I like the ships textures

Change the planet Water , it is too much bright and blue ?
Or perhaps it's some alien planet with special liquid ? perhaps change color to avoid people comparing it to heart ?

You should avoir point lights on the ships , it will be GPU intensive and A8 is not Unreal 3 or Cryteck engine !
What you can use is simple oriented sprite flares with culling perhaps.

Example :
http://www.unrealsp.org/images/gameguide/whatis/tournament.jpg

Thanks for the quick replies.
I agree that planets should not look like a paper folded surface.

Better?
I took away the spec bump material, adjusted water color in photo shop, and adjusted material color settings in MED.
Always open to more ideas.
Thanks.

hi

just google for planet images, like this:
http://fragile-stock.deviantart.com/art/Desert-Earth-Planet-2-0-70049878

what is very important to be much more realistic is adding atmosphere!

Thanks for all the advice. Everything helps allot. I will gracefully accept any criticism or compliments from all future screen shots because I'm building the game more for the people than myself. My goal is to add to the good space game tittles available on the market, not the bad ones.

I've been thinking about upgrading to A8 for a while now. At first I was afraid that my A7 lite-c code would have compatibility issues with A8.

I spent a whole year learning the very basics of A7 lite-c and do not want to spend more time learning all over again the basics of A8.

After reading about the upgrade, it's my understanding that if I was to program an A8 game (after upgrade purchase) using only A7 lite-c, I will not run into any compatibility problems. I would only have to handle engine physics programming differently.

If I'm wrong about this than please let me know.
Thanks.

A8 lite-C = A7 lite-C

hmm.. i think you need to overwork the whole texture..
It looks way to small sized ^^

Take a look on these 2 Earth Skins (Colormap and Bumpmap):
1: http://minecraftworld.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/earth_flat_map.jpg
2: http://www.3dstudio-max.com/textures/images/earth-bump.jpg

And additional cloudmap: http://naturalearth.springercarto.com/ne3_data/8192/clouds/europe_clouds_8k.jpg


Yes i know.. they are a way tooooo large. But i don´t want you to use them.. they show how to create the colormap of a planet surface. Mat colors for water and Ground textures for landmass. The depth comes from a second skin (the bumpmap).
That will look like that: http://www.imagesload.net/img/Earth.jpg


Your texture looks to bright with to intense colors. And the clouds look like a kid had fun with Photoshop brushes ^^"

There are some minor differences (e.g. decal shadow handling, some terrain related things) what could cause problems, but if you read carefully the update history, you can find the source of all malfunctions appearing after upgrading.
But maybe you are lucky and will not meet any problems... And A8 is really faster than A7!

06/01/2012 :
"I understand that some people may think it to be impossible for one guy to have enough skills to build a great game in just a few months, but that's just what I'm doing."

It will be 3 months soon : we are already 23/03/2012 !

And you'll have showed only some model ship and a planet ??
(perhaps you didn't know alreaday what means real game making!)

You should work lot more on your game, you was supposed to work very hard , all the time on it !
I really think now it was some big joke and lies.

I have failed in trying to build a game in just 3 months. I ran into problems and delays that I did not expect.
However
The development of this game will continue until finished. It will also take a little longer since I'm aiming for top quality graphics & game-play.

There is a good chance that I will unleash a new great rpg space war this year.
I'll be posting more shots as I make progress.

Alone without help you will need years for a good spacegame. Just start with scripting the basic code for the 3d flight and fighting.do the modeling and other artwork after scripting. I also still usng alpha_models. My gamecode is still not finished (after many years!!!) For shure it is possible, but not alone in that short time. You should create a timeline (deadline) for single parts of the developing process....