The example images are excellent, and I would love for the lander experience to emulate environments like that. I don't think it's a justification for geographic features being so easily visible from space though. GnarlyFurtado is right, and I concur.

Unless a planet is only a hundred miles in diameter, it makes little sense for these beautiful geographic features to be visible from tens or hundreds of thousands of miles away. It's just a simple matter of scale. And gravity. Such features would only be visible upon getting into a very tight orbit or entering the atmosphere.

Geography can't poke out that far into orbit due to gravity, so it wouldn't be visible from space. Very small objects like asteroids aren't spherical because they don't have enough mass to create their own gravitation, so they generally resemble something like a potato because they never became spherical. This is a large part of what the theory of general relativity explained about our universe.

There's also the fact that without gravitation, planets also would not form atmospheres, which is why asteroids are also completely barren. And on, and on. Violating one law of physics has a chain effect of suddenly violating a whole bunch of other ones.

I get what Stardock is trying to do and this is of course a fantasy where ships have advanced sensors et al, but physics is still physics and I think it's a strawman argument to play the "fantasy card" to explain away creative liberties being taken with our established knowledge of the cosmos.

It's a shame to purposefully go to such an extreme with planet design when there are much simpler ways (e.g. using exaggerated colors and textures) to make planets easily identifiable for exploration from a distance without also violating our understanding of how general relativity and gravity actually shape planets.

Well, I'm in favor of the current design. If all else fails Stardock can obviously provide a planetary z-scaling option in the settings that allows you to determine the degree of exaggeration (from current to none).

In contrast, I think it is crazy to to demand physics-accurate planets; but also demand aliens that are portrayed grimly realistic, surrealistic, and cartoony zany with exaggerated dimensions depending on the alien. Playing the "StarControl2 did it" card to explain away the creative liberties taken with our established knowledge of the cosmos and how evolution works.

What about artistic integrity? 

What about the wholly unrealistic relative scale used for the size of the star, planets and space ship? We know how gravity works on a planetary scale - showing the star and the planets in that relation to each other (as shown in SC2) requires the star to be ultra dense; a neutron star in many cases but sometimes dense enough to be a black hole. Why use these scales when they are hopelessly inadequate at showing what we understand about the universe? 

That aside, there are simple steps taken with modern (current) equipment to render elevation maps (i.e. geographic features) at faux heights to make them more apparent and easier to study; no need to invoke sci-fi. What you are saying is that you only accept a solar-system where the planets are portrayed as if you look at them through really good binoculars. You won't allow for the case where your ship systems do thermic, barometric, geographic and other scans and compiles those into an enhanced rendering (as is used by scientists, the industry, and the military currently).

I don't think invoking realism is a particularly good way of arguing in favor of the classic visualization.

Spores design and current planet design seems fine to me.

Sorry, but this is pretty much a Straw Man.

What about it?

Your argument is moot. Every single representation of the universe is inadequate at showing what "we understand about the universe." Realism is an artistic convention, but waxing on the exact structure of cellulose fibers while describing a wooden table isn't necessarily part of it. 

Again, you seem to misunderstand what realism, as a convention, actually is. To claim the "classic visualization" is "not realism" you've synthesized your own definition of the term.

Yeah, I wanted to call this a straw man argument too, but I wasn't inclined to start a debate as to why.

Fantasy and reality are not all-or-none aspects and are not mutually exclusive. They can peacefully coexist in this medium without compromising one another.

Here is an idea regarding planets and the scanning thereof. I definitely agree that extremely exaggerated features should not be viewed from space. That aside, it doesn't mean that the world is boring or featureless, quite the opposite actually. The world can be incredibly diverse and beautiful, some with thick atmospheres, mountains, lakes spires, and a whole bunch of exiting and sometimes exaggerated features, but in order to see them fully the player must initiate a scan.

I don't know about you, but one of the things that made SC2 great was exploring. And a big element in that was the scanning experience. The look of the planet from space gave you a general Idea of what to expect, but to truly delve deep and understand what the planet had to offer you, you had to fire up your incredibly advanced scanners to penetrate the atmosphere and scan the whole surface, to find your minerals, biology, and your artifacts. 

I imagine that SCR can have a similar experience, in order to see the planet in all its glory you have to scan it first. Perhaps going along with the idea and plan of upgrading the mothership (another important factor of SC2) you can give your ship better and better scanning tech, allowing you to scan from further and further distances, with the scan taking less and less time to complete, and perhaps revealing more detailed information on the planets contents, and surface. The joy of finding, and mining, and hunting on many interesting worlds and places was part of what made SC2 (in my "humble" opinion) a great game that was fun to play. 

