hazeron with good graphics

[Jalaris]

I was thinking about this recently while trying No Man' Sky. Fancy lighting and effects aside (which we neither need nor want), Hazeron stands up pretty well, though, as Dean says, there is scope for serious improvement in certain areas. Our great advantage is that every beautiful scene is the result of meaningful and dynamic interactions between its elements. In this landscape, one of my favourites, the composition is due to a well-made simulation of orbital mechanics, atmospheric density, stellar spectral class, and so on. The beauty is "earned".



 I find the fact that every planet has a bewildering number of landscapes which actually vary based on elevation, latitude, biome, and temperature preferable to the somewhat "gimmicky" (though genuinely beautiful), static feel of No Man's Sky, where one gets the sense that the beauty is contrived from someone's very artificial manipulation of colour palettes, skyboxes and terrain generation, to arrive at a premeditated result.

Now, some suggested improvements:

• 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.
  

These trees are from "Proteus". They are probably even simpler than Hazeron's, but they're easier on the eye, because they don't aim at any kind of realism. Hazeron does, and it sometimes falls down because of it.

• 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.
  

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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If this is going to be a useful graphics suggestion thread, rather than, erm, another "make Hazeron better" thread, perhaps it should go in the Arena of Ideas?

If Hazeron could get its own stylized low-fi graphics, similar to Proteus or Stationeers or Astroneer or, better yet, something uniquely Hazeron, I would come back to the game and I could get many people that I know to play it. I've always loved Hazeron and the depth of its features and game world, but the graphics are just hard to stomach.

I saw a post where Haxus was trying to promote the game on Facebook to get new players; a post on Facebook actually brought me back to the forums today. However, as it stands now, until Hazeron gets a better stylized graphics style that works and looks amazing, it just isn't going to attract many more players than it has now. Graphics may not matter as much to the current lot that play Hazeron, but it matters a lot to the large majority of people that play video games. It doesn't have to be amazing, Crysis or Star Citizen level of graphics, but it does need to look appealing to the eye. It needs to be beautiful, unlike the current 90s level video game graphics it has now.

See this video for a somewhat scientific explanation for why beauty attracts people: Kurzgesagt: Why Beauty Matters

So, Vectorus, I hope your post brings about a good discussion and helps Haxus know that while the game does not need good graphics it does need something that is stylized and beautiful to attract more people. See you guys in another 6 years, or however long it has been!

P.S. Good job adding features and fixing bugs Haxus!