Planet textures
 

Seriously dear devs, THIS is supposed to be a "small" colony??? Half the planet is boasting with city lights.

And this is not the only example. I don't get it. Is there no communication with the graphic artists creating the textures? You did a better job with the New Romulus planet texture...

If you look carefully, there are only a handful of actual planet textures. Many are just inverted or rotated variants of other textures. That texture right there is used for at least 3 different planets, and it's also in the exploration cluster missions too.

It's not that there's no communication. It's just laziness. Particularly in older maps like that one.

That screenshot shows Narendra III, which has just been added to the game with the recent Season 7 patch...

If they simply take the planet textures from the shelf of exsting, old ones, then why can't Cryptic at least pick appropriate ones?! I know there are M-class textures without city lights.

This is a minor issue which however, GREATLY affects immersion!

Oh really? Oh well. :rolleyes:

This is possibly the biggest problem with the game period. :( The textures don't look right, and everything is off scale. If the game looked more like actual Star Trek stuff, I think everyone would be a lot happier. :(

Definitely. So far, Cryptic seems to tend towards exaggerations wrt planet textures. If it is an "inhabited" planet, even if it is merely an outpost or a colony of a few thousand, they would repeatedly use Coruscant-like (tm) textures oO

The looks of most planets in the game are qualitatively poor anyways... Textures may not only be wrong but also of extremely low resolution. One can only hope that Cryptic will be able to incorporate a major planet graphics-overhaul in a future season... doubt it, though.

Reuse of existing planet materials is usually due to schedule and time limitations. We could spend a bunch of time painting brand new textures for a planet you only see briefly, or we could spend that time dressing up the ground map, or adding cooler landmarks/more detail.
I know everyone's going to say that's a cop out, but I assure you that's what it comes down to.

I wouldn't expect a full overhaul. Perhaps we can try to plan to paint new planet textures for future work, or for key planets.

As for resolution, most of our planets are using texture maps that are the maximum size we can use already. There is not much more to be done about that. Even when you apply a 2048x2048 texture to a sphere, if you blow that sphere up to thousands of kilometers across, that texture is going to break down some.

Procedural planet texturing is pretty quick and great results, well when i do em in lightwave they are. Photoshop was is ok and does nice results too but takes too long imo. Id rather just do a sphere in lw and bake a procedural texture on.

texture is not the problem IMO, Scale is. There is only one planet ingame that seems to be to scale which is Vega. Any chance you could go through and make all the planets bigger?

Thanks for hopping in tacofangs :)

Resolution is not the primary concern. As I said, the major immersion-killer are Coruscant-like planets which are supposed to represent a scarcely populated world. That should be an issue that could be fixed relatively easily by simply picking "random_planet_texture_01_m-class_no_lights.png" instead of "random_planet_texture_02_m-class_multiple_lights.png" ;)

just a thought: less maps more stuff to do there.

if you make 2000 space maps where you fly in a circle to scan 5 clickies and warp out, that is quantity over quality and things like planet textures get re-used frequently, because it doesn't really matter anyway.

Instead Planets that you re-visit a lot, like say New Romulus or Defera in multiple Questlines for multiple reasons, results in quality over quantity.


and what would i give to have tech like this in STO http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5gb2XfjW0U
imagine doing that with a Runabout... or X-Wing... or Viper...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL8zDgTlXso

add a persistent universe, and Foundry style tools to populate this stuff with content + some canon via a Planetary Wiki (so we don't end up having 500 different species living on the same Planet).

*dream* maybe in Star Trek Online 2?




But really... wouldn't it be possible to just put 4, 9 or 16 2048x2048 textures on one "sphere" to increase resolution? (not that i think it would be necessary, but if your engine can not handle bigger textures, then just split up the picture into more texture files and puzzle them together while placing them?....)

*still wants to know why the texture slider in video options goes to 200% if it is not used*