So, you may have found that planet generation was taking a long time. Indeed! It was. This is a terrible trade-off for me; basically I can have high resolution planets that look nice but take a long time to generate, or low-resolution ones that look mediocre to crappy but generate in a snap. What to do!

For now, I've put it at low resolution planets. It's just too much of an obstacle to have to sit through that planet generation screen forever. But I'm trying to rack my brain to think of a way to make high resolution planets that generate in a reasonable amount of time. Hopefully, I can hit on something simple. In the process, I hope that I can sort out consistency issues. Some of the planets, really, are very beautiful. But these are few and far between. Most are mediocre, and many are really quite boring and crappy-looking. Why can't they all be fantastic? I think they can. Both of these issues can probably be solved at the same time, but it will require some serious rethought.

The other thing I am doing that has been on the backburners for awhile is a texture overhaul. The textures that are in the game have been put in over the course of the entire, organic, and haphazard process. So what I have is a bunch of crappy textures, a few good ones, and no reasonable way to sort between them. More, they are stylistically all heterogenous, so that some look a certain way and some another.

So I'm also going to redo all the textures for planets, and most of the textures for cities. The ones for ships, trees, rocks, etc. seem to work reasonably well for now, and I have to really focus on what will give the biggest payoff.

So these are some things to look forward to in the next beta test, which will probably be in two weeks time. Meanwhile, please continue to test and play in faith that I can improve the overall appearance of things for you the next time this goes. I fully intend to give the better beta testers just a full licenced copy of the game when it's done, as a way to say thanks. So there you have it!

Calvin

Just a quick status update for the two of you who are reading this =)

The planet generation has been majorly overhauled, they are much much prettier now. I had just spent too much time on other areas of the game, and the quality of it had slipped very badly. Right now I'm trying to optimize planet generation more so that it doesn't take as long; it's a very difficult problem.

I am in the middle of overhauling city graphics. I'll let you know how that looks when it's done. I've also got a list of some bugs and other issues that I need to resolve.

The other thing I'd like to do, is change from the single-vertex stars to a more proper starfield background. This isn't hard at all to do, and would make the game look a lot nicer, especially in space. As-is the stars look a bit crappy, I know =)

So yes, I was able to make the planets look a lot nicer. The same is now true for the cities, not just in terms of textures but the shapes of the buildings is now quite a bit more interesting.

Right now I am fixing many small gameplay bugs, and trying to iron out some other issues that might be keeping you down =) There should be another beta test out later this week, and it will represents quite a nice improvement over 0.6.4 which is exciting for me. I think you will find this one more enjoyable by a fair margin!