A blast from the past
Here’s an early Supreme Commander teaser screenshot from way before the closed beta even began. Notice how different everything looks. There isn’t a single currently recognizable unit in that screenshot, except perhaps what looks to be the mech marine. That battle just looks so … alive. I wonder what happened between then and now. I wonder why it seems like Gas Powered Games re-made all of their unit models. In particular, I really want those large, four-legged tanks in the current iteration of the game. Those would make for some mean tech 3 units, and would help add some variety to the current bland tech 3 fare of engineer, siege bot, and mobile artillery.
Those explosions are also really nifty. I wonder if they actually had those in the game at some point, or if they Photoshopped them in for the screenshot. They almost look like 2D sprites; I’m not sure how they’d work if you, say, rotated the camera.
(click to enlarge)
March 25th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
The explosions are placeholder sprites; they’d look exactly the same from any angle, like the magic rotating corpses in Doom :-). Fast (well, scaling permitting), but hideous in a true 3D game.
March 25th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
That screenshot looks extremely contrived. Notice the positions and orientations of the various units. It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Also, don’t those blue tanks look kind of like the UEF pillar?
March 26th, 2007 at 8:23 am
They look “so alive” because the explosions are all photoshopped into the image and the colors are enhanced as well.
March 26th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Idd, those screens were mock-ups, purely art thrown together to give people an early impression. They DID have “real” volumetric explosions with volume at a certain point ( just look at this: http://www.supcomuniverse.com/?p=image&id=150 ) unlike the horizontal, white flashes we’re seeing now (only the UEF and Cybran nuke effects give me a real explosion feel). Still, it might have been too much of a burden on the PC.
March 26th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
Yeah, I figured those screenshots weren’t quite on the level. Ah well. I guess it doesn’t make much sense to compare what is actually accomplished real-time in a 3D engine against an “artist’s illustration” and say I wish the present game were more like the fake.
March 29th, 2007 at 1:07 am
Pics that made my jaw drop back then (I’m such a victim of early hype :))
http://media.pc.gamespy.com/media/755/755287/img_2897686.html
http://media.pc.gamespy.com/media/755/755287/img_2897782.html (water)
And especially
http://media.pc.gamespy.com/media/755/755287/img_2897699.html
Sigh.. I wish someday – when PCs get faster – we can see something like that…