Galciv 2 ships looked pretty good, so I am confident they will look great in GC3. What should the graphics guys work more on are the weapon effects and ship explosions, those were average at best. And beams is GC2 sometimes appeared misaligned or offset from the ships they were firing from.

Precisely.

Why not dx11? (i think its ~4 years old). Im not a programmer, dont know anything about pros and cons dx11/10, but i checked the steam survery stats. Theres ~55% users of dx11 gpu+os, so it gives us about 30mln users ready to play dx11 games.. so why not dx11?

I'd really find cool to have some visual action on the ships - like blinking position lights, maybe some engine flarings or somethins like that, giving the scenery more live... the gc2 ships were nice but a bit statix. like plastic models. In additon to reflecting the ambience, this would look really good.

DX11 would more or less force users into Windows 7 or Window 8. And would require users to have an Nvidia GTS450 or AMD HD5000 or higher.

This doesn't "Sound" bad right?

Go to the Call of Duty:Ghosts Discussion Hub on Steam. Feel free to bathe in the LITANY OF HATE because Ghost had the audacity to be the first game to ever force DX11 and 64-bit onto users. It's shocking to see people whine about not having 64-bit. Whining that their GTX8800 should run the game. Etc. Then in the same breath say that the game is a 'console port'.

One of the first games that would actually benefit from being 64-bit and DX11 only, something that would make the game stand out from the console counterparts, and their user base HATED THE REQUIREMENT.

Im not sure that cod is good expample, that game its a bad port and looks bad, so people could be shocked about its requirements.

btw. 85% steam users have win7 or 8.

Litany of hate is well-deserved, because CoD, in its heart, is an old Call of Duty, which in turn are just Quake 3. No need to tell me how much upgraded it is, I'll believe in upgrades CD Project Red made to Aurora (NWN1 engine), turning it into beauty, that runs in the heart of Witcher 1. CoD:G has absolutely nothing to have system extortions like that for quality, and possibilities it offers. Bethesda at least tried to offer some improvements for their Gamebryo's successor (can't say it's that much better - compare it with Witcher 2 engine), and system requirements are more modest - they don't try to sell old-gen multiplatform as gen-after-next-gen one.

So yeah, pour more hate for the hate throne.

And agian the differnce between DX10/11 is not "OMG this looks so god damn amazing" it adds things like tessilation, which makes organic things look better, and adds other organic elements like water/fire. And a bunch fo pipeline benefits. But there's nothign fuctionally about DX11 that makes a game 'look amazing' from the entirely simplistic visual point of view. It has benefits but they're entirely under the hood or utterly poorly understood by people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MARHtzy-_qU

Watch this demo. What do you think?

I can tell you unequivocavly that this demo does more complex things and is a technical marvel that does more than BF4 and Witcher2 combined. Yet that's almost impossible to convey to most people who can't understand why this demo is absolutely incredible from a technical standpoint.

Where's the beef?

... I was expecting some new screenshots... *.* 

but this whets the appetite...

Yeah, same.  I've been playing GC2 lately and the graphics and UI stand up fine for me, except for my 2 pet peeves about stardock UIs in general - ESC key behavior and textbox entry.  I really hope my first threat regarding GC3 alpha doesn't have to be about the ESC key behavior. 

I've been watching videos for an upcoming game called banished, and one of the many good things about it is that you have a lot of control over the UI - you can hide/show elements as you like and you can drag and place UI elements wherever you want.  Such a simple thing but something you just don't see in many/any games.

Anyways...new shiny ships and stuff are great and all but the UI is more my concern and I'd be so very happy if the ESC key and textbox entry worked like it does in 99% of games and winapps - along with other piles of UI goodness that I'm sure will be there.

One really lame trend in many games I've been getting on mostly early access is how small the important game windows are - it's like they're being designed for phones or tablets.  Actually, even a game like distant worlds suffers from this - the colony list and other biggies in that game are horribly tiny.  It's like here, you can have 14000 stars in your galaxy but have a 2x3 inch window for colony list.  For huge tabular displays I want a huge window, with all kinds of sorting and filtering, and even better, I'd like to be able to have that window either be full screen or sizeable.

Frogboy, is this the program we will need for the fbx files?

http://www.autodesk.com/products/fbx/overview

So in the ship designer do we get to pick materials for like the ship, for example a matte non-reflective black, or a gleaming reflective black etc such as that? 

FBX export is certainly a nice feature for anyone familiar with 3d modelling. Good news for me

(Ericridge: you need a 3d modelling software that can handle the FBX format. Professional Autodesk stuff like 3ds MAX will work, but it's very expensive. There are alternatives tho...) edit: no idea why this line appears as hyperlink...

One thing I hated in GalCiv2 was that the AI was able to make even the nicest ship design look ugly by placing weapons and other components in absurd sizes and positions onto it. If something could be done to remedy this it would be great.

About the UI: I always found the bright white/greyish frames of windows and other UI elements a bit annoying, esp. in contrast to the mostly dark galaxy and also dark UI backgrounds. Not sure whether it's too outlandish to ask for a solution that allows to player to customize that too (I mean easier than via that Stardock Win UI software - forgot the name)?

Finally I'd still be curious whether the leaders seen during negotiations are pre-rendered vids aas in GC2, or real-time rendered 3d models (that maybe can be FBX-exported too?)

There's been talk about the AI harvesting designs used by successful players, which means this should be somewhat alleviated.