

Let me give you an example of realism vs. fun.  In real space, only stars are significant light sources. That means that the dark side of a planet should be pretty darn dark.  Well, that's a bit of a problem if you think about it.  It can become quite tedious to try to see planets at a glance on the map if often times you may not be able to see the planet at all if the dark side is facing you.  But that's how it was at one point.  We all thought that would be cool and the 3D engine let us do it.  So since then we've turned up the ambient lighting a lot.  But the same is true on ships and such.  They react to light but how lit should they be on their own?

In Galactic Civilizations 1, this wasn't an issue. The ships were completely lit on their own by magic. I.e. they were sprites:

Galactic Civilizations 1

Galactic Civilizations 2

So right now, I immediately have problems. First, the ships are not anywhere nearly as good. This is going to be hard to solve but it'll have to be solved. In GalCiv 2, since you can zoom in on ships as much as you want, the coolness of the ships depends a lot on how close you are.  But as a practical matter, this is the level they'll be looking at it from and they better look cool at this level. They had better look as good as the first game's ships were.

Next, look how dark it is (and there's a glitch in the current build where it's even darker by default based on the range of the ship but this shot is already as light as I can get it by selecting the planet).  There's hardly any stars for instance.  So we'll have to find a way to solve that so that there's a lot more visual flair.

Another shot from GalCiv 1:

The Drengin Empire's ships were greenish with some brown highlights. It'll be interesting to see if we can have that kind of flair on our ships along with a lively background like this.

It apparently isn't as easy as one might think to have a lively background in 3D. Tiling a bitmap of stars and such apparently has issues as one zooms in and out. I am skeptical on that as I tend to think that we can get away with a nice big old tiled background. And don't forget we'll need to get parallax scrolling in there.

The tactical map is nice.  Ironically, one can almost imagine that the "hard core" GalCiv players will end up playing the game in this mode.  It's not quite ready for prime time though.  There is this concern about making the ship icons too small.  Part of it has to do with just them being too small to see and the other is having them be so small that the icons won't be able to be nice.  I tend to take the view that you can get away with a lot with 12x12, 16x16, 20x20, and 24x24 icons in terms of how descriptive they are.

Basically the more powerful the unit/fleet is, the bigger the icon will appear. So you'll be able to glance and if you see a big capital ship icon(s) coming your way, you're in trouble.  This part of the game I'm pretty happy with.

The new planet screen is still a work in progress. Mostly in terms of UI that is.  What's going to be cool is that many planets will be totally unique from game to game (the good planets that is).   The UI is still a bit awkward (so what you see here will likely change quite a bit between now and the final game).  The map itself I think needs more visual help. It's probably near the point where the graphics developers can start working with it.  I've coded planetary terrain making before and I can say that Paul's work on creating maps that don't look like fractals is fantastic here. Any developer can looking at the land masses can probably appreciate the skill there.  My beef has more to do with making sure that there's more texture on the planet.

Here's my lame attempt.

Right now:

vs.

It's amazing what a little texture will do.

And if we could do this mostly on mountains you could end up with a cool thing.

This is just a quick whip-up of things but what I think the planets need is for it to be pretty obvious and styleized on which sectiosn of a planet can be enhanced and which parts are desolate.

Then punch it a bit further so that the desolate areas are really desolate.

I did this by going through the uninhabitable sectors and using a more brownish hue to them.

Of course, here's the problem with my solution: Galaxy generation.  Applying a texture as I describe is time consuming.  You can have either unique planets that aren't as cool looking each game or you can have pre-canned planets that are pretty cool looking.

My suggestion is to do both.  Class 0 through 9 planets are pre-generated planets.  And class 10 (earth-like) and above would be unique.  And in a pinch, we could have the texturing algorithm go in the background starting from Earth and then going out in a circular pattern in a background thread once the game begins. After all, the player isn't going to see the outlying planets for awhile.  But hopefully it won't come to that as that's a lot of work.

As nit-picking as I may sound here, it's worth nothing that Galactic Civilizations I's graphics were so bad that we couldn't even do box shots until 3 months before release.  Here we're about a year before release and much of the game is working already. So we have a lot of time to polish this stuff up. But since I'm going to San Fran next week to demo this and we want to get some previews, the graphics are going to have to be reasonably decent much ealier.

Progress is starting to go very fast now and we've got a great team -- the complete GalCiv 1 team plus the Political Machine team plus Paul K! I'm totally jazzed about the new game features. Just totally scared about getting it all together for the March beta!