[Taehl]

Hi. I'm new to these forums, but certainly not to FS, FS2, and FS2Open. I love the project, and the updated graphics, and the mods. But there's one thing that bothers me: In the original FS and FS2, when you turned your ship around, the background stars stretched into lines to give a cheap impression of trails. It looked nice, sure, but also gave a little bit of visual feedback about turning rate and direction.

Unfortunately, FS2Open doesn't have them, even if you use software rendering. Is there any chance that they could be put back into the game? Also, something may have to be done about stars all being 1 pixel big - that was fine in 640x480, but in 1600x900 or higher they're minuscule, and their trails would be too.

[Droid803]

Oh, that's because skyboxes make it so that retail stars don't appear.
They're still in FSO if you don't specify a skybox.

[The E]

That's not entirely true. It is possible to get both skyboxes and retail stars, one just has to increase the "Number of Stars" setting in FRED's background editor.

[headdie]

Off on a tangent here but would it be possible to have something, I am guessing in the post processing, so that any bright spot that moves across the screen more than a certain amount gets a light blurring effect?

[The E]

It's possible, but it would require keeping the last two or three frames rendered in memory, like all motion blur effects.

[headdie]

and thus quite resource intensive

[Taehl]

Good to know it's not impossible! Is something like this already available (or will be soon)? And anything about making stars a bit bigger?

[Droid803]

Good to know it's not impossible! Is something like this already available (or will be soon)? And anything about making stars a bit bigger?

Make your own skybox? Use spacescape or something, fiddle around with star sizes as you see fit...

[pecenipicek]

Good to know it's not impossible! Is something like this already available (or will be soon)? And anything about making stars a bit bigger?

Make your own skybox? Use spacescape or something, fiddle around with star sizes as you see fit...

he's talking about the retail style stars which streak a bit when you move around.

[Zacam]

That's not entirely true. It is possible to get both skyboxes and retail stars, one just has to increase the "Number of Stars" setting in FRED's background editor.

MediaVPs missions already have "$Num Stars: 2000" set in them, and I don't see any at all.

Also, it is currently limited to 2000 as a maximum, as defined in MAX_STARS in starfield.cpp (with a default init to 500 defined by Num_stars in the same file.).

[Alan Bolte]

Purely out of curiosity, I decided to see what happens if I increased MAX_STARS. Here's 9110 stars, which is the number of local stars with apparent magnitude <6.5.


[attachment deleted by a basterd]

[Mongoose]

Note to Axem: discospaaaaace

[pecenipicek]

Purely out of curiosity, I decided to see what happens if I increased MAX_STARS. Here's 9110 stars, which is the number of local stars with apparent magnitude <6.5.

with no skybox, correct?

[Alan Bolte]

Right, no skybox, no media_vps, nothing. It actually looks pretty good in motion, i was impressed. See for yourself:

[attachment deleted by a basterd]

[Pottuvoi]

It's possible, but it would require keeping the last two or three frames rendered in memory, like all motion blur effects.

Full motion blur would only need a small velocity buffer which is then used by post processing filter to create the effect.

Another way would be to do within the skybox rendering pass which would onlly need turning information of the ship and directly render the blurred version as the skycube. (sample the skybox several times in single pass to create the blur, you can even use HDR skybox without any need of HDR framebuffer..)