A new art direction for 1.8

[Falcon`]

For a long, long, time Soldat has been ugly – certainly since its creation, but as games have become more and more beautiful, we've stayed behind the times and the disparity has grown larger. When a new player opens up Soldat, not only is he met with a convoluted and confusing menu, but also graphics straight from 2000, which even for the time weren't good.

With 1.8 we are going to rectify that. Hand-painted sceneries and textures were the way to go, since limitations poised by the old engine rendered many conventional methods useless, and the art team (which consists of Monsteri) doesn't have enough time for 3D pre-renders. The goals of the new art direction are a cohesive style, much improved visuals, and improved readability of the game elements.

The style will be a mix of cartoony and painterly visuals with a bucketload of grit, but decently realistic shapes and objects. All colliding things – that is to say, polygons and colliders, will have thick outlines. Polygons will also be shaded invertly with light sources on the map in mind. A mix of cold and warm colors will be used for the foreground and background – where the foreground is warm, the background will be cold, and vice versa. The further background sceneries go, the colder they will be, which creates a nice sense of depth and increases readability. Colliding objects on the foreground will thus have more contrast and stand out from the rest.

During the downtime in communication we've been steadily growing our library of textures and sceneries, which is now starting to be big enough to be put into use. A lot is still work in progress and preliminary, and for the final results to match our vision, some additions to the game engine and PolyWorks will be necessary, but so far we've achieved some nice results with the tools already available. Check it out: ctf_dropdown!









Do post your thoughts and possible requests down below, we'd be happy to hear opinions, since this is a very big change coming up. We'll be making more updates in the coming weeks, and hopefully in a more regular manner than before.

[darDar]

Say big thanks to monsteri who made and makes this possible

[gor]

Looks very promising,cant wait to see the other maps

[DutchFlame]

Hi,

Personally I have to agree with you that soldat is and has been ugly for too long, however is this related to the activity of players/new players? Secretly I'm hoping it does.

But damn... this looks super great and incredible.

I wish I could be of some help but, unfortunately I have zero knowledge about graphics and / or drawing abilities.
Not quite sure if I understood correctly as I'm hoping that polygon bugs are somehow getting ditched with this amazing time consuming work.
It's necessary for mappers/mapping that poly-works or any tool gets a proper fix/remake because currently it's disturbing any mapper out there since it's not fulfilling its job.

Never the less keep going and I look forward to the end result.

(DROPDOWN LOOKS EPIC SO FAR)

[Tarrega]

It's genuinely awesome. Sincere thanks for all the work.

I have one small criticism: to me, the player models look as if they're *behind* the terrain, as if the ground they are walking on is much much closer to us than the player model itself. At times. Like shown below.

(Probably largely because the new lighting and whatnot aren't applied to player models? Perhaps this is okay and I'm just wrong, you'd know better. Just thought I'd share.)

Thanks again! It looks excellent.

[kzya]

add more features and rename it to soldat2 with advertising and it will be popular again

[Naughty Dog]

This is epic stuff! Thanks for all the work!

[Petterkowski]

1 man army. In monsteri we trust Good job right there, mate! Wait for 1.8 project to finish, guys, so you'll be able to see a big idea behind it once its done :] There's more of it coming! Let's make Soldat great again

[Kenix]

This is a massive step towards making this game look more attractive. If we ever hope to get this game to a bigger audience (Read: STEAM + advertisement) it needs to be visually appealing to a contemporary audience. Which, I'd say, is definitely the case here. So a tremendous good job to Monsteri for the redesign.

[Raged`]

This looks pretty amazing.Gj whoever gave an effort on this

[nosejj]

BRING IT ON, BOYS!

[ginn]

Map textures look amazing, and the guns look good enough.
I think the player gosteks needs to be reworked, because they don't fit in with the theme, and look out of place.

Maybe after these patches, one isn't required to use a mod to stand soldat.

A couple of other things, that are needed for soldat.
New gun SFX, the current ones are pretty bad (if I remember right, that they haven't been changed since forever).
And possibly most importantly... There's a need for match making. With it, an account system might be required.

[MrHamsTR]

I don't know how to thank you people try to make this soldat better over and over years.
But the part I never supported was you damaged controls by removing prone cancel.
And so far there is no moving improve works or fixing polybugs.
We are a family in soldat for years I've been playing this since 0.9 beta or something like that old.
I am Hide and Seek player, this means moves and speed is more important and enjoable than fighting at all for me.
Maybe you could bring back old pronce cancel or healing huge polybugs on maps.

If there is something I can help, just tell me I will try to do everything I can.
But the visual is not everything that makes the game "Soldat"

I say again, those works were/are great works that deserve big hugs, thanks to all developers.

[CheeSeMan.]

wow, if it looks this good I might even turn background sceneries back on

good work!

[Mayhem]

Amazing work, can't stop looking at it  Is this possible to make a parallax background, so these mountains would moving much slower than things on the first plan? It could bring some good visual effects and make background more dynamic.

[Viral]

Mad props to Monsteri for everything he did/does. I can assure you it's not even a fraction of his work shown here, not to mention kicking our lazy asses can be just as exhausting :b Now that I know how Monsteri uses the base structure i can hopefully make it a bit easier for him in the upcoming maps.
I have to admit gostek looks out of place a bit, in comparison with the new outlines on sceneries and the overall style it appears rather bland - hopefully it will be fixed someday ^.-

[L[0ne]R]

Props for the Monsterous (bad pun intended) amount of work on the graphics. One thing's for sure - this art style for maps and sceneries looks amazing and 2016-worthy. (Well, almost - just lacking parallax and a few other bells and whistles.) I feel bad for not contributing in any way, but my excuse is that I feel bad in general right now and taking a leave.

My one concern is how outlines are being used to separate colliders from background scenery - maybe it's just because screenshots are downsized, but I don't see a clear difference between colliders and non-colliders. There are outlines on some of them, but they're very faint. Some background sceneries seem to have the same tone and opacity that I'm not sure if they're really just background. And of course the file naming issues that I've expressed in the dev channel, but in the end we just agreed to disagree.

Still, fantastic work on the art style. Consider uploading the test version of the map & sceneries so we can see it in motion and full resolution.

[Arrow/Freeman]

Fantastic job! Im really looking forward to seeing it in person. 

[Hubiq]

Wow! It looks nice  Soldat needs a change like this.

BTW. Any details about 1.8 ? Release date (approximately) or something?

[Akinaro]

So now you dont mind if map "have too much" sceneries?
Any idea when you release updated Polywork to play with it a bit(even without actual game to test it)?
As I see there is still no news in terms of graphic use in it, just one graphic file that need to be stretched to fit map(no multi-texturing)?

Also yeah, gostek look now like some sticker on screen, its too small and too "sharp" compared to map style. It would be good to check and see how game would look if gostek would be slightly bigger(2-5%) so it could contain ""more"" shading(and less contour). Just to see how it would work in game.