Pretty snazzy stuff indeed. I'm sure the SC look is deliberate, with the homogenous sort of boxy, team colored look. If I were to critique it, I would say that unit identity is weaker because of the homogeneity. But then again, TA was sort of a gray random mess to the untrained eye. I remember thinking so when I first tried the game anyways.
It's a balance of course, homogeneity vs identity. Looking at TA's Core units, their "flag colors" are silver, coal, beige cameo, construction stripes, red, and the red isn't that dominant. All these textures makes the TA units look fragmented, but on the positive side, you can very easily tell, say, the small rocket Kbot (Storm) apart from the Adv. one (Dominator?). Their overall shape differs a lot too. I think that's the two most important visual dimensions to think about when it comes to ... well, I'd even say character design in general. You can even take something like Mario or Gundam colors and slap on something completely different (with the original placements somewhat intact) and you'll still get a Mario/Gundam vibe. And even something abstract like craters or shadows can easily become a Mickey Mouse head or whatever.
Anyways, I think the SC style is perhaps a bit weak in those areas. There are only two very dominant flag colors, and the color placements feels "checkered". Perhaps "evenly distributed" describes it better. The boxy bits gives a nice chunky armoured look, but just as the color placements, their even distribution prevents powerful silhouettes/masses from forming, and the boxes are also very anonymous with their function and seem to act more as filler.
Wow, that was a bit of a tangent. Don't think I'm hating on the new stuff, it looks real nice. I also saw some snazzy animations on Youtube by some guy. I liked his
Jethro especially. I never realized that the missile pods made any kind of sense like that.
I just found Cavedog's UnitViewer on an old backup partition. However, it's using models done before the original release, and many units are missing or have missing faces (top faces). Unfortunately both Spring .86 & .87 crash on my eeepc. The log says my intel GMA something is poop (lowest gfx settings), but .81 somehow works (only "test game"). I sat on my TA game CD and cracked it ages ago. Not having a CD drive anyways, I suppose I'll have to get it from GoG now.
Now I should color some of them scribbles up. Maybe make a unit portrait style pic? I'm thinking the background environment should vary according to unit role / weapon, to give a little visual help. It's easy to spot sea stuff already because of water color, but I'm thinking that could be taken further, so each unit portrait makes the most out of its graphical space.
