• Stylization. Hazeron's overriding problem is the uncanny valley. Glabrians are the most obvious example of unintentional creepiness, but lots of things count. We don't need more graphical fidelity: we need to embrace the low-fi style as an artistic choice in itself, not a limitation. Take trees for another example. The trunk colours are dark and grungy: they're supposed to look "realistic". If instead they were solid pastel colours or had geometric pattern, for example, the low resolution wouldn't matter. Nor would it be any more demanding on the hardware.
  

• Rocks and terrain. The terrain is very smooth; excessively so. I took a look at No Man's Sky's landscapes, again. The textures repeat almost as often as Hazeron's. The actual mesh generation is not much more detailed. The main difference is that the visual line of the composition is broken by lots of boulders, cliffs and sharp edges. Hazeron's planets sometimes feel very "generated", like a height map, simply because there's nothing to redirect the eye or break the flow of the smooth, repetitive hills. Just throwing in some polygonal boulders and sharp cliffs here and there would make a big difference. Other "solid" visual elements like fungal growths, crystal clusters, coral and barnacles, tree stumps would help to break up the composition in interesting ways. Caves would be fun too, but not really a graphical thing.
  
• Fade-out plants. When flying, or in overhead view, the rendered foliage around you has a very obvious circular cut-off. It's jarring. I'd suggest that, instead of a hard border, plant density should decrease semi-randomly after a certain point, and that vegetation should be rendered in a very basic, infrequent way to a significantly larger distance than it is now (if the player chooses). It's good to see at a glance if a distant mountain has any trees at all. At that distance, you could render an aggregated "copse" sprite for, say, every 50 trees, with a limit of 1 sprite per square km. Or something like that. Graphics are, ultimately, a symbol, and it's irritating in any game when they fail to symbolize something that's actually there, or when they symbolize something that isn't there. It doesn't matter, by comparison, how much that symbol looks like the real thing.
  
• Foam Where the sea meets the land, the way the water just stops feels a little spare. Just adding a margin of white, without any particle effects or wave motion needed, would make a big difference. The water feels sadly insubstantial at the moment.
  
• Rivers Rivers are a romantic's best friend. They make a landscape. Right now, we have some long, thin, bits of sea, which is not the same thing. Upland lakes and mountain streams would take sightseeing to a new level, for not much cost. The infrastructure for water above sea level also prepares the way for lots of uses in building and spacecraft models.
  
• Seasons! My personal obsession. Haxus' too, I hope, as a keen kitchen gardener!
  
• Obstruction. It's very immersion breaking when you walk through a tree. It makes me sad every time it happens, since it jolts me out of my explorer's fantasy. So as not to kill the servers with pathing problems, I'd recommend trees (not bushes) and boulders should obstruct avatars (in a fairly approximate way), but not the AI. Trees are concealment not cover, in any case, so the fact projectiles pass through is no problem.
  

• Ambient occlusion Not necessarily anything scary or GPU intensive. If you fly near a bright star, you find the walls of your spaceship get totally washed out. In a cubic room, you can't tell where the corners are. A bit of pre-baked shade where faces meet at an acute angle might make all the difference. You could even choose which edges get the effect in the designer, to reduce the load and prevent it appearing where it isn't wanted. In blender, for instance, it's a very lightweight, static effect meant to help with modelling itself, rather than rendering - and it's very useful.
  

• Stars. They're sprites, and it's fairly unpleasant for the brain when you are trying to manouevre near them. Is it hugely difficult to make them spheres instead? They can revert to sprites when you're not in close orbit.
  

(08-14-2018, 02:21 PM)Vectorus Wrote: -snip-

• Stylization. Hazeron's overriding problem is the uncanny valley. Glabrians are the most obvious example of unintentional creepiness, but lots of things count. We don't need more graphical fidelity: we need to embrace the low-fi style as an artistic choice in itself, not a limitation. Take trees for another example. The trunk colours are dark and grungy: they're supposed to look "realistic". If instead they were solid pastel colours or had geometric pattern, for example, the low resolution wouldn't matter. Nor would it be any more demanding on the hardware.
  

-snip

(08-14-2018, 02:21 PM)Vectorus Wrote: On the whole, though, the fact that Hazeron manages to generate scenes worthy of an emotional reaction, purely on the strength of its simulation (rather than set-piece design), is commendable. I would say Hazeron + balancing + fewer bugs + OK graphics = best game ever, already. "Good" graphics are just overkill at that point! If every other game on my PC disappeared permanently, I'd be mildly put out. If Hazeron went, all the others wouldn't even start to make up for it. That time it actually happened....shudder.

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Quote:that could allow for procedural generation of plants

(08-23-2018, 10:50 PM)Haxus Wrote:

Quote:that could allow for procedural generation of plants

All plants, including their textures, are procedurally generated in SoH. They always have been.

Tree trunks use one of a palette of bark textures so they don't vary much.