[CommanderDJ]

The title basically says it all, but just to reiterate: I'm asking whether it's possible that something is added to make parts of levels nebulae, and other parts empty space. Imagine the possibilities: Shivan strike groups hiding in nebulae, waiting to ambush unsuspecting Terrans, other such things... (I know I only listed one possibility there. )
I don't know how difficult what I'm asking is, but if someone experienced could comment, that would be awesome.

CommanderDJ

[Trivial Psychic]

It's been asked for many times over the years.  Now, combining some complicating scripting and perhaps some distance check sexps within FRED, it at least might be possible, but not easy to do or really practical.  Any practical method would certainly require some new features from the FSO team, and I don't believe that this is a priority for them for now.

[CommanderDJ]

I suspected as much. Perhaps some time in the future when people are less busy...

[The E]

Problem is that we coders are always busy working on something.

[Thaeris]

Yes, this would be really useful, especially for atmospheric missions where you have a cloud layer and then open sky. Wings, FreeSpace Atmospheric, and our mod, Stellar Assault, would have need for this.

[Commander Zane]

FreeSpaceLancer.

[General Battuta]

You can sort of fake it using set-mission-nebula or whatever it's called.

[Dragon]

I don't know of any way to make "exterior" of a cloud, I tried to do it with glowpoints, but it looked ugly.

[Nuke]

FreeSpaceLancer.

ive already managed a combined mouse and gun control system years ago with scripting. but now were talking about some serious beef that is needed in the game's rendering engine.

from a graphics standpoint, how hard would it be to change background settings on the fly? surely nebulas require different initializations from your usual mission. youd need to seriously upgrade the mission format too, to have multiple environments. probibly would lay out nebulas with something like the asteroid system, then theres the matter of rendering the nebula from the outside. freelancer apperared to use a large bitmap for the long distance effect, closing in brings out poofs and debris sprites, closing in further increases the poofs and replaces the debris sprites with models, and then once the boundry is crossed, the full on effect. you also need to render the inside looking out case as well, though thats just a matter of droping the poof alpha and fog. so is it possible, yea sure. is it a monumental undertaking, damn skippy! does the scp have the time or the manpower to implement it, probibly not. would be seriously awesome though, a serious step to modernizing the engine.

[Trivial Psychic]

There is a potential for creating a somewhat simple feature to enable an awkward method of simulating variable density nebulae.  It comes from two fields which are currently part of objecttypes.tbl which relate to FOG.  The two fields control how far away from the camera that ships will begin to be obscured by fog, and the second controls at what distance they will completely disappear behind it.  Using these fields, you can presently make nebulae thinner, but it will affect ALL nebulae for any modified ship classes.  It is not inconceivable, that a talented coder  could create sexps to modify these parameters in mission.  Simpler for the user would be a global modifier, which multiplies these figures for all ships within a mission.  Using a figure greater than one would make the nebula thinner, while using one between one and zero (decimal, obviously) would make it thicker.  Then using waypoints as markers, one could combine every-time events, with the fog thickness multiplier sexp and variables, to create a nebula which gets thinner as you approach a waypoint.