Messing Around with the Debug Console

[evonannoredars]

Doing some messing around with the debug console and thought I'd share a load of screenshots from this.

Water rendering turned off:

Spoiler :

Looks like a big desert, which frankly looks wayyy better than the actual deserts imo.

Floating fish and flying ships!

Terrain and water turned off:

Spoiler :

Altering water properties:

Spoiler :

Completely smooth ocean!

Altering camera zoom limits:

Spoiler :

These are the default ('Full') values:

But 'Capture' lets you get wayy closer:

And with custom you can go even further out:

Turns out there is an end to the ice wall! It's just void beyond there.

There's also a 'mobile' setting (for switch maybe?) that's more limited than full

Messing with camera angles and settings:

Spoiler :

Switched to an advanced start modern age here! Default camera settings:

FOV 10 gives an isometric-like view

Or a tilt weight of 1 (onto the default 0 tilt) makes the camera face straight down

Some nice city closeups using zoom and camera rotation and tilt alterations:

Spoiler :

Someone needs to mod a first person view - things can intersect kinda jankily sometimes, especially around navigable rivers where the terrain drops off and props attached to building models are left floating in mid-air, but it's very pretty.

Pavilions are great places to view from! Even a way to get views tethered to specific buildings or spots would be great.

Continued in next reply because I hit the image limit lol

 

[evonannoredars]

A couple more closeups:

Spoiler :

Also, should note that I've been using this screenshot mode mod to hide the UI, as this is what these look like without it:

Spoiler :

 

[user746383]

Wow those are amazing. Civ VR should have been exploring your world in first person instead of playing a virtual board game in your living room.

Those “deserts” look so awesome.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I remember in Civ4 when you zoom out, camera angle also changes up to strictly vertical, because technology of that time was unable to handle that amount of graphics. Most of the units looked pretty silly from above.

 

[Wizard-Bob]

Very well done. Very artistic! Thanks for sharing your work

 

[evonannoredars]

Thought I'd take some more closeup screenshots now I'm confident I'm not going to mess up old saves by using the debug console

Screenshots from this game with the big Pyramid of the Sun, Mundo Perdido and Uwaybil K'uh temple complex

Spoiler :

View from the tower of Rila Monastery

A pretty little town in the shadow of Vihren

An idyllic little coastal town

Some from this game where I nuked the hell out of Benjamin Franklin's Qing

Spoiler :

Somewhere a quiet organ was playing, barely audible behind the wind howling through desolate streets and broken homes

Dropped about seven nukes trying to get the best shots in this location lol, here is what I think is my fav individual shot:

And the best sequence I got, which you can fullscreen and go through at your leisure:

And a couple screenshots from this mountain-themed game I started a story thread about that I never finished (oops)

Spoiler :

View from the hanging gardens

A couple more shots from inside cities to round it off

It's here - on the last screenshot I was planning to take - I realised I could turn off vfx to get rid of the constant polar smog and have prettier (although still kinda grey) skies

 

[The_J]

These look just great .

 

[Finwickle]

Great shots! It’s like looking at a city builder game.
Well, a city builder game with nukes, that is.

Someone should turn this into a camera mod.

 

[evonannoredars]

Great shots! It’s like looking at a city builder game.
Well, a city builder game with nukes, that is.

Someone should turn this into a camera mod.

I'm no modder but it feels like it shouldn't be that hard to do - there's some limitations in the debug menu, you can only tilt the camera 0-80 degrees and camera height can't be altered directly. Unsure how much of that could be circumvented through modding, but the camera height does automatically adjust itself to terrain height below.

 

[user746383]

Maybe something they could do in an expansion is have an in-game reason to operate at this level of detail in your cities, that could be amazing.

 

[thejoyofciv]

Wow, these are really cool! And I'm glad my simple screenshot mod was useful here.

Re: modding this directly into the game, I'd love to see that too. When I was looking at camera related things for the screenshot mod it didn't seem like you could modify the camera zoom and angle, but I might have missed it.

 

[evonannoredars]

Took some more screenshots today, these are my favs:

And here are the rest:

Spoiler :

 

[GeneralZift]

This really makes me wish we had a City View button. It reminds me of the Age of Empires 3 home cities:

 

[Siptah]

Or just Anno's post-card and first-person modes.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Or just Anno's post-card and first-person modes.

The problem is, as lovely as the Civ VII in-game shots are, compared to Anno's streets teeming with animated people, Civ VII's are simply Architectural Postcards with no life showing at all.

But then, to hijack the thread for a moment, I think that was a major missed opportunity in Civ VII: lack of people in the cities and towns. When a 6-year old game like Anno 1800 can have people moving in every street, structure and town and still portray maps with ocean water movement, animals in the fields and forests, and playing areas stretched across a half-dozen separate biomes and still play well on the average computer (well, MY average computer anyway), I really wish Civ could have tried the same.

