The dev's have stated many times that having animated turrets will cause unacceptable performance hits. Besides most people play zoomed far enough to where you wouldnt notice any animations anyway. This is a dead issue. It aint gonna happen

Actually the honest answer they gave after the discussion, was that it would take too much time to do and implement it and that they will take a second look at it after the release.

The stuff about performance has really no base in reality (there are older games with much lower performance requirements which have moving parts on unit models and have more units on the screen at one time) and can't be used against moving turrets as an argument.

Lack of time to implement it though, is perfectly reasonable.

Not so suspicious when you consider that the people you're dumping on the planet are really just the government, not the populace (they're already there).

And ridiculous system requirements...

And again, its been done to death already.

Daton supcom is an exception to EVERY extreme, its a terrible comparison.

I like the new kol too. and as has been said, its okay if it looks different in style from the other tec ships. only ship in the armada that was originally built for combat, rest of them are converted from other uses, for those who still missed that info.

I will miss the old kol and all of its weirdness...

Will this mean other TEC ships might get updated looks, cause in that case make the Akkan pretty.

nope

I can accept the animated turret arguement, it really isn't going to deliver much visable benefit given the normal zoom level you play at.

I can accept the other TEC ships need to look old/industrial compared to the Kol to fit the storyline.

But looking old doesn't have to mean looking like 'a flying cat litter tray' as in the case of the TEC Dreadnought.

Its the quality of the Kol that needs to be replicated in the other models not the look and feel. Consider the case of Bioshock where the Devs made old look beautiful or the countless WWII games.

If IC are out of development time, then I guess thats that you can't say you weren't warned.

Imagine if Crytek said 'yeah well you see on this level of Crysis there was a forest fire before you arrived and thats why you can't see any tree's and the textures are all the same dark grey, its all part of the story'.

Come on you know it needs to be done, are we going for game of the year here or not?   Just pause the countdown for a few weeks no one will mind, if your investors and publisher give you a hard time we'll giv em a good shoeing for you.

You are, quite simply, wrong. SupCom's scale is far higher than SoaSE's, and has many more movable parts - even using their wasteful system (which, by the way, isn't the turrets - it's the actual projectile calculation, something SoaSE doesn't have anyway).

What's actually completely analogous to SoaSE's scale is Homeworld and Homeworld 2. And those had animated turrets. Even on corvettes. The "performance drain too big" excuse is a blatant lie - everyone with even a modicum of engine coding experience can see that.

That's way the answer to that is lack of time to develop and implement it and not resource drain.

But it already has been discussed to death and it won't be changed. :/

Btw. a bit offtopic.



That's something I've never understood about SupCom. TA Spring has also projectile calculation (I've shout down nimble scout planes with the heavy artillery) but it doesn't use that amount of processing power that Supcom needs.

That's because SupCom units generally fire much faster, their projectiles have a longer livetime, and because the unit's also calculate what they can fire at based on 3-4 different layers of counter-intelligence. In addition to a shield-layer that also acts as a collision box for projectiles.

I dont give a flying crapping cahoot about their wasteful system, moving turrets is a waste of processing power thats not going to be of any use in the end.

you kidding me? I love love LOVE the Marza, I even think it looks better than the current Kol!

Homeworld might not be the best example to compare Sins against over turrets. Homeworld only had what, a hundred ships max when all sides were added up (also a lot lower res than Sins). Sins has to keep in memory a lot of planets, stars, asteroids, debris, nebula stuff, weapon effects AND sometimes close to a thousand ships. It also has to do it on an average level machine so the devs can actually make some money in terms of sales

It has also already been said that there will be little visual gratification for turrets due to the distance players view the battle at.

Still, if the devs can add a turret effects patch at a later date, I know I would be extremely happy.

They can't do that. The advertising is already "in the pipeline" and can't be delayed. Ergo, they must release on schedule. I'm sure they'd love to do this to a blizzard style "its done when its done", but they can't do so. They're a much smaller development house that, simply put, can not afford to do so. Blizzard doesn't need advertising -- its so big that if it released an empty box everyone would buy it -- and Ironclad Games, and Stardock, are small enough to need advertisement. Especially when breaking out into a "new" genre.

I don't think the wider gaming comunity is going to be as forgiving when they see it.

Yeah, but the gaming community is going to get a completed version, not this incomplete beta. Where there will be even more units to help make it clear that the variation isn't cliche'd different units -> different roles -> same balance setup.

there always has been, and always be noobish complaints. saying the TEC and Vasari are "closely related" is utter dribble, theres no way to feasibly wipe it out.

So here we have a screenshot from Eve:Online Trinity, not much going on here so this could easily be an RTS view as well as an FPS view before anyone brings up the genre argument. It merely serves as an example for computer generated graphics 2007/2008 for a space environment.



Now you could drop the SoaSE Planets, TEC Kol, TEC Colony Frig or Vasari Fighters into this picture and they wouldn't look out of place, kudos to IC job well done. You couldn't however add the other capships, frigs, cruisers or structures they would look clearly out of place and sit better with a screenshot from the Homeworld line.

More than anything else this is what I see as being the biggest weak point for SoaSE the divide in quality. There are some nice screenshots in the media section which I assume are from the single player campaign or Advent race which show good promise.

I'm only badgering on about it cos IC are almost there, and should have time for these sorts of minor changes in a release patch for around Feb08.

ok well SoaSE is NOT Homeworld. Homeworld is like a reference point that we are using to compare an amazing space based game to! So what if some ships look out of place? The overall game compensates big time. Yes some expectations of the Vasari were unment, but so what? This is BETA guys, just imagine what its going to be like after Beta.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!  

I think his point is that the models don't look good compared to what they could be.

EVE/Homeworld doesn't have a couple hundred ships on the screen at once.

No, they don't. And, generally, Sins doesn't try that either (Exactly how often do you have a couple hundred ships on screen in model form instead of icon form? That "excuse" works for turrets because they require CPU resources to move even if you can't see them moving, they don't cease to exist in icon form.)

And, let me also point out that a part of his point is that the Kol could in there and it wouldn't look to bad. As well as fighters, colony frigate, and planets in general.

since we are at it can we compare Company of heros to the graphics in say Call of Duty?
No, we can't. I can look at the models and eve and tell you right out their geometry limits are a lot higher than they are in sins. It's not due to any quality issues coming out of the art department. Give a modeler at ironclad a 10000 poly limit, I'm sure they'd produce some steller results. This is an RTS guys. It's a game that is running off your computers, not game servers. Everything in the game needs calculating. We can't cheat like you can in FPS's. I'm sure eve couldn't ahve 10000+ units showing on screen at once like multi managed to pull off.

I do though agree, eve does look nice. but it's a very different kind of game. The expectations for the cpu and gpu are probably very different.

I wasn't nessescarily refering to his point, there have been lots of compariosns to HW and Supcom. Its just irritateing to keep seeing "wow this reminds me so much of HW" Would tou like it if you put your work out and get a lot of "wow that looks a lot like something else"?