Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Kosh on April 03, 2010, 04:48:05 am
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If we were to look up in the night sky on another planet in another star system, would we ever see nebulas in the background, you know, like we do in FS?
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They'd be nowhere as bright as they are in FS.
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Yeah, but it still would be cool to have a Nebula nearby that's visible without the need for a telescope.
Not close enough to get funky radiation problems, though. :P
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I'm also quite sure that they wouldn't be that colorful. Lots of the nebula images NASA gives us are digitally enhanced, aren't they?
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Most of the really colourful pics you're seeing are actually from infrared photography....
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Therefore, realistic background nebula being pretty boring, just do what looks best.
That's what I assume to be the general rule.
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Rule of Cool plz.
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I vote we have boring color. It would feel right playing through Fs1&2 again with a realistic background.
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Well, it won't be realistic unless the stars are in the right place.
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realisitcally, you wouldn't see ANY nebula in most systems. the most nebula-esq effect you would see is the milky way star cluster (i'm not sure what its proper name is)
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Galaxy, I believe the technical term is. :p
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well we are IN the galaxy, so we aren't really seeing "the" galaxy. i thought there was a term for the dense trail looking along the disk, but maybe not.
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Well, if this can be seen from Earth?
(http://www.danheller.com/images/California/KingsCanyon/Stars/milky_way-galaxy-n-trees-1-big.jpg)
And there are nebula and stellar nurseries within the Milky way, there maybe a few systems that are close enough for nebula to be that visible!
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That looks like a high-exposure shot with a very long shutter time.
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Aye, the sky doesn't look like that to human eyes.
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Probably, you can even see a shooting star like object. but still that's from earth with an atmosphere and light pollution to contend with, in the depths of space with the right visor filters, who knows what it would look like?
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Actual astronauts?
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In near earth orbit, not in deep space.
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In near earth orbit, not in deep space.
There's no significant difference between out in the middle of nowhere and up near the moon.
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Apart from the ambient light reflected from the earth and moon, and the closeness to Sol.
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This could on forever...
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Apart from the ambient light reflected from the earth and moon, and the closeness to Sol.
Ambient light? No such thing. There's no clouds of gas or dust around earth (at the distances astronauts have gotten) that would significantly diffuse the light reflecting off of earth or the moon or the light from the sun. If you look in the direction of the black of space, you see the black of space. If you look in the direction of earth, the moon, or the sun, obviously you see light from earth, the moon, or the sun. But there's no haze, no diffusion, and no "ambient light". And I'm fairly certain that whatever TINY difference in the amount of matter there is out there versus farther out isn't enough that it would have any visible effect.
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Well, it won't be realistic unless the stars are in the right place.
It can still be closer to realistic than colorful nebulae, ie, have the illusion of realism. Honestly if one was to leave the milky way and erase visible constellations, Id say mission accomplished.
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Or we can go in the complete opposite direction and have ridiculously vibrant backgrounds, Homeworld-style. :)
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Or we can go in the complete opposite direction and have ridiculously vibrant backgrounds, Homeworld-style. :)
Just don't make them HW2 style. Those are atrocious.
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HW2 backgrounds look like you're in the high atmosphere of some gas giant more than deep space.
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During the coldest months in alaska is also a time when the skies are very clear and cloudless. I look up at the night sky every winter and it's so clear, you can see a crap load more stars with the naked eye. And i could see green nebula. The mystery remains of whether i was seeing nebula, or just the billions of hydrogen or helium molecules floating through space from so far away that the ambient star light makes them visible.
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That's called an aurora, mate.
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any nebula visible to the naked eye is likely going to be red.
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During the coldest months in alaska is also a time when the skies are very clear and cloudless. I look up at the night sky every winter and it's so clear, you can see a crap load more stars with the naked eye. And i could see green nebula. The mystery remains of whether i was seeing nebula, or just the billions of hydrogen or helium molecules floating through space from so far away that the ambient star light makes them visible.
Did they look anything a bit like any of these?
http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=aurora+borealis&gbv=2&aq=0&aqi=g10&oq=aur&gs_rfai=&start=0
If the answer to that was yes, then that green stuff you saw was solar radiation having fun with the Earth.
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Actually, charged particles of the solar wind being funnelled to polar regions by the Earth's magnetic field and colliding with atmosphere, ionizing the molecules and causing the awesome looking glow.
Auroras are a wonderful phenomenon. I have once happened upon a proper corona style aurora, which is basically when the whole sky is lit with them, and forming seemingly infinitely high pillars on the sky:
(http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0907/auroracorona_kenwell_big.jpg) (http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0907/auroracorona_kenwell_big.jpg)(http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/103_fall2003.web.dir/Raidmae_Hersey_Perry/liz%27s%20pages/corona.jpg) (http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/103_fall2003.web.dir/Raidmae_Hersey_Perry/liz%27s%20pages/corona.jpg)
Nebulas would, in all likelihood, mostly look like somewhat lighter background to the starfield. In some cases, however, the light of the nebula could actually cover the starfield, making it difficult to use stars for navigation.
That would likely be the case in somewhere like the Trifid nebula or other places where stars are born and are heating the gas in the nebula. Or someplace like Eta Carinae, where the gigantic star in the middle is illuminating the planetary nebula it has puffed around itself. Colours, though? Not as bright as the Hubble pictures I'm afraid.
In fact, open and elliptical star clusers like Pleiades, Hyades or Messier 13 might provide fairly fascinating views.
Then there's stuff like Charcoal nebula - being close to it, it would obscure the sky behind it.
