[Turambar]

i just wish the blur stars in the background could maybe have a band, like an arm of the milky way, just an area of higher density.

[neoterran]

Someone tell me the reason Lightspeed left is because he was approached by a company to work his magic for a brand new, DX9 or OpenGL2.0 level, pixel shaded space combat game. 

[Lt.Cannonfodder]

It does need a lot more smaller stars sprinkled in it though. I think just bumping the star limit in FSO beyond the default 2000 (which is way too low) would help a lot with that.

I never really liked that original starfield I made, so here's the new one:



Maybe not just what kazan wanted, but lightyears ahead the normal starfield of FS2.

[Kazan]

appears to be the same as the standard starfield

[Prophet]

It's a step to the right way. But it still doesn't look like this.

[Kazan]

star "lanes" is definantly one thing i want it to do

[Lt.Cannonfodder]

appears to be the same as the standard starfield

You know, I could almost take that as an insult  Trust me, especially ingame it makes a big difference.

It's a step to the right way. But it still doesn't look like this.

I like my starfields subtle, so they won't distract me too much. But each to his own, I guess.

[Prophet]

I like my starfields subtle, so they won't distract me too much. But each to his own, I guess.

Of course that picture is too crowded and a background like that would make you blind. But seek out your monitor brightness fiddler, and turn it down. As the smaller stars fade out of view, it becomes almost perfect.

[aldo_14]

It's a step to the right way. But it still doesn't look like this.

To be fair, I don't think BSG looks like that either (it's really close to pitch black most of the time).

[StratComm]

when the ****ing hell did i say huge?

do me a favor and NEVER presume something i didn't say

ever

i mean it


that pisses me off ESPECIALLY IN ARGUMENTS

Andromeda is big enogh that it was considered a nebulae before we knew there were other galaxies! 

Even under suburban skies you should be able to see it with your naked eyes, as a 1° fuzzy patch of light. If you live in an area with heavy light pollution, try to find it with binoculars (or your finderscope).

http://www.backyard-astro.com/focusonarchive/andromeda/andromeda.html

more accurate:

M31 is 178x63 (arc min) http://www.seds.org/messier/m/m031.html
the LMC is 650x550 (arc min) http://www.seds.org/messier/xtra/ngc/lmc.html
the SMC is 280 x 160 (arc min) http://www.seds.org/messier/xtra/ngc/smc.html


so the answer to your question is: Yes, they can be naked eye distinguishable!

In a game?  At normal resolutions?

I'll admit, I got seconds backwards, meaning to say minutes.  Silly conversion and I do know better.  But the horizontal angle in FS is supposed to encompass at least what, 45 degrees?  More?  I can't remember what the default FOV actually is, but that would tell you.  At that scale, two arc minutes would be represented by about a pixel, give or take, at most "standard" resolutions.  One pixel drops down to closer to 1.5 arcseconds at 1600x1200.  At that scale, the argument becomes making them a placeable bitmap, not part of the starfield.  But that's not really my point.

I've done a fair bit of stargazing in my day, and while I have used a (relatively powerful) telescope to actually look at Andromeda before, I can certainly say that it's not something that just leaps out of the night sky at you.  Even if you know what you're looking for, you can see that it's there and that it's perhaps blurrier than its neighbors, but you can't say "gee, that's really big in comparison" because the part of it that has an apparent magnitude greater than six is not substantially bigger than a star.  You can't make out the disk with the naked eye, and you can't see its full extents without masking the residual starlight from around it.  It's not like I'm living in a cave here; I'm talking out of personal experience and it just isn't big enough IMHO to put in to a game at all.  Now the magellenic clouds, on the other hand, are outside the scope of this discussion.  One, they aren't disks, and really are hard to distinguish from an ordinary clump of stars if you don't realize what they are.  Two, they aren't highly structured, so clumping a bunch of stars together would do fine.  I've never been south of the equator so I don't know what those clouds look like from a normal perspective, but they certainly don't fit in the same argument as "look at this disk, isn't it pretty."

Also of real importance is that Freespace is a space combat game, not an astronomical simulator.  If someone playing it is sitting there long enough to go "hey, that's not a star, it's a galaxy" then something is seriously wrong.  Unless you want them large enough to be trackable features, in which case they should be done as background bitmaps using the system we already have.  Either-or.  There is absolutely no reason to spend time that could be better spent elsewhere implimenting something that, when all is said and done, will be either virtually unnoticable or just downright silly.

[Kazan]

i never said any of the things in my initial post had to be done through coding so do not assume so

all things can be done with backgrounds, but some of them (particularily the starfield things) could be better done in the starfield sprite code

Representations of SMC, LMC, Andromeda and Triangulum would be NICE to have even if yuo have to apply some magnification to Andromeda and Triangulum

it would be PRETTY


however we've been arguing about by far the LEAST important thing on the list and ignoring the important onest hat would have a much greater impact

star distribution and variance

[FireCrack]

Personaly, I want it to be more like the I-War 2 starfeilds, where stars are actualy glowing points of light, rather than pixels, and the stars shine in different colours and intensities.

[StratComm]

And I quote (thread title):

Star Field Wishlist

Which, when combined with four distinctly code-based alterations (before and after) in your original post, only logically falls code-side too in your original proposition.  If you intended it otherwise, it should have been stated explicitly there.

I've never even said anything negative about starfield dispersal (I think it'd be a great idea, really) or even diversity, other than to point out that stars on the background are already more diverse than you're giving them credit for.

[Kazan]

there is no magnitude diversity

[karajorma]

Well if this isn't code related it should be in FSUP.

Which is where it's going now.

[StratComm]

It is actually majority code-related, unfortunately

there is no magnitude diversity

Look at that picture I posted one more time, please, before you go saying something that's patently false.  Specifically, see the two stars near the upper right small whisp.  There's a noticable - not huge, but noticable - difference between two adjacent stars.  Now I'll freely admit that the starfield in that picture is crap.  It was a test mission and I never raised the density, and I'm not going to try to hide that.  But you cannot say that there is no difference in magnitude when there is actually quite a bit of variety in both the intensity and color of the stars in the engine as of a year ago.  I don't know how long it's been like that, but it's not just a bunch of identical points of light.

[S-99]

Man, i'll take the starfields that came in 3.6.7vp's over retail starfield.
Galaxies sound cool as hell too:)
I'm sort of split on whether or not galaxies should be in the star field.
After finding out a couple are visible to the eye from the atmosphere.
Go ahead and toss them in:p
But, that spiral galaxy didn't look too nice

[Kazan]

ok there is a very little ammount of magnitude diversity

i want some stars with higher magnitudes and I want banding

[StratComm]

ok there is a very little ammount of magnitude diversity

i want some stars with higher magnitudes and I want banding

I still am thinking that you have not actually run a semi-recent build.  What more diversity do you want?


And of course I'm not talking about banding.  Please, lets add banding.  That would only help visual quality and be noticable in doing so.

[Kazan]

i'm currently playing latest official release

i'm talking major magnitude diversity - some bright stars like the open cluster Subaru along with general background stars, other open clusters, globular clusters, star lanes, etc