Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[SealyStar]

Could be really awesome... too bad Notch said it would have minimal textures (only polygons), then justified it as a "retro stylistic" choice, and not just being too lazy to make art. Come on, at least ASCII like DF is a meaningful stylistic choice.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Ya, but half the fun of these games is RP (look how many freakin' rp servers minecraft has) and better graphics = better rp. Terrible graphics are fine just characters need to be look-at-able. Honestly morrowind level graphics would be beast, alas...polygons.

[SealyStar]

Could be really awesome... too bad Notch said it would have minimal textures (only polygons), then justified it as a "retro stylistic" choice, and not just being too lazy to make art. Come on, at least ASCII like DF is a meaningful stylistic choice.

worse graphics, more time to spend on improving gameplay.

I never said "HE NEEDS TO MAKE IT LOOK CRYSIS".
I think that the game would benefit greatly if Notch could be bothered to create even rudimentary textures. But that's not what bothers me, so much as the fact that he thinks he can pass off sheer laziness as a "stylistic choice".

[Sirus]

Could be really awesome... too bad Notch said it would have minimal textures (only polygons), then justified it as a "retro stylistic" choice, and not just being too lazy to make art. Come on, at least ASCII like DF is a meaningful stylistic choice.

worse graphics, more time to spend on improving gameplay.

I never said "HE NEEDS TO MAKE IT LOOK CRYSIS".
I think that the game would benefit greatly if Notch could be bothered to create even rudimentary textures. But that's not what bothers me, so much as the fact that he thinks he can pass off sheer laziness as a "stylistic choice".

Y'know, like DF or Nethack. Or Space Empires, or Aurora, or any number of other games

[SealyStar]

Could be really awesome... too bad Notch said it would have minimal textures (only polygons), then justified it as a "retro stylistic" choice, and not just being too lazy to make art. Come on, at least ASCII like DF is a meaningful stylistic choice.

worse graphics, more time to spend on improving gameplay.

I never said "HE NEEDS TO MAKE IT LOOK CRYSIS".
I think that the game would benefit greatly if Notch could be bothered to create even rudimentary textures. But that's not what bothers me, so much as the fact that he thinks he can pass off sheer laziness as a "stylistic choice".

Y'know, like DF or Nethack. Or Space Empires, or Aurora, or any number of other games

Note how all those are 2D. 2D ASCII is completely different from having untextured polygons. You can mod in graphics for all of those, but that's not what they're made for. Now, think about flying through space, in your flat gray ship, looking at the bland polygon rust-red asteroids...

[Sowelu]

Games that don't take place in a literal 3d volume (roguelikes primarily) are good candidates for abstract graphics, because it's nearly impossible to represent what's actually happening in graphics.  Mainly because it often doesn't make sense (oh, right, five red dragons in a small hallway).

Aurora and Spare Empires also have a lot of abstraction, and meter-for-meter differences aren't very important.  In Aurora you can stack hundreds of ships on one point, and it's reasonable.  You can design your ships however you see fit and imagine them whatever you like, without having to actually arrange the rooms.  (Good luck doing that with engineering spaces, btw.)

For those games, it's not laziness, or an artistic statement; it's merely the only way it can possibly work.

Hazeron needs a fair amount of graphics because there's FPS-style combat, and walking around inside a ship matters:  Where are the walls?  Where is that door, which might be venting atmosphere?  Which windows can I see out of?  And BECAUSE you spend a ton of time staring at the graphics, well, you don't want to stare at something ugly.

Also, things like Noctis?  Exploring a galaxy full of amazing sights was a huge draw to that game, even if they haven't aged well (and weren't necessarily thrilling to begin with).

[Sirus]

Could be really awesome... too bad Notch said it would have minimal textures (only polygons), then justified it as a "retro stylistic" choice, and not just being too lazy to make art. Come on, at least ASCII like DF is a meaningful stylistic choice.

worse graphics, more time to spend on improving gameplay.

I never said "HE NEEDS TO MAKE IT LOOK CRYSIS".
I think that the game would benefit greatly if Notch could be bothered to create even rudimentary textures. But that's not what bothers me, so much as the fact that he thinks he can pass off sheer laziness as a "stylistic choice".

Y'know, like DF or Nethack. Or Space Empires, or Aurora, or any number of other games

Note how all those are 2D. 2D ASCII is completely different from having untextured polygons. You can mod in graphics for all of those, but that's not what they're made for. Now, think about flying through space, in your flat gray ship, looking at the bland polygon rust-red asteroids...

Flotilla. Flat untextured polygons. Admittedly colorful, but still polygons.

[Sirus]

Nothing kills an argument like a broken link

Try this.

[SealyStar]

It works for Flotilla because Flotilla is completely abstract. Not to mention that that's got a lot of rounded shapes, which, knowing Notch, won't be the case with the 0x10c ship, and it'll look like something from Star Fox on the SNES.

[Sowelu]

Hey now Star Fox was awesome.

However it ALSO had some sprites, and when it did, they were generally well drawn.  That's important.

[Sonlirain]

Well minecraft had low minimal sys specs so you could almost play it on a microwave oven.
And i personally don't mind bad graphics if the gameplay is allright.

[Girlinhat]

I think this is up to implementation.  People are like "Baww untextured polygons suck" but Minecraft made do with like 32x32 graphics per cube face, right?  If done poorly, you end up with a slate grey ship sitting atop a mud brown asteroid.  If done right, you can get a lot of creative graphical appeal for minimal system stress.  Tasteful use of low graphics can result in surprisingly beautiful scenes.  You don't need HD to be pretty.  And I'm not talking about abstract graphics either, like how DF shows a dwarf as an abstract ☺, but real honest-to-god graphics can be done very well using very little, if done right.

[sambojin]

I thought Elite style graphics was the point. Acorn Elite had quite nice graphics, that represented the game well. So did Elite 2 and 3.

Looking at those screenshots before, it looks like there will be some texturing. Or that asteroid and planet are made up of god-alone-knows how many polygons. Either way, it will probably work quite well.

In space games, colour and lighting do a hell of a lot of the "cool, we're in space" heavy lifting. Some abstraction is good, because it's in the future and you're in a spaceship and you're going to alien planets. We don't have a particularly good frame of reference to what it would really look like, so abstraction covers that hole up nicely. Better to have good looking polygons then badly drawn art/textures/concepts. Polygons are fine. Look at X-wing, or TIE-Fighter, or Elite 2. They all had graphics that were fine for their genre (and admittedly, their era). The retro-space-game-graphics look is good if done right. Look at the characters in the few screenshots before. That's some pretty nice lighting effects just there. I can imagine there will be a lot more.

[SealyStar]

Well minecraft had low minimal sys specs so you could almost play it on a microwave oven.

No, since Minecraft is coded in highly-inefficient Java, it's actually really system-taxing. It's a common complaint.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

I agree with Girlinhat, it'll be fine if done right.

And star fox...well...ugh.