Homeworld, the slow-burning deep space strategy game, is one of my favorites of all time. Coldly evocative of the artwork of Chris Foss, Peter Elson, John Harris and others, the art stuck with me longest. I remember noticing the odd style of the backgrounds, technical yet painterly, and thanks to Simon Schreibt now I know how they did it: it was vector art with vertex shading, an object lesson in how to generate flawless sky-spheres around the play area with the technology available to developers in the late 1990s.
this can produce such good results. Oh and don't forget that this technique solves two major problems.
#1 You don't have any problems with DDS texture compression artifacts.
#2 More important from composition perspective: since you can't get too fine detail (it was said in the tutorial that the base TGA shouldn't contain too sharp details), the background stays were it should: In the background. Too often i see games where the background contains so much noise and details, that you can't really separate fore-/midground from background. The last time i saw this perfect combination of tech & composition was in Diablo 3. I talk about the 2.5D tree article.
I've been looking forward to playing the recently-released Homeworld 3, by many of the same people who worked on the original 25(!) years ago.
Previously:
• Commercially-available chairs in Star Trek
• Exoplanet orbits two stars
• Photos of planet Earth
