[Ulala]

Pulsars might be cool, if not really distracting. 

[FireCrack]

Thing is, if you were close enough to Andromeda for it to be that large in the sky without magnification, then there would be far fewer stars in your immediate location, and the Milky Way would be a comparatively dim smudge behind you

Unless you're around a coulple billion years from now...

[Kazan]

Thing is, if you were close enough to Andromeda for it to be that large in the sky without magnification, then there would be far fewer stars in your immediate location, and the Milky Way would be a comparatively dim smudge behind you

did you see the arcminute sizes i post?

[IceFire]

Thing is, if you were close enough to Andromeda for it to be that large in the sky without magnification, then there would be far fewer stars in your immediate location, and the Milky Way would be a comparatively dim smudge behind you

This is true....if it were to be really important on the screen...you'd likely be very close to that galaxy and the Mily Way would be far behind. But it is visible, to the naked eye, on Earth, if you know what your looking for...so it is possible to see it.

[StratComm]

Or you could go out on a clear night and see just how big and noticable that spot actually is to the untrained eye.  I still stand by my statement that it's not something I would want to see in a game because no matter how you do it you'll wind up emphesizing it more than you'd see in real life.

[Kazan]

I still stand by my statement that it's not something I would want to see in a game because no matter how you do it you'll wind up emphesizing it more than you'd see in real life. inside the atmosphere of earth

fixed that for you

[Col. Fishguts]

I still stand by my statement that it's not something I would want to see in a game because no matter how you do it you'll wind up emphesizing it more than you'd see in real life. inside the atmosphere of earth

fixed that for you

M31 spans about 6 times the diameter of the full moon in the sky. On a clear night you can see  the bright central bulge with the naked eye. It looks like a little blurry spot, not much bigger than Mars or Venus. Through binoculars it looks like a little bigger blurry spot.
Going outisde of the atmosphere might give you a clearer picture, but you'll never see it like in the telescope with your own eyes. But then again, you wouldn't see any nebulas either, so the discussion is somewhat redundant.

More on-topic: If the starfield would be improved, I'd like too see the milky way as a band of higher star density with more size/colour variation than the current system.

[Kazan]

6 full moons eh? not that large

[actually larger than i thought]

[Herra Tohtori]

Well, this always comes to the question of coolness versus realism. The backgrounds currently in use (lightspeeds cool ones and such) are impossible. Regardless, they are cool. But.

I think that it would be very much possible to create very good-looking starboxes by using just stars, and planets of course if one happened to be conveniently nearby. For example the Sol system simply doesn't have any colorful nebulae around it, but the sky with stars is cool in itself. Of course you would have to have the Milky Way visible. Add to that differently colured and sized nearest stars (red Betelgeuze and orange Arcturus, bright Sirius and blue Vega and Regulus... you name it. Most star systems would be like this, quite similar in starfield itself. Planets should take a greater role in backgrounds IMO. Everything would be centered around them anyways in normal systems.

 But then there could (and probably are, too) some star systems that would offer really spectacular views. Mostly I'm talking about systems inside or next to star clusters. Having a star cluster near you could fill the whole sky with relatively bright stars and gas illuminated by the stars. For example, take a look at the Pleiades, or M13 cluster at Hercules constellation:

M45 Pleiades Open Cluster



M13 Hercules Cluster




Even in the wildest backrounds we haven't yet had anything like these IMO. Of course the gas would not be quite dense - locally the space is practically just as transparent as in solar system. But in the long run, being inside a nebule would definitely create a subtle shade of color to background darkness. The colour of a nebula is defined by the color of the star that illuminates it.

It would be very interesting background in a mission inside a spherical cluster...

Galaxies and nebulae would not be nearly so impressive as these. Of course, if GTVA discovers intergalactic subspace travel, there could be some missions situated in some more dense cluster of galaxies... something like this:

Abell 1689 Galaxy Cluster



Clusters FTW!

[StratComm]

I still stand by my statement that it's not something I would want to see in a game because no matter how you do it you'll wind up emphesizing it more than you'd see in real life. inside the atmosphere of earth

fixed that for you

No, I was correct in my statement.  The bright spot that you would see on a (pixel-based) background, the central bulge of Andromeda, is not noticibly larger than a planet at 2/3 AU which isn't worth adding in either.  Sure, the whole feature is pretty large.  But most of the feature takes magnification and a trained eye to make out (which has been my point from post 1).  You won't get either of those things in a game, because limitations of a discrete pixel size and the fact that it's a game (and you should be moving at all times) makes noticing something not resoundingly different from the background prohibitively unlikely.  Unless, of course, the bright portion of that feature is large enough to notice easily, in which you should be able to easily point out Andromeda in one of the pictures of Earth from the moon, or space from the shuttle, or something like that.  Because I know you haven't been in space to have a better idea of what it 'should' look like.

[Kazan]

we've spent the most time on the lowest priority item on the list - features like M45 which are _MUCH_ more apparent and would add some beauty

variation in star apparent magnitude in the levels displayed in the M45 image is really the single biggest thing

we can then add clusters and then ry and get some banding

[StratComm]

We're debating the "lowest priority" item because it's the only thing to really contest.  (I'm curious how you plan to make the starfield more diverse than it currently is but that's a relatively minor thing; the point being that diversity isn't something to argue over other than how painfully obvious it is.)  If you want to have correct constallations and features as you would see them from earth, I firmly believe you should be using a skybox for 100% of your background.

well, you know how to code... on with ya!

This sums up the rest of this thread nicely.  There's no point to keep debating it if you've already got your mind made up over what you want to see, unless you're trying to convince someone else to do it for you.

[FireCrack]

But then again, you wouldn't see any nebulas either, so the discussion is somewhat redundant.

Unless you were nearby said nebula....

[ni1s]

I've always liked space black and scary. The Great Void, if you will.
Anywho, Celestia is a great tool, not only for astronomers with a bad case of short term memory, but also good for illustrating what space looks like, with diffrent magnitudes, galaxies, nebulas, comet trails, fuzzy stars, disc stars etc..

Get the 2 million stars db from Motherlode, turn on galaxies and nebulas, set the mag limit to something mid. 12, and you'll have yourself a good lookin' universe. 

[S-99]

Personally
If anyone gets this to work in fs2
That'd be really sweet
It'd look amazing, along with the already amazing game
It wouldn't not fit if done properly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Freespace2Open_Screen01.jpg
This here is sort of a good example of what i thought is a populated starfield with nebulae and other stuff
It'd be even better with actual star clusters and stuff

[karajorma]

You really don't need to start a new paragraph for every sentence.

[S-99]

Sorry
Just
My
Format

[ni1s]

Sorry
Just
My
Format

That's bold, as I'm pretty sure Microsoft holds the patent on annoying formats(wmv).

[karajorma]

Sorry
Just
My
Format

Problem is that it means I ignore pretty much half of what you say. It's simply too much effort to read it that way.

[Flipside]

That's more laughy smileys than ought to be allowed on a single page of text....