Hello internet! This week Morpher has been trying to prioritise the snow theatre, since it still needs a lot of love to get it workable. He's fixed a particularly irritating bug in how ground tiles were being generated, and I've been creating a few snow-themed vehicles for the civilians to drive.
For a long time now, snow maps had a tendency to look like this:
All the ground tiles are identical. It's not a good look, but this week Morpher went and fixed it. Now, all the clear snowy tiles are drawn in all their pseudo-random glory. It's a small but necessary detail which has certainly given me some more motivation to play with the snow theatre.
That's all we've done by way of terrain this week. To go with the snowy terrain, I've put together a bunch of vehicles suited to the environment. I have thus far created a snowcat, a tracked truck, and a snowmobile.
These vehicles will help to illustrate the change in setting between rural areas and cities within the snow theatre. Similarly, I've been working on a few vehicles for out in the wastelands that can fit both settings. I'll let you guess the inspiration, it's closely modeled on a vehicle from a really good film.
The snowmobile I produced have me the idea to replace the Nod bike with a similar unit on snow maps. So far I'm not sold on the exact execution of the unit, but I really like the idea. GDI gets a bluish makeover in snowy conditions to parallel its sandy camo used in temperate regions, but so far Nod has lacked any visual differences between theatres. This is my attempt at reworking the Nod bike into a snowmobile:
And that's what we did this week!
Damn awesome vehicles! Great work.
:P there more I read and see of your weekly bulletins the more I doubt that this is accurate. This must be several months old internal data to keep us entertained. It simply is to much awesomeness for 1 week. :)
Anyway as usual fantastic work and I can only agree with @Ahrimansiah on his statement I can hardly wait for the Beta. Also fantastic idea on the snow variations for numerous GDI and NOD vehicles.
Every now and then we slip in something we forgot from a previous week, but mostly we're just pretty good at stretching "Morpher made some code-y stuff, and Orac graphic-ed about for a bit" :P
the snowmobiles are awesome, they allways remember me on this one james bond movie :3
the other vehicels look very good, i really like the desing
the idea of replaceing some units on snow maps sounds cool
cant wait for beta, been watching this mod for long time ^^
I love the snow mobile idea, if you aren\t happy with the way it looks now, which does look pretty cool btw, you could try a different propulsion other than a single track, and make the rear part look different :O
the snow terrain looks much better now, and those vehicles are awesome!
Nod's snowmobile looks good, but I might recommend brightening the grey portions a bit. IMO, the contrast makes it look very dark compared to the white terrain it's going to be traveling over.
For other changes, consider creating a half-track version of the Nod Buggy/other wheeled vehicles? Bringing the grey more in line with Nod's old style from C&C Gold might be beneficial overall.
Were these models and textures a winter camo would be an easy change to the textures, but I understand voxels are quite different.
Morpher and I have been discussing harsh movement penalties for wheeled units in the snow. I think we both felt that the buggy's wheels are just at the edge of plausibility for snow traversal, but I'm probably going to try a few things out. I was thinking about the snow humvee as inspiration.
I reeeeally don't want to go changing Nod's colouring, because the tolerances are so low. But if I have to, I have to.
Something that comes to mind for Nod in the snow is the old snowmobile chase scene trope with the paramilitary guys in full winter gear with grease guns.
Best example I could find on short notice is from a "newer" Bond flick. (Aren't they all?)
Youtu.be
Alternatively, there's an episode of Archer featuring such a scene.
But I digress, something's gotta give. The problem is that dark colors tend to bleed together in a light environment, especially in poor lighting. It's color composition 101, literally, I took a class for this.
More important than color for distinguishing units, however, is the ability to tell the "silhouette" apart. As long as it looks characteristically distinct in profile, you're good.
For the record, when I said "I took a class for this." I meant that to say something along the lines of "Christ, people can actually pay money to be taught about colors at a college level." Not as an argument from authority.
Taking another look at it, I think the problem, at least that I have, is with the shadow, it makes the unit seem more amorphous than it is because it seems to blend together with it.
Don't worry, first year of graphic design I did a paper of colour theory too.
You too noticed the shadow, which has been irritating me too. The issue is that in TS the snow was blue while we've opted for white. White is a way better choice for lots of things like lighting and terrain and stuff, but it has irritating effects elsewhere (like making the Nod units look wrong, causing questions about what colour ice should be, and making weather effects difficult to spot).
Everything's a tradeoff, and these ones are big and theatre wide, which makes them a lot harder to decide on. In the end we have to make a decision and back it to the hilt.
I like the Nod Snowbike. =)