Global - screen shots

lookin' cool - I'd love to see some cloud details on that globe though -- and for gameplay purposes having a faded center on view of them so you can see through them still. looked at your website, sounds like an interesting project!

could use a specular map and make water shiny, thin layer of atmosphere maybe? but it all could be annoying in the game.
I think all these statistic graphs (or whatever they are) shouldn?t be transparent and should be above the red and blue territory indication layer, but then again I don?t know how this works in the game, maybe it?s better this way

The plan at the moment is to add atmosphere / fog effect to the horizon which will give the impression of clouds and will catch the sunlight as the sun moves behind the earth. Like all good space based art, its important to get the star burst / lens flare effects a good working over.

At the moment with the teams current work clouds, over the centre of the globe are difficult to do so they look good, and will hide the action going on underneath. In the longer term we hope to add real time weather (which can be downloaded off the net) and used in a detailed battle mode to affect the game play.

I agree with the stats layer, the rendering sequence is wrong at the movement, and the icons generally need to be tightened up.

The decision to make them transparent flowed from the metaphor we are using generally of photo realistic earth, with a 'holographic overlay' that the player interacts with.

Awesome!

I love this kind of game. Will definately take a peek come August.

Scott.

I'm definately keen on checking this once the demo is out!

I've always thought a global rts game is *perfect* for independant game developers, because the art assets required can be really, really low, and you could just concentrate on the gameplay.

I really like the visual style that Introversion Software (the Darwinia guys) have approached their game called [url="http://www.introversion.co.uk/defcon/index.html"]Defcon[/url], but I'm dying to see all the visual effects on the planet that you have mentioned. Does anyone know what other games where they've rendered some really cool looking planets?

Be sure to let us know when the demo is released so I can make a post about it!

You are right about the low art asset cost. It is a large reason why a game of this scope can be attempted by a team of our size. (3 programmers, no full time artists).

The terrain is comprised entirely of NASA images and height data - along the lines of Goggle Earth - all of the art for which is in the public domain. It means we can get a AAA quality globe with nothing other than programmer time.

Our cheesy holographic overlay uses primitive shapes and primary colours which is well within the skills of our programmers. As long as we carry the theme through out the game, I think we will get away with it and the end result could be quite stylistically striking.

I honestly think that if you can grab a decent graphic designer / artist to do a work over on the holographic overlays and help out with making colours more complementary for the project, it could do wonders. I mean, it's not absolutely needed, but I reckon it could push the overall aesthetic look to new heights.