Not another graphical change! (AKA What have you done to my Nebula?)

[Ian Skippy]

Nebula from 1.1. For the rest what the guys above said.

 

[Obsidian Ant]

Thanks for the input Matt, I just passed through that area and to be honest it looked freakin fantastic. But I do not have pictures from beta to today for comparison.

Granite is it possible its just a lighting detail? unless you are in the exact same spot from beta I bet alot changes the view according to where you are sitting.

I'm in the same system.

If the assets are unchanged, and as I am using all the same settings and system spec - as well as being in the same location...perhaps it is related to the graphics settings bug as reported above and in the bug forums.

 

[Matt Dickinson]

I can't help with the rings sadly as I've not worked in that system so a bug report is your best bet there I'm afraid. The only other possible thing with your nebula screenshot is the gamma resource was none final and we preferred the softer look. I can't recall off hand when we shipped gamma vs when we finalised the nebula assets, they we're certainly something that ran close to our release deadline so it's possible. If possible I'd check a previous release 1.1-1.2 etc. Feel free to pop a bug report in! We certainly haven't changed anything for the xbox, the xbox uses a different set of settings so the pc is unaffected (mac also has different settings!)

Thanks a lot for checking out this thread!!

I have the exact same system in both screenshots, settings were set to max in both cases. I haven't even changed drivers in the past six months (bad of me I know). There does seem to be an issue with graphic settings not applying correctly, the following shows the differences between low and ultra settings:

http://i.imgur.com/E3HmLpw.gif



In the following image, the fx on the asteroid changes, but shadows do not get applied.

Spoiler

http://i.imgur.com/OzLdXlw.jpg

A number of other people have reported this in the following bug report thread, but it hasn't got picked up yet:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=163773

 

[Arjin]

I'm in the same system.

If the assets are unchanged, and as I am using all the same settings and system spec - as well as being in the same location...perhaps it is related to the graphics settings bug as reported above and in the bug forums.

It's very likey, I personally like both shots, but am more fond of the smoother gaseous looking #2 screenshot like you said subjective. I will have to add my screenshots from my visit there a few days ago. See if they are similar.

 

[Matt Dickinson]

Slightly disingenuous there when I've pointed out between release and today we haven't touched or optimised the nebula's! The only possible change was gamma to release, there's been no need to optimise what's there as it's not been an issue!

 

[Arjin]

Slightly disingenuous there when I've pointed out between release and today we haven't touched or optimised the nebula's! The only possible change was gamma to release, there's been no need to optimise what's there as it's not been an issue!

Yea some folks are acting like they are willfully trying to not understand.

 

[Obsidian Ant]

I can't help with the rings sadly as I've not worked in that system so a bug report is your best bet there I'm afraid. The only other possible thing with your nebula screenshot is the gamma resource was none final and we preferred the softer look. I can't recall off hand when we shipped gamma vs when we finalised the nebula assets, they we're certainly something that ran close to our release deadline so it's possible. If possible I'd check a previous release 1.1-1.2 etc. Feel free to pop a bug report in! We certainly haven't changed anything for the xbox, the xbox uses a different set of settings so the pc is unaffected (mac also has different settings!)

Ok thanks Matt. Unfortunately, I don't have any screenshots of the Horsehead in 1.1 or 1.2.

So, it shouldn't be a case that the graphic settings aren't applying correctly - as seems to be happening with the asteroids (I'm reading what you said there correctly...that's unrelated)?

 

[Hydrino]

I don't know, quite a lot of nebula photos have that extra 'detail'...

http://i.imgur.com/v5hcVnJ.jpg

But one thing is for sure...the new nebula seems to be more consistent with the rest of the games nebula.

I like the way there are obviously closer stars at a variety of sizes and distance. I haven't seen the stars in the fore-ground of the image look like that in the game and would love to see that type of effect more pronounced. Maybe someone that has been in more dense star clusters has a different opinion, honestly I haven't travelled that far in the galaxy- never left human space.

 

[Matt Dickinson]

Ok thanks Matt. Unfortunately, I don't have any screenshots of the Horsehead in 1.1 or 1.2.

So, it shouldn't be a case that the graphic settings aren't applying correctly - as seems to be happening with the asteroids (I'm reading what you said there correctly...that's unrelated)?

One thing to say, is with the background; we generate it as you enter the system your in, changing the graphics setting for the background won't update the background until the next time you jump to a new system. So if your running on "low" and change to "ultra" your background won't change until you enter a new system. The background settings determine the resolution for the background and some details on number of samples etc that we use when rendering the background to try and make things look as good as we can on low spec machines. (just to be clear the nebulas are part of the background)

 

[Mithos09]

Could this be another case where the settings got stuck? We've already seen this with the galaxy map before.

 

[Mr_Blastman]

Here's the Horsehead Nebula in Space Engine. Fullscreen for all the details. It is breathtaking in realtime.


The screenshot was taken with a origination perspective from Earth. Distance to the Nebula is 18.559 light years.

