[Scuddie]

I was thinking...  Imagine you were fighting a battle in deep space.  Now imagine again a battle fairly close to a star.  The lighting conditions will definately be different.  For example, in deep space, there would be little to no ambient lighting.  Likewise, if you are close to a star, ambient lighting will be much higher than normal.  I was also thinking, if there were two stars in the area, the lighting would be a mixture of the two colors.  What I am thinking is to have an RGB valueset so that the color can be defined by the level designer.  For example, if I wanted to be far away from a blue sun I could say 40-40-60.  I would imagine it's easy to do, as you already have it implemented for the color of the system's star.  50-50-50 would be considered normal, 0-0-0 would be total blackness, 100-100-100 would be total whiteness.  Obviously, the creator shouldn't go below 20 or above 80.  What do you think?  It could be very usefull in nebula missions.

[RandomTiger]

Sounds like a good idea, keep pushing

[Fury]

I think FS2 already does this, it is not too visible in original FS2 but use TBP stars.tbl as an example. Ambient lightning has been tweaked. Of course it is not very sophisticated.

[Petrarch of the VBB]

I think this is an excellent idea, and it would make glow maps and points all the more important, becuase if there was little ambient light, glows would be th only way to identify ships visually.

[TrashMan]

OH YES...YES!  A helluva idea!:yes:

[Petrarch of the VBB]

Calm down. It's not healthy to get so excited!:D

[TrashMan]

What do you......AAAAAAAARGH!
* drops dead from a heart attack*

[SadisticSid]

I like this idea. Especially since stars.tbl can be a bit anal sometimes.

[Knight Templar]

Just for refrence, Ice did this with BWO too IIRC.

[phreak]

couldn't you just use the negative suns?

[TrashMan]

BUMP.....

[Scuddie]

The best part about this is you'd be able to set the attitude of the mission.  You could set the ambience level overall of the mission, then you can apply light sources and attach them to stars.  For example, to make things more realistic, the global ambience would be maybe 20-20-20 to better simulate shadow.  Now you can get a white star that's close to you emit a 80-80-80 modifier from that direction to show off that one, and a blue star in the distance would emit a 50-50-60 for a nice hint of blue from that direction.  So you could have a bright reflection from one star and a hint of flavor from another.

BTW, has fred/fs2 been modified to allow missions without a star?

[CP5670]

I have this sort of thing for one or two missions in PI; what I did was to add in an extra sun entry into stars.tbl with the intensity level bumped to 15 or so, which works fairly well.

[pyro-manic]

Me wants!!!