Wireframe ships on the map are lazy as hell

[Kalarian]

All the art for the game is awesome and then they hide the coolest parts on the map. Can we get some real ship designs

[Duke Jukem]

I second this, the ship designs are all pretty cool but why have wireframe ship models? It just detracts from overall aesthetic of the whole map and cheapens the whole look. I'd love to hear a sensible reason for this but given that nothing else on the map is represented in wireframe it really does look out of place and a bit lazy

[ashbery76]

I like it.You wont see the detail at that zoom anyway.

[Kalarian]

Originally posted by ashbery76:

I like it.You wont see the detail at that zoom anyway.

Maybe not on your little baby monitor.

[Aidanya]

i would imagine they would be much harder to spot. these space games are stuck with a blackish background. so everything that needs to pop has to be done with light colors.

I would imagine it is super hard to make actual ship designs that are easy to see in the map.

Still agree 100% tho and would be super cool if they could make it work.

[Ghuldarkar]

As with so many UI choices in so many games: Options would be nice. Let's have wireframes for the people that prefer and low res models for the others (maybe with a cel shaded frame around in player color). This could potentially be solved with a simple texture change.

[NattyDev]

The ammount of time I spend staring at models on the main map is 0%

I prefer the performance gain rather than tiny ships i can barely see. That's what ship viewer and battle screens are for.

[Sublustris]

This has nothing to do with laziness, ships were like that in ES1 too. It's a design desision, it serves as a fleet representation, as opposed to fleet itself. And yes, it helps both performance on map and visibility.

[makromate]

actually i like that kind of look...its fresh and stylish

[Ragnoff]

I did not see it as lazy either, tbh

[Starmender]

It's not lazy, it looks better that way.

[Ogami]

Looks better this way, ES 1 had the same design.
Its not lazy, its a style and it fits the game.

[Shameless Jay]

I figured it was because your looking at a galaxy map from your leaders perspective and the wire frames represent your units similar to chess

[TheFunMachine.]

This is part of the art direction. It isn't much different from ES1. I like it, and the ships look fantastic in the battle animations.

[Imas]

It really does save a lot of performance and dev-time to do it this way.
To have all those different ships on the map without having all but the most modern of gaming riggs slowing down to a crawl while zoomed out, the devs would have to make either really low-poly version of those (or outright 2D billboards) that look awful when zoomed in, or various (about 3 or 4) LOD versions of... well, like 7 or 8 ships per faction.

Instead they went with this pretty stylistic and easy-to-implement choice that actually fits the rest of the visuals on the map quite nicely.
And if their graphics departement has the option to either create nice looking visuals that everyone gets to see (like those gorgeous colonization videos... they really blow the remade MoO out of the park here :-) ) or instead make something minor that only really adds to the game if you zoom way in, have a good enough graphics card to show dozens of those ships and needs quite some time from the programming team as well... yeah, it's obvious what the better business idea is.

[MasalaMouth]

Toggle on/off. Done.