Visuals were mostly excellent, as expected. The only thing that I would have preferred would have been more realistic depiction of the stars on the background sky on space shots, but that's just my preference on the side of realism in these things. Although I have to say I would have preferred to see recognizeable constellations instead of randomly generated starfield backgrounds.
The starfield was actually created in a very similar way you do skyboxes in FreeSpace; it's a single high resolution starfield mapped cubically onto a sphere object. We didn't anticipate that someone would actually look for proper constellations, but I should have know you would :P
In our defence we did try to keep things somewhat real where we could. Rule of cool obviously was the name of the game, but there's at least some effort put into making things seem plausible.
I hope you noticed the Orion nuclear drive on the GWB. Early on there even was a scene showing it firing, but it was dropped since explaining it to the audience would have been too difficult.
The starfield was actually created in a very similar way you do skyboxes in FreeSpace; it's a single high resolution starfield mapped cubically onto a sphere object. We didn't anticipate that someone would actually look for proper constellations, but I should have know you would :P
Well, it's not so much me looking for them, rather than noticing they're not there.
In our defence we did try to keep things somewhat real where we could. Rule of cool obviously was the name of the game, but there's at least some effort put into making things seem plausible.
It all looked very good and the blazing bright milky way sort of set the mood for the background visuals to be a bit more extravagant rather than realistic, so it all fit together good.
I hope you noticed the Orion nuclear drive on the GWB. Early on there even was a scene showing it firing, but it was dropped since explaining it to the audience would have been too difficult.
Well, I was looking more at the cannons, CIWS, missiles and nuclear bombs going off than details like that. I might go and see it again, to look for details like that, or wait for it to be released on Blu-Ray.
If it had actually used the Orion drive, I probably would have recognized it. And I'll probably recognize it if look at the ships design with a more critical eye.
I loved how the Finnish were the only ones that didn't arm their space ships... :p