For examples:
Trains moving on railroads which, among other things, would show in a moment where your railroads connected to without having to dig through the brambles and thickets of the UI.

People wandering the streets and buildings of the towns and cities - and rioting when they got unhappy, or collapsing in diseased heaps during a Plague Event, or dancing in the streets during a Celebration.

Instead, we get minimal animation on some improvements and structures and a virtually Dead World everywhere else.

Mind you, the game looks gorgeous, especially compared to some of the previous renditions of Civ, but with just a tiny bit more effort and focus it could have been breathtaking . . .

 

[Lebo44]

For examples:
Trains moving on railroads which, among other things, would show in a moment where your railroads connected to without having to dig through the brambles and thickets of the UI.

People wandering the streets and buildings of the towns and cities - and rioting when they got unhappy, or collapsing in diseased heaps during a Plague Event, or dancing in the streets during a Celebration.

That would be cool.

Victoria 3 has trains, ARA has people wandering or working on fields, workshops etc and the devs have been already considering implementing of railroads with some "life" in them.

 

[GeneralZift]

The problem is, as lovely as the Civ VII in-game shots are, compared to Anno's streets teeming with animated people, Civ VII's are simply Architectural Postcards with no life showing at all.

But then, to hijack the thread for a moment, I think that was a major missed opportunity in Civ VII: lack of people in the cities and towns. When a 6-year old game like Anno 1800 can have people moving in every street, structure and town and still portray maps with ocean water movement, animals in the fields and forests, and playing areas stretched across a half-dozen separate biomes and still play well on the average computer (well, MY average computer anyway), I really wish Civ could have tried the same.

For examples:
Trains moving on railroads which, among other things, would show in a moment where your railroads connected to without having to dig through the brambles and thickets of the UI.

People wandering the streets and buildings of the towns and cities - and rioting when they got unhappy, or collapsing in diseased heaps during a Plague Event, or dancing in the streets during a Celebration.

Instead, we get minimal animation on some improvements and structures and a virtually Dead World everywhere else.

Mind you, the game looks gorgeous, especially compared to some of the previous renditions of Civ, but with just a tiny bit more effort and focus it could have been breathtaking . . .

Well, in the case of a city view mode or something similar, they can easily split the game. So for example the static map is always on, and the Civilians come alive (fade into existence) when you zoom in or when you use the city view mode.

As for trains I feel like that should be default. But I mean there should also be fish, roaming animals, birds, like Humankind.
And maybe Cars on roads between cities.
Planes in the modern era between Airports.

These are the types of details I would expect if Civ was AAA

 

[evonannoredars]

Well, in the case of a city view mode or something similar, they can easily split the game. So for example the static map is always on, and the Civilians come alive (fade into existence) when you zoom in or when you use the city view mode.

As for trains I feel like that should be default. But I mean there should also be fish, roaming animals, birds, like Humankind.
And maybe Cars on roads between cities.
Planes in the modern era between Airports.

These are the types of details I would expect if Civ was AAA

Agreed, something like that would be better for a camera mode. I don't think having minor details like people wandering around was necessary for normal gameplay, the world is already populated by units. Having teeny city inhabitants alongside enormous units might look pretty weird. Some more movement in the world would be good, but I don't think simulating lots of little figures constantly doing stuff would be the right solution.

Wrt railway connections, they'd need an improvement to how roads/railways show up first, a train making some of the sharp bends that occur would look v janky. I think a little train visual for when units teleport between railway stations would be very neat though. As for decorative fish and animals, there's the issue that we have very functional ones on the map in the form of resources. Letting them walk around a bit on their tile would be nice though.

In general though I do think you guys are underestimating the amount of detail that the game has. You can't see it from my screenshots, but there's a lot of things which have moving parts and particle effects. Civ 7 definitely has the amount of detail you'd expect from a AAA game imo, it's just subtler to avoid distracting from gameplay too much and harder to see with the normal zooming in limit.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

In general though I do think you guys are underestimating the amount of detail that the game has. You can't see it from my screenshots, but there's a lot of things which have moving parts and particle effects. Civ 7 definitely has the amount of detail you'd expect from a AAA game imo, it's just subtler to avoid distracting from gameplay too much and harder to see with the normal zooming in limit.

On the contrary, as I posted the game looks gorgeous, and I started noticing the animations in the resources and structures and improvements back in Civ VI, which they have continued beautifully in Civ VII.

But

I cannot help but compare Civ VII the brand new game to games like Humankind of several years ago, which for all its faults (and they were Legion) had very animated cities even with the oversized Unit graphics and more general animation in the countryside (unimproved rural tiles in Civ VII-speak) than Civ VII has. Equally, as I mentioned, the 6 year old game Anno 1800 has graphics both functional and animated and the new edition, Anno 117, due out this year in the preview shots I've seen looks even better. Much as I enjoy the Civ VII graphics, and I very much do, I still wish they had tried to make the cities and towns look a bit more populated.