Please bear in mind that this is just an idea, and a simple one at that. I do not wish to offend. If you wouldn't mind thinking about, and posting feedback about it, that would be great. 

Don't think about the new ones for a moment...

Think about the old ones...Really!  Stop and think about them.  They were...circles.  That's it.  Blue.  Red.  Yellow sometimes.  From space, they were NOTHING to look at.  We remember them so fondly because of our experiences on them.  Stardock is promising an even better experience on them soon, and I, for one, am happy to wait for that before coming to a conclusion.

Artistically, it's impossible to NOT improve over the SC2 planet designs, so let's see how gameplay interfaces with the art, and then we'll have a good idea of the new art direction actually "works."

The problem with this attitude is that if you reserve judgment until you see the finalized planets, it'll be way too late. We need to talk about this right now if we want to have any chance at all of swaying Stardock from their current design. Staying passive solves nothing, given that there's something worth solving of course. 

I think a lot of you are missing the importance of the word "controversial" that I used in my first post. In this case I meant that people will typically feel very strongly either for or against this planet design, with little middle ground. That's not a good foundation to build a game upon. One doesn't have to please everyone, but this kind of controversy should be avoided where possible. The risk is that debates about the design ends up overshadowing the game itself. 

Agreed, though based on how the posts have gone since this thread began, I think the initial "shock" has worn off and we are starting to realize that we may have all jumped the gun a tad on both sides of the argument. I also agree that we don't want arguments on graphical choices to overshadow the gameplay and story but as we have neither at the moment, we chose the one thing we had been given greater detail on to debate.

For me personally, I am trying to remember the staying power of the appearance of certain older games vs. newer ones. Ex. Donkey Kong Country on the SNES vs. Donkey Kong Country on N64. The SNES game was and still is beautiful despite it's age while N64 was the far more powerful system, it's early attempt at more realistic 3d graphics are far uglier to look at. More common example Final Fantasy 7 vs 8 on ps1. 7 was exaggerated and 8 went for realistic. Look at them today and 8 is visually less appealing too look at. So holding judgment on exaggerated vs. realistic while still arguing both points I think is exactly where we want it to be right now.

I don't know man, final fantasy VII looks just _terrible_ to my eyes, I'd say the cautionary tale lies with FFVII here honestly, they had the new median of 3d graphics  and decided to change to it for the sake of change, abandoning the tried and true 2d format that still had room to be tidied up graphically, as a result people have something that looks like absolute ass years down the line.

Cartoony absolutely provides a bit of a buffer against age but it doesn't provide an absolute one, Conker's Bad Fur day as the first example that popped into mind doesn't look great these days. I suspect we've hit the graphical age where things can still look passable despite age as we go forward regardless of what look you go for.

I think the concern that I and a few other people share is the idea that if there is nothing to ground our experience in reality in the game if everything feels 'cartoony' then we're not going to be able to form the same attachments to cast and characters. We need some anchors to reality to make things feel more real and immersive, planets and other things that we actually know about seem logical choices for this.

@JudgeYohance

HOMM2 looks tons better than HOMM3 even with the lower resolution.

@Precursors_TiLT

You haven't seen anything but a ONE measly CONCEPT picture. SD isn't revealing anything else, 'cause they're either sure their planets look fantabulous and everyone's gonna drool over them OR they give less care for anyone's opinion and will make it per their design anyway. I don't think discussing it further is gonna help anyone at this point.

I think we, the people that dislike the current design of the planets, have made our point quite clear, Precursors_TiLT. SD reads this forum, so they know what we think about the topic. We've come at loggerheads over this, and I believe that, rather than talk this to death, arguing the same points over and over with different words, a wait-and-see attitude is in order.  Of course, I'm speaking only for myself.

Couldn't agree more. At this point it is up to SD to do what they will with our feedback. Further arguing among ourselves cant really do much. We have said just about all there is to say regarding the topic. Now all we can really do is wait and see what happens.

Though I do wonder, if it all boiled down to a simple vote among the founders regarding the planet desighn, how many would support a carton desighn vs a realistic desighn? 

^ You haven't even seen the in-game design. What are you gonna poll, an idea? Besides, this forum doesn't even have a built-in poll system as far as I explored, unfortunately. I dunno how viable it'd be to use strawpoll.me ... Also, Founders' opinion will always be different from the opinion of an average user, 'cause of dedication and commitment.