Also, the view of Milky Way as seen from Magellanic clouds would likely be breathtaking.
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Also, the view of Milky Way as seen from Magellanic clouds would likely be breathtaking.
This.
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Can I bum a ride out there with someone?
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Aye, the sky doesn't look like that to human eyes.
Sure it does, if you're in a place that's dark enough. I recognize the technique for the foreground too, wave a flashlight around to highlight it.
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Aye, the sky doesn't look like that to human eyes.
Sure it does, if you're in a place that's dark enough. I recognize the technique for the foreground too, wave a flashlight around to highlight it.
Where's dark enough? I've seen very impressive skies where I grew up, which was remote and rural and far from any light pollution, but I don't believe that anywhere on Earth will exhibit patterns that stark to the human eye. Even in pre-industrial eras I don't believe it would have been so vivid.
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Rural Mississippi has similar skies to that.
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I imagine the light levels are comparable to rural Vermont, and I think it's safe to say that while you get a great many more stars, you will never get a sky that looks like that.
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I want new eyes to see other main colors besides the Red-Blue spectrum.
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I want new eyes to see other main colors besides the Red-Blue spectrum.
Like Geordie's visor in Star Trek TNG. :)
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That's called an aurora, mate.
I know what an aurora is. I see them all the time, their boring, mostly green (sometimes other colors), and uninspiring. When i meant clear sky, i meant a clear sky and seeing something that was much beyond the atmosphere.
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That's called an aurora, mate.
I know what an aurora is. I see them all the time, their boring, mostly green (sometimes other colors), and uninspiring. When i meant clear sky, i meant a clear sky and seeing something that was much beyond the atmosphere.
Truly your depth perception is beyond human capabilities.
You do know there's no way in heaven or hell to know how far a static atmospheric phenomenon is unless you triangulate it using parallax in the order of kilometres? If the green aurora stayed static, you couldn't have known how far it was.
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Doesn't depth perception (not from parallax cues) for a human fail somewhere around the 10m mark? After that, it's all potentially erroneous judgments based on relative size or other learned signals.
I remember being on a glacier, and looking at a side of a mountain. It looked like something you could jog to without much trouble, but the tour guide said it was actually something like 6km away.
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If you wanted realistic (WHY does everyone insist upon this?), you would be fighting in most likely nothing but inky blackness, especially in the areas between systems; it would be totally black, there would be no light except via artificial sources.
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Realism?
You'd be piloting off computer screens. Visual information through glass is nigh useless. Oh, and subluminal lasers :)
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subluminal lasers
wat
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subluminal lasers
wat
I assume he means sub luminescent lasers. Lasers that are not within visual range.
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but... we are piloting off a computer screen... :nervous:
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subluminal lasers
wat
I assume he means sub luminescent lasers. Lasers that are not within visual range.
No, he doesn't. He's making fun of FreeSpace's subluminal lasers, lasers that don't move at lightspeed.
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subluminal lasers
wat
I assume he means sub luminescent lasers. Lasers that are not within visual range.
No, he doesn't. He's making fun of FreeSpace's subluminal lasers, lasers that don't move at lightspeed.
He got what I meant. I guess I was more vague than I meant to be on the irony.
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Subluminal Lasers FTW.
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#.#
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You see, there is no game if your fighter isn't controlled by you. That, and trying to dogfight at 8.3km/s is kinda... stupid?
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#.#
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Yup. Seems we're on the same wagon of "Fun >> Realism"
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Aye, the sky doesn't look like that to human eyes.
If you go to TRUELY dark skies when there is no moon out and completly clear weather, the sky looks far more impressive than that.
Here's a map of light pollution in the US. If you havn't seen the sky from at least the grey areas...you haven't seen dark skies :p.
http://doubleyoutube.info/OAC/Light_Pollution_Road_America-USA-Del.gif
Nebulosity, to the naked eye, appears grey, without color, although some bright nebula in a telescope might appear slightly green/red.
I think that a sky background that was accurate to what would actually be seen in space would be far more beautiful than the current star backgrounds. However, when I'm playing this game I'm trying to shoot things, not just look at a pretty view. So, having lots of colorful nebula can make it a lot easier to see the ships against the sky. Still, I'd love to see accurate backgrounds and would prefer them over the current ones (although the current ones aren't too bad).
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Aye, the sky doesn't look like that to human eyes.
If you go to TRUELY dark skies when there is no moon out and completly clear weather, the sky looks far more impressive than that.
Here's a map of light pollution in the US. If you havn't seen the sky from at least the grey areas...you haven't seen dark skies :p.
http://doubleyoutube.info/OAC/Light_Pollution_Road_America-USA-Del.gif
Nebulosity, to the naked eye, appears grey, without color, although some bright nebula in a telescope might appear slightly green/red.
I think that a sky background that was accurate to what would actually be seen in space would be far more beautiful than the current star backgrounds. However, when I'm playing this game I'm trying to shoot things, not just look at a pretty view. So, having lots of colorful nebula can make it a lot easier to see the ships against the sky. Still, I'd love to see accurate backgrounds and would prefer them over the current ones (although the current ones aren't too bad).
The first few missions of Blue Planet have a 'realistic' Sol skybox background, if you want to check it out.
As for your 'truly dark skies' comment, thanks for the map, good stuff. Apparently light pollution these days is bad enough that even in Antarctica you can't see what would have been visible in ancient Rome.
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If you wanted realistic (WHY does everyone insist upon this?), you would be fighting in most likely nothing but inky blackness, especially in the areas between systems; it would be totally black, there would be no light except via artificial sources.
I'm not insisting on it, I was just curious.