DEVBLOG: VFX UPGRADES IN ATHENA - discussion thread

[NQ-Wanderer]

Dear Noveans, let us know your thoughts on our latest VFX devblog right below!

[Atmosph3rik]

Love to see my big red ship in the warp test 😁.

 

But it's only half finished, and if you wipe the game it'll take me a year to get back to the point where i can continue working on it.

[Mncdk1]

The new darker skybox is a welcome revision. The BP preview is about time.

 

The water I don't really care about.

 

The warp animation I do care about though. It looks like someone ate a bag of skittles and threw up on the screen.

[Emma Roid]

How about a decision about that possible wipe?. Does not make much sense to play, or post updates while we are in the dark

[RektDad]

Love the graphics updates - nice work!

[Wolfram]

I loved the new skybox and was very excited for the water, but as I mentioned on the PTS feedback thread, the water surface now seems to be very transparent, you can literally see the bottom ground instead of the water, with just a few ripples and foam above, which takes all depth feeling away. Would be nice if water had a second pass and was a bit more visible again.

[xTru]

I like how updates are happening so often now, it makes me belieeeeve brother.

The new warp effect feels cheap tho, I think I prefer the old one.

Everything else looks amazing, especially the real time BPs previsualisation, hopefully we will see a BP snip at one point.

[Sycopata]

Nice work, sky box is for sure, the more important part on the VFX.

[blazemonger]

Sky box .. better
BP changes.. about time you got started on this..

 

Water.. meh.. who cares as it's irrelevant to the game

But that warp effect is .. just ... awful

[Taelessael]

-New skybox is much better than the old one, though still a hair on the bright side as I recall (could make this a slider in the game-settings?).
-New water looks decent, but may need some level of fine-tuning near the shore-lines.

-New warp effect needs its opacity turned down a lot, and may benefit from having a version of the old warp-lines (cut down to a third of the current lines at the time of this post) overlaid on to it.

[Haunty]

I think they're all an improvement. Underwater refraction could be more realistic.

[DarkEvader]

Loved new skybox

BP deploy pre visualization very nice

Water surface ripples very good, hope you remembered to solve the water excessive transpacency/invisibility issues that we noticed on PTS. No use having nice surface effects if water becomes invisible on shallower areas once you get more than 100 meters above surface.

Warp effect, meh, didnt like that

[Bobbie]

.

[Shredder]

Tone down the warp effect, please. 

[DecoyGoatBomb]

I like the changes. I agree with others. The warp effect could benefit from being toned down. One other major visual thing that I would love to see tweaked is toning down the shield visuals. Like having it only highly opaque when you are taking fire / in combat. It makes the game look really bad when you have a bunch of parked ships with giant glowing bubbles. The general look is okay just it is so evenly opaque and very bright. So much so that you can't even see how cool the ship designs are.

 

I feel like most of NQ's art decisions would benefit from a pass that just reduces the contrast, brightness and opacity of many effects by about 50%. Good effects like sound design, if you do your job well players do not notice your work. It just feels right as a whole. Less is more IMO.

[Neonicks]

The stars are too big and colored. They are difficult to perceive together with a large number of particles at high speeds.

[Tordan]

The water is much easier to navigate. I approve

 

The blueprint placement is a long awaited improvement. Thank you.

 

The skybox flight particles are still ridiculous, although I am thrilled that they no longer fly THROUGH the ship. Thank you for that.

That is NOT the way space looks (would look) if you were flying fast through space.  if you were able to approach the speed of light, the stars in front of you and behind you would spectrum shift and change color, near by stars to the side of you would look like short lines in space instead of dots. The current bombardment graphic is just unrealistic visual noise that serves no purpose. (one geeks opinon, but hey, you asked.)

 

The warp graphic is scary retro 1970s disco warp. Well qualified geeks MOCK "Zerdoz", not emulate it.

 

Tordan

[Daphne Jones]

I like the BP visualization. If it's good enough, I might be able to recover my bases after a wipe.

 

The rest of it? Don't care.

[nekranox]

When you travel fast (not warp), the particle star effect doesn't blend into skybox.

 

Can the star particles be spread out across a larger volume around the player? To give a sense of vastness. 

 

just a suggestion, looking good in general. I also think the water is too transparent near shore

[Shredder]

13 hours ago, DecoyGoatBomb said:

I like the changes. I agree with others. The warp effect could benefit from being toned down. One other major visual thing that I would love to see tweaked is toning down the shield visuals. Like having it only highly opaque when you are taking fire / in combat. It makes the game look really bad when you have a bunch of parked ships with giant glowing bubbles. The general look is okay just it is so evenly opaque and very bright. So much so that you can't even see how cool the ship designs are.

 

I feel like most of NQ's art decisions would benefit from a pass that just reduces the contrast, brightness and opacity of many effects by about 50%. Good effects like sound design, if you do your job well players do not notice your work. It just feels right as a whole. Less is more IMO.

They need to make the game generally a bit more gritty, everything is a bit too bright and slightly cartoonish.

Maybe it would simply require minor changes to things like contrast, or maybe they also need to make soem changes to the honeycomb options available, or some changes to the way lighting works.

 

I also agree the shields, although generally nice, do need to be tuned down.

[CptLoRes]

9 hours ago, Tordan said:

The warp graphic is scary retro 1970s disco warp. Well qualified geeks MOCK "Zerdoz", not emulate it.

Now that you mentioned it, I cannot stop thinking about how Zardoz is a very good representation of how NQ approach SFX.

And yes, I have actually seen the movie..

 

 

And it would seem that cleaning windows is still a lost technology in DU, that or there is some new kind of sentient dirt growing on them that resist cleaning..

[Novean-61657]

The only real thing of substance here is the BP preview, that is SO HUGE! I really hop it'll work well.

 

The rest I might like or I might not (in certain situations), but imho it doesn't change game play...

 

@CptLoResA very persistent algae that showed up after one of the patches our AI implemented... But I suspect it's a mutated foot fungus that one of our fellow settlers introduced...

[Megabosslord]

I didn’t get time to try the BP visualisation on PTS. Does it work for statics and snap to the grid of the construct you’re standing on? 

[Modgud]

7 minutes ago, Megabosslord said:

I didn’t get time to try the BP visualisation on PTS. Does it work for statics and snap to the grid of the construct you’re standing on? 

At the moment, no. This is the plan for the future.

[Emma Roid]

After posting these (admittedly critical) remarks on the #discussion channel in discord, I am suddenly blocked (I didn't post anything else all day). 
Granted, they are not my best posts ever - but do they deserve a discord block? Or is NQ just actively blocking negative reactions to the update?  

I made a ticket with NQ asking for a reason. Maybe someone outside of NQ reported me causing a block, so not sure what happened and I don't want to jump to conclusions. But it does not help keeping my faith in the game & the company