As Precursors_TiLT put it: once we see the in-game design, it will be too late for anything to change.

Polling is a valid way of knowing what the Founders, as a group, think.  Now, it might not be representative of the average user's opinion, but that's still the reason we're here: to give our opinion. Our applications were reviewed one by one. I think they know who they're dealing with. I would only be half-surprised to learn that we're catalogued by personality / experience profile.

Too late to change? Who said you can make them change anything at all? Unless it's a total off the wall design decision that's rejected by 90% of the founders and causes a massive uproar in a form of hate/bash threads, you're not gonna make them change a thing. And the planet art isn't even close to being rejected. Sure, poll'd be nice. Here it is:

POLL

So true... its safe to assume SCR is still in early development, far from Alpha, so now is the time to discuss things.  And the more we discuss it, the more SD will notice - they are active here so I'm sure they're reading everything and taking note, otherwise what's the point of having the Founder's program at all?

This thread is the most popular in the Founders area, SD won't ignore what we say here.  Whether they choose to act on it or not is another matter...

We're essentially a die-hard focus group for SD, so polling is a great idea to gauge first reactions and opinions.  And the more the better, so SD has as must info as possible.

I think you posted the wrong link hunam. The link you gave only took me to the voting results. 

Here is the corrected link to humans poll (I simply removed the /r :)): http://strawpoll.me/6292325/

I would suggest voting on this poll. It would be a great idea to see whether or not the majority or minority of founders dislike or like the art direction. 

^ sorry, fixed the link

POLL

OP, maybe you can embed this in your original post?

Looks like SD disabled <iframes> in their forum.  NM.

I wonder if frogboy will vote 

voted. I like polls. I think it's not a bad way to get at a glance feedback. I also totally respect their ability to completely ignore feedback. I'm a UI designer (actually, now I manage UI developers and designers) and also oversee UX research - and it's very very common that people are outspoken that they dislike something, don't want it, and then when they actually get a good version of it, then can't live without it. It doesn't always work this way - and a major part of my job is figuring out when a strong willed designer is right and when overwhelming user feedback is right. (A good example is phones with touch screens. Most users were saying they hated touch screens before they were finally done right.) 

So I'm sure that they're reading this, taking this all in, and then weighing it against the many other factors and research. I don't think there's ever a good reason to not talk about something we have feedback on. As professionals, they've got their filters set up so they know when to tap us and when to decide they have to take a leap. A lot of times on game forums fans wail on about not being listened to, but the game industry probably listens to its fans more than any other creative industry from what I've seen. 

Polling only works if everyone participates and there is no way to enforce complete participation. If people don't participate your information is skewed and is actually more harmful than good. 

The Founders are not a committee and will never be treated as such. Each Founder is an individual with a voice that is not stronger or weaker than any other peer or group of peers. There is no group voice for the founders only individuals. 

The Founders are also a single data point in the development of this game. There has been some great feedback with regards to all aspects of the game that has been talked about, and we want to hear it all positive and negative.  

^ To talk about something meaningfully we need something more than just a measly ringtone. 

Grounding in reality isn't the point, or the main point, of a Star Control game.  Space, actual space, is light-years of blackness and nothing, with pin-pricks of rock, dust, and gas. Space travel is months of waiting and drinking recycled pee-water. :P  We've found no evidence for aliens, let alone dozens of species across the cosmos. 

The very thing that makes a Star Control game good is that it is NOT based in reality. We plant weird and comic aliens, and shorten months of travel to seconds or minutes. We fill the blackness with planets, stars, life, and excitement.  We roll over convenient mineral deposits to "mine" them.  We woo space-babes with black-screens and funny dialogue.  None of that is close to reality!  Go work at SETI for a week.  I guarantee 95% of us would be bored to tears after the second day. 

I'm not prepared to throw any idea under the bus that has been put forth yet, because Star Dock has a great history of making Space exciting and interesting.  In fact, the only real frustration I'm feeling at this point is that there is so little to do or talk about yet.  I look forward to more content in the vault, and more glimpses of the game, so that we can talk about, and get excited about, more aspects of the game. 

I agree, the whole game will have to be contiguous with the planet design for it not to stick out like a sore thumb.  What LITTLE I've seen of it so far gives me hope that it is going to be that way.  If it's not, our opinions WILL matter to Stardock, otherwise they wouldn't have asked us for them. 

Live long, and keep prospering.