While making this mod I learned a lot about GUI modding and realised that there are so, so many cool things possible! I want to write them just to inspire other people and encourage anyone else to make their own planet view (or other GUI) mod maybe with some of these things included if they like, or using the ideas as a springboard for any of their own stuff.

One really cool thing possible would have been to re-theme the UI based on the ethics of the controlling empire. So for example if we're looking at a planet held by slavers there could be shackles and chains and other grim looking art elements draped over the planet view, or whatever. Agrarian Idyl colonies might have a nice natural theme. And so on.

It's technically very doable, and even I think art is not too tricky to handle: The art provided for the empire rooms already in stellaris already cover a great deal of personalities and empire types and could perhaps be re-used. A modder could also quite simply overlay that room art wholesale in front of the city view to create the same effect we get on empire creation or diplomatic screens. The specifics aren't too important, I just think it's great that the entire thing could be re-themed like this.

IArmy icons could be turned into simple spritesheets that display fun animations. Like a gun firing, or a soldier walking, or a tank rolling on it's treads, stuff like that. It's also possible to do more fancy things with army health bars. In vanilla they are literally reusing the fleet combat health-bar. it would have been possible to have an animation where the army icon slowly breaks apart as it takes damage, or gets splotched with red blood until it's entirely covered. It's all possible, if you get the art for it.

Does this planet have a 24 hour day? 20 hours? 40 hours?
How long is a year?
What kind of seasons do they have?
What season is it currently?
How old is the actual world itself? (Not just the age of the colony).

All this could have been assigned and displayed. I didn't want to "clutter" the UI in my mod so I held off, but it could all also easily be neatly moved behind a small scrollable element (like I have with my districts). Also setting everything up for earth/mars/etc wasn't something I wanted to spend the time looking into.

A similar concept to the above. There could have been an area on the layout assigned purely for a block of text which changes every X years. The block of text gives a short 1-3 sentence description of a current event on the planet, news-reel style. Some people went missing in the mountains here. A new species of bird was just discovered here. A magnitude 9 earthquake struck the west coast. A bomb threat on this penal colony. A plague in this city. And so on. this was also cut due to layout and, again, time. It's basically a separate mod (it'd be a lot of stories for me to write.)

Let's talk about capital cities. I'm interested in the mods on the workshop that have given multiple variants of your capital building based on your ethics. How about a UI element that does that instead. This doesn't have to affect gameplay at all.

So for example if we're spiritualists we get some gothic beautiful ecclesiastical church-city. Instead of squeezing that idea into a small building icon, it can be it's own entire element. And then we can pull from the empires namelist to actually NAME the capital city of this world. When we click around the galaxy we're seeing all these cool capital cities! I also love the idea of being able to assign the capital city to a specific planetary feature. This would give us a great sense of where people are actually living. For example a capital city at the Rich Mountain deposit. Or a city in the tropical swamp. A volcano city. When I watch/read sci-fi there is nearly always a declaration of where colonists are actually hanging out (in a valley or whatever) and Stellaris just doesn't cover it.

What about an art box that shows some prominent alien NPC/resident living on that planet? An exile from X country (Garak, anyone?) or some-such. A refuge related to the refugee event you just got.


So those are just some mad ideas that occurred to me as time went on and anyone could make. Hope it was a fun or interesting read!

To hide the blurriness, you could use some sort of filter like scanlines or something, at least until you get high-res art.

@LNSS
Thanks for the idea! there are already scan lines on it, however, hah!

could you add tiles for crisis worlds like Infested worlds? they showed up in the lategame and it's super wierd to not have any art despite being in the base game

Hi, new here waiting for your "Summer" update. hehehe
I did hear(read) you read suggestions. I could make an entire google docs of suggestions for you updating it time to time, i love think of ideas ngl.

Anyways for a first quick suggestion i wish it could rain more things, not just water.
Like planetary diversity adds such good amount of planets, it could be pretty nice to have, as an example:
On molten colonies to rain literally rocks or metal dust as snow.
Also on hot enough planets, not just molten, the rain could be molten floating particles just going up by the heat, like a reverse rain but "slower" like floating incandescent ashes.
Biolumen planets, biolumen mushroom particles (Color choosable).
Sakura planets or megaflora to rain flower petals (different colors u could choose it).
More types of rain, acid rain, mud rain, etc...
Desertic planets to have dust storms.
Gaseos planets to have giantic high electric hidrogen storms.

Add artifical particles that u could add with added technologies that buff the planet, or particles that are synced with planetary modifiers that actually has a description and name related to atmospheric modifications. Good way to make the planet clima effects on the planetary view to have a gameplay mechanic, isntead of only being visual, right?

Make planetary shields visible on the upper part of the planetary view sky, that could be a nice touch.

Etc...

I wish to be able to see this even on unowned planets, u cant control the climate but the planets still have a clima, right?

Aquatic planets could be like.. instead of raining, bubbles goes up hhahah.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VCBIeJRnBaa-rB1QpF-nXti-D0Pf1h2urbC7ilRS1ek/edit?usp=sharing

@Aka
Thanks I'll take ALL the suggestions, keep them coming!

To your last point: You absolutely should already be able to see weather like rain/fog/snow when you don't own a planet. Are you not experiencing that?

As for other particle effects yeah they're all really great ideas and I've felt the same and want them too! Challenge is that making the animations work well is tough and time consuming. If this was my job and I was getting paid for it I'd have kept going with more but ultimately I had to release the mod and move on.

Also, the controls we have available are very primitive. You can't have petals spin and flutter for example. It's just layers and scrolling at different speeds. The effect would work, but not as good as you might imagine.

i was creating a galaxy map mod and i forgot to go to the google drive file sry hahah.
about the petals im fine even if they just fall dont need them to spin hahah. sometimes simplier is better XD but have more amount of textures could be nice. just textures to keep it simplier. dont worry.

i was able to look at unowned planets true. i frogot about that.

@Akashugo
Check in the mod files for the textures I'm using for the snow/rain. Once you have a sense of what they look like you're more than welcome to link me some you think would be good for other effects! I love all of your example ideas.

Hi! I don't have any experience modding, and after a lot of failed attempts I ask you: Do you think it would be feasible to have in any way per-planet cityscapes?

Having variety with new planet classes is always great, but on top of those new classes are almost always the same cityscape that you use for every other planet

@Yui-chan
Yes it's possible but to look good it'd honestly be quite involved. You can't just slap new city variations onto that area because they have to weave inbetween the planet environment layers (as an example check the "megaflora" screenshot in this workshop page slidehow and note how the city is actually hiding behind some of the trees)

What I would do to accomplish that is remove the vanilla planet portrait area (the top middle art bit that shows cities/environments) entirely and then build my own version of ii, with all the layers, with effectbutton types.

Then you could manipulate it in a thousand interesting ways. You could have slight scrolling but the further away layers scroll slower for an epic parralax effect. You could add vegetation variations. You could have more stages of city construction instead of just the vanilla 4. You could weave ship animations into it. And of course what you said. You could do a LOT.

But we're talking about a LOT of art, a LOT of data, a LOT of effectbuttontypes and a very big process in general. It won't ever be a thing in this mod, I'm afraid to say.

Thank you for your answer! It's sad that there isn't a way that doesn't involve redoing the entire planet portrait area

There might be and I just don't know to do it. I'd start by looking at 00_portraits_main.txt if I were going that route!