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AriochIV — Stars in Shadow: Planet Types
Published: 2015-06-22 05:12:01 +0000 UTC; Views: 16574; Favourites: 246; Downloads: 361
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Description
A selection of regular planet types in Stars in Shadow. In-game, these are 3D rotating spheres, and so they were created as 1536x768 textures with multiple layers. You can see more specialty planets here .Barren: An airless rockball, too small to retain an atmosphere or generate internal heat.
Arid: A world large enough to retain a thin, cold atmosphere, too thin to allow liquid surface water.
Desert: A warmer Arid world with a thicker atmosphere, but little water.
Inferno: A volcanically active world with an extremely thick, toxic atmoshere, and a runaway greenhouse effect.
Iceball: A small, cold world with a rocky mantle covered with a thick layer of ice, and enough internal heat to form underground oceans.
Glacier: A terrestrial world like the Earth, but cold enough to cover the land and oceans with a sheet of ice.
Garden: An Earthlike world.
Island: An Earthlike world, usually warmer, and with higher sea levels.
Paradise: A super-habitable Earthlike world, larger and warmer, but less dense and wetter.
Stars in Shadow is a space 4X strategy game currently under development.
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Comments: 16
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OOoooo pretty. I like all the shiney planets.
No, really, I LOVE all the variations. That was a mainstay to several space RTS I used to play with my stepdad in the past.
My stepdad and I used to play Hegemonia (Probably the game lethe-gray is remembering because they went with very similar planet types - particularly with arid and inferno planets) a couple years back. It's from the early 90s/2000s, about the same time as Sins of a Solar Empire and Homeworld 2. What Hegemonia lacked in tactical and battle flexibility it more than made up for all the pretty rotating varieties of planets that you could colonize and ultimately terraform, and that was something I really hoped lots of space RTS would take to heart: the sense of immersion in a vast galaxy where variety is the spice and mainstay of life for colonization. Where planets weren't all cookie-cutter Earths or gas giants or whichever.
I remember Sins of a Solar Empire went along a similar track - a variety of planets, different types being preferred by different races. (The Terrans preferred Earth-types, the religious Borg-Kadeshi hybrid guys preferred desert in an amusing callout to Homeworld, and so on.)
This is just one of the reasons why I love seeing a wide variety of habitable worlds and seeing that variety so visibly depicted. It adds flavor and interest and a degree of realism to a game, especially now where graphic technologies can catch up.
And these are just so pretty. -goes back to staring at them-
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I recall Hegemonia -- I was following it during development. Very sexy graphics, for the time. I ended up not buying it due to the bad reviews -- as I understand it, there was a severe cap on the number of ships you could build, which really limited one's options.
Sins also had very pretty graphics. I did get that one, but didn't play it much. Kinda burned out on the standard RTS formula, and was disappointed at the lack of story and the fact that you kind of have to play zoomed out so far that you can't really appreciate the nice ship graphics.
We want to do as many different planet variations as the game can handle, though I think texture memory is eventually going to be an issue.
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Just remembered - stepdad would take the ship cap off, but the battles would have some seriously wicked lag. We ended up having to compromise on a decent ship cap that wouldn't slow things down. And even then it was...well, meh, after a while.
The other part that was great about that game despite its shortfalls? The music. I still have tracks from that game that try to earworm me on occasion. 
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Yeah I seem to recall stepdad modding Hegemonia to take the ship cap off... heh.
Sins...yeah I remember we petered off playing that one as well. Some games seem too rigid in how battles and certain factions play so I can get why you'd have issues with both of those. (One of the reasons I think Homeworld is so much liked is that it allowed more flexible tactics and methods than most RTS did at the time. I think he and I played HW2 and Cataclysm, modded and unmodded more than the other 2 combined.)
Yeah it was the pretty graphics I remember about both games, so...yeah.
Best of luck with getting all that to work. I really like the decision to push for as much variety in planets as you can get, because that's part of why SF is so fun to play in. How things are different, not how they're the same.
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I like the Paradise and Island planets...!
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How big are the planets in comparison with each other?
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Planet sizes are variable in the game; terrestrial worlds come in Small, Medium and Large sizes (gas giants being Huge). Large is about twice the size of the Small. Barren and Arid planets are restricted from being Large, and the Paradise is always Large, but the rest can be any size.
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Awsome,.. love how you made those.
.. i like it how some of them represent different stages our Earth had. Like Glacier the Snowball Earth stage, or Paradise,.. thats how i immagine our Earth during the Carboniferous Age.
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Yep, just trying to imagine the different states that a habitable world can be in.
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Question: was this based on a much older online game from the late 90s, early 2000s? For the life of me I can't remember the NAME of that game, but it was in beta while I was playing it, and it had similarly titled and described planets
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I'm not familiar with the game you're referring to, so I guess the answer would be "not that I'm aware of."
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Yeah I kind of thought, it's been more than a decade since I'd played it. Gathering resources, setting up fleets, etc - are reasonably common among turn-based games anyway, but the names of the planets just kind of struck me
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