 

[Obsidian Ant]

One thing to say, is with the background; we generate it as you enter the system your in, changing the graphics setting for the background won't update the background until the next time you jump to a new system. So if your running on "low" and change to "ultra" your background won't change until you enter a new system. The background settings determine the resolution for the background and some details on number of samples etc that we use when rendering the background to try and make things look as good as we can on low spec machines. (just to be clear the nebulas are part of the background)

I see, that's good to know and and will certainly help for the future. I haven't changed any settings for the screenshots I took today, and all settings were already on Ultra when I loaded the game up. To be honest, you guys have done a great job of getting the game running on low spec PCs, it runs better now on my laptop than it ever has.

Some of the things I have noticed may well be due to the fact that I haven't visited the areas since gamma - as you point out. A number of people here have noticed other changes in the graphics over more recent releases, but that is a different topic.

I will submit a bug report for the nebula just in case.

I just found this screenshot of the nebula from a different angle posted to the forum in January, which seems to more or less match what I am seeing today (though perhaps at a different quality setting):

Spoiler

 

[Artie]

As far as I noticed, all nebulae are "soft" since release in December. I never see "crisp" nebula in any release game version, so it was probably just beta/gamma asset.

 

[Matt Dickinson]

I see, that's good to know and and will certainly help for the future. I haven't changed any settings for the screenshots I took today, and all settings were already on Ultra when I loaded the game up. To be honest, you guys have done a great job of getting the game running on low spec PCs, it runs better now on my laptop than it ever has.

Some of the things I have noticed may well be due to the fact that I haven't visited the areas since gamma - as you point out. A number of people here have noticed other changes in the graphics over more recent releases, but that is a different topic.

I will submit a bug report for the nebula just in case.

I just found this screenshot of the nebula from a different angle posted to the forum in January, which seems to more or less match what I am seeing today (though perhaps at a different quality setting):

Spoiler

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/attachment.php?attachmentid=9090&d=1421513032

Yah the pics do seem to look a bit too smooth for the low res versions so I'm going to guess that the gamma resource got replaced at release with a smoother one. The low res one is a bit blockier and I'd expect to see something not quite as nice. If you fly round in the galaxy map you can sometimes seem them flick between the hi and low versions. It always looks nicer on the background I find!

In regards to the post about stars those big diagonal streaks are lens artefacts from the telescopes, we did try using something similar in the star field but it all looked a bit 80's! We did (believe it or not) run through quite a few looks to the stars internally to try and get a nice realistic but slightly stylized look.

 

[CMDR Commander]

Hey Matt, can we increase the nebula resolution through GraphicsConfiguration.xml somehow?
Because some of the PG ones look absolutely repulsive.

 

[Tinman]

Hey Matt, can we increase the nebula resolution through GraphicsConfiguration.xml somehow?
Because some of the PG ones look absolutely repulsive.
[url]http://i.imgur.com/Eoq2Kaml.jpg?1[/url]

There are no PG ones...they are all hand authored so far even if the placement in the Galaxy might be procedural.

Old post from December:

Placement is procedural based on all the lovely maths the galaxy guys use however the assets are hand authored. We did look into procedurally generating them but we considered it a time sink for that point in the project. We also had to guarantee the local ones looked as close as possible to the real things so we went down this route. Certainly haven't ruled out changing things in future releases though! Think of it a bit like the planets, Earth etc we override to use very specific data, everything else uses procedural data.

I believe distance to the core is a good factor for how numerous they are. Too close and the dust is absorbed into stars and too far away there's not enough matter. They seem more prevalent above and below the galactic plane. Sorry I can't elaborate on the math's it's way beyond my comprehension but it is based on all the existing data available, as is all the galactic dust you see. Quite a lot of debates about the data sets we used and how they were visualised. It's strange to think a lot of this data is written down but rarely visualised! There's also the factor of "what people believe is real" vs what science says is real and we've tried to please both camps as best as possible while making the system work as a game in real time!

 

[CMDR Commander]

snip

Yeah, I know that. There's like six or seven archetypes which the great generation machine shuffles back and forth. They are PG in the sense of their placement and that they don't correspond to any actual IRL nebulae, unlike Barnard's Loop or Horsehead.
That's not really the gist of my question. Thanks for the bump, I guess.

 

[Arjin]

Here's the Horsehead Nebula in Space Engine. Fullscreen for all the details. It is breathtaking in realtime.
View attachment 49236

The screenshot was taken with a origination perspective from Earth. Distance to the Nebula is 18.559 light years.

Nice pic, but wrong game forum....

 

[Mr_Blastman]

Nice pic, but wrong game forum....

It is relevant to the OP...

 

[Chazzie]

Yah the pics do seem to look a bit too smooth for the low res versions so I'm going to guess that the gamma resource got replaced at release with a smoother one. The low res one is a bit blockier and I'd expect to see something not quite as nice. If you fly round in the galaxy map you can sometimes seem them flick between the hi and low versions. It always looks nicer on the background I find!

In regards to the post about stars those big diagonal streaks are lens artefacts from the telescopes, we did try using something similar in the star field but it all looked a bit 80's! We did (believe it or not) run through quite a few looks to the stars internally to try and get a nice realistic but slightly stylized look.

And in my opinion you got them bang on! I'm a big fan of how the graphics look - now if you can add pulsar effects I'll be laughing!