Monochromania

The_Gneech

Spaceman
I was checking out the "Flight of the Excalibur" wallpaper (which is very nice!), and that combined with beginning to play Unknown Enemy, finally pointed out to me one of the things that has been bothering me about the later WC titles, namely color.

In WC1 and WC2, the ships are all vivid colors ... military green highlighted with red, white, and blue for the Confed ships, deep-sunset-orange with red patches for the Kilrathi, and so forth. In the later games (I first noticed it in Privateer, actually), ships are all various shades of "metallic," with the occasional stripe or highlight color. It's true of cutscenes as well ... the "pilots running to the launch bay" scene in WC1 is deep red; that same scene in Prophecy has white lighting, with a single red blinking bulb.

Some of this was highlighted by the fact that I recently played Tachyon: The Fringe as well, and one of the things that game actually did very well was to make different "flavors" of ship very distinctive by use of shape and color.

Just a detail I noticed. :)

-The Gneech :cool:
 
Couldn't agree more. I miss the colorful WC1 and WC2 look as well. Privateer (which is probably my favorite game in the series nonetheless) and everything that came afterwards is too gray :(
 
Part of the problem is the WC3/4 engine. Without a good shadowcasting, things look more grey, IMO. And the fighter looked cool I think, but the capships were rather ugly.
 
Eh, I kinda like the more realistic hull colorings in the later games. Our modern planes aren't painted brightly. They're sometimes camo'd, and stenciled with group markings, but that's about it.
 
Eh, but in WC, fighter combat is more psychological than in the real world. It's as much about scaring the other guy off as it is about killing him. The WC3/KSaga manual says that this is why Kilrathi ships usually have such sharp, blade-like edges and protruding weaponry. In this aspect, colour works too. And if you don't believe this, try to imagine the WC2 Kilrathi ships painted with a fluorescent pink or sickly green instead of the blood-red that they actually had... much, much less impressive :p. This all relates to Kilrathi designs, but it seems likely that Confed would have learned a few things over thirty years, too. So, in conclusion, gray ships in the WC universe are unrealistic :p.
 
Quarto said:
Eh, but in WC, fighter combat is more psychological than in the real world. It's as much about scaring the other guy off as it is about killing him. The WC3/KSaga manual says that this is why Kilrathi ships usually have such sharp, blade-like edges and protruding weaponry. In this aspect, colour works too. And if you don't believe this, try to imagine the WC2 Kilrathi ships painted with a fluorescent pink or sickly green instead of the blood-red that they actually had... much, much less impressive :p. So, in conclusion, gray ships in the WC universe are unrealistic :p.

Yeah, Confed ships look gay! :p


Ooopss, I ment g*r*ay :) :)
 
Murray said:
Yeah, Confed ships look gay! :p
Yah, but fortunately, the fighters don't suffer from the same deficiency...

(not counting the ill-concieved WCM "Rapier"...ugh!!!)
 
Suggestive of what?...
The Excal is suggestive of kicking major a##,
and the Epee, well...I can't recall too well what it looks like
 
overmortal said:
Eh, I kinda like the more realistic hull colorings in the later games. Our modern planes aren't painted brightly. They're sometimes camo'd, and stenciled with group markings, but that's about it.

To wrench the topic back on course, I'd say this depends on the plane, on the country, and on the style of the day. WWII planes tended to be green; WWI planes came in a wide spectrum of colors; Bert Rutan's planes are all shiny white; lots of airlines have planes that are bright red or stark blue or what-have-you. And the defining characteristic of the Blue Angel squadron, IIRC, is that their planes are blue.

-The Gneech :cool:
 
I agree with Gneech -- I miss 'bright' video games... I don't *mind* the 'realistic' fighters in WC3 (they fight realistic space cats, afterall), but I think it marked a general decline in bright video game graphics. Everything after '94 or '95 became gray and black and yellow and shaded over.

... I miss Commander Keen.
 
I don't like the newer spacesims with their use of color. Most ships are grey while the sky is covered by some ugly nebula blob. It should be viceversa- colorful ships and a dark space and vast starfields and the occasional faint nebula. Everyone who looked up in a clear night knows that a starfield with the faint band of the milky way looks much more beautiful than those awful nebulas. I liked the way the Sol system was in I-war: only a bluish band of faint light where the Milky way was supposed to be and the rest was stars. Freelancer felt "unreal", if I can say so, to me because of the excessive use of nebulas. The Leeds system for example looked more as if you fly over Mexico city at sunset rather than space.
 
Just a side note, did anyone else notice that the colors started to change with the Morning Star, supposedly the fighter of the future, would be colored the same way as fighters of the future.
 
Going by that logic, it started with the Crossbow, being that it too was quite gray, and you flew it before you ever sat in the morningstar.
 
The Crossbow was white... if you count white as gray, then you'd have to blame the Ferret before blaming the Crossbow.
 
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