The 'skydome'

chris5281

C
I've not seen much mention of the new stellar backdrop in Alpha 4 yet, but it just blew me away so I had to bring it up. My four week old son was kind enough yesterday evening to go to sleep for an hour and give me a chance to play, but it feels like I spent most of that hour stationary, spinning in place and looking at the stars. For me the change from a static, painted backdrop to a real stellarium is the most spectacular part of the release.

Even with the stellar positions distorted by parallax, there is so much that is recognizable. The Galactic plane obviously, and the Magellanic Clouds, but also some of the major nearby galaxies such as Andromeda and M33. Orion is distorted but recognizable. The Pleiades are easy to pick out for anyone who has observed them from the ground. Bright stars like Sirius, Polaris etc. are there.

The Dr-Who-esque hyperspace effect, star map, flying around stars and planets etc. is all great, but I've experienced that before in other games and in cinema. Maybe never as well as here, but I've seen it before. The realistic universe all the way through to the stellar backdrop is something I've never seen before, and it's spectacular. This isn't science fantasy, this is science fiction. For me, this is what makes this game the real deal.
 

xyphic

X
I thought I spotted Orion. It'd be really neat if there were a way of turning on constellation rendering in the HUD, just for the awe of it. :)
 

AtomicHorror

AtomicHorror
xyphic said:
I thought I spotted Orion. It'd be really neat if there were a way of turning on constellation rendering in the HUD, just for the awe of it. :)
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I always thought it would be a nice thing to include as part of the hyperdrive spin-up. Constellations flash up for easier orientation, though it would be more of a cosmetic thing than a real help, particularly if you get too far from Sol.
 

gazzareth

G
AtomicHorror said:
I always thought it would be a nice thing to include as part of the hyperdrive spin-up. Constellations flash up for easier orientation, though it would be more of a cosmetic thing than a real help, particularly if you get too far from Sol.
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Can't see the use so much, as you point out - once you get away from Sol then they are all going to distort then disappear although may be interesting to see how far you can go and still identify any ??.. .. ..

G
 

Commander Dave

Commander Dave
xyphic said:
I thought I spotted Orion. It'd be really neat if there were a way of turning on constellation rendering in the HUD, just for the awe of it. :)
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There is a constellation setting somewhere. I've seen it but I can't remember if it's in the map or in the display settings.
Might be in the right hand side panel somewhere.
If I had a memory I'd be dangerous.
 

Colonel Kenney

Colonel Kenney
xyphic said:
I thought I spotted Orion. It'd be really neat if there were a way of turning on constellation rendering in the HUD, just for the awe of it. :)
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I'm smelling "Hud" mods in our future. I'm thinking that might even be something they can add as an expansion further.
 

wstephenson

wstephenson
Colonel Kenney said:
I'm smelling "Hud" mods in our future. I'm thinking that might even be something they can add as an expansion further.
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I was speculating on IRC that the cockpit console could be used to livehack the scripting language used to render the cockpit UIs and HUD, as well as entering cheat POKEs ;).
 

Colonel Kenney

Colonel Kenney
Michael Brookes said:
It's in the map and it's not very useful once you move away from Sol.

Michael
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Its a good point. We won't be spending much time near Sol anyway.

But I'm thinking a hud mod in the future where we can actually click on part of the sky and ID the star. Even though its a skybox there could be positional data involved that could ID the star etc.

I haven't seen yet (only streams) but are there "bookmarks" or "favorites" out there or an area to make notes of systems in the map?

Pen paper is handy of course but sometimes some of us already have enough stuff on our desk with the hotas and its dark so I'd like to be able to take notes on systems as to supply/demand last known prices etc..
 
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Malicar

Banned
M
I'm still shocked how good Alpha 4 looks and I haven't even seen it first hand. it sure did look good on the IPS panel though watching the streams.
 

dalkev

D
The problem is that not many constellations are actually stars from the same region of space. They are simply shapes formed in our own sky-dome. For example in the belt of Orion the middle star (Alnilam) is around 1400 LY away from Sol, whereas the other two are 900LY (Mintaka) and 800LY (Alnitak).

On the galactic scale the constellations become irrelevant.
 

ScottGust

ScottGust
dalkev said:
The problem is that not many constellations are actually stars from the same region of space. They are simply shapes formed in our own sky-dome. For example in the belt of Orion the middle star (Alnilam) is around 1400 LY away from Sol, whereas the other two are 900LY (Mintaka) and 800LY (Alnitak).

On the galactic scale the constellations become irrelevant.
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Is this a permanent state of ED mechanics or an Alpha state?...anyone know?
 

Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
I believe it was asked somewhere else but cant seem to find it now. The position of the stars in the galaxy, has it been modelled to reflect current 2014 positions and will start spinning from there?

Or has the stellarium been modelled as a fast forward to the actual in game year? Im not an astronomer but Id imagine several thousand years may make a difference in some constellations as seen from earth, or anywhere else for that matter, no?
 

tooterfish

T
AXIS said:
Is this a permanent state of ED mechanics or an Alpha state?...anyone know?
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Braben is a bit of a maths wizard, but I don't think he can bend real space and time to his will just yet.

Maybe by the time of Elite 5 he'll have transcended, and be able to sort these little niggling problems for us, but right now we'll have to settle.
 

chris5281

C
Viajero said:
I believe it was asked somewhere else but cant seem to find it now. The position of the stars in the galaxy, has it been modelled to reflect current 2014 positions and will start spinning from there?

Or has the stellarium been modelled as a fast forward to the actual in game year? Im not an astronomer but Id imagine several thousand years may make a difference in some constellations as seen from earth, or anywhere else for that matter, no?
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Not as much as you would think. You use the word 'spinning' so I assume you are thinking in terms of Galactic rotation, but the Galactic year is of the order of 200 million Earth years, so 1000 years makes no appreciable difference at all. What does make a difference is the motion of the stars relative to each other. This is actually quite complicated. From Earth we call this 'proper motion' and it's generally quite small. I think the star with the highest proper motion is Barnard's Star, and even that will only move a couple of degrees in 1000 years. Most stars will be orders of magnitude smaller in terms of their motion as viewed from Earth, so I would be surprised if Frontier are bothering with it.

Of course, from the point of view of a Galaxy simulation the interesting parameters are not the proper motions but the genuine transverse and radial velocities of the stars. The trouble is we currently have very little information on these properties for the vast majority of stars - even those in our very near neighbourhood. This is one of the issues which ESA's recently launched Gaia satellite will address.

A further issue is we have similarly poor positional information for the vast majority of stars! So any change in positions over 100 years are likely to be lost in the error bars of the positions themselves. For example I mentioned Betelgeuse in my original post. It is one of the more prominent stars in the sky, yet according to Wikipedia the best estimate of it's distance is 197 -/+ 45 pc. That's a 25 per cent error bar!

So in summary, efforts to make an accurate Galactic map are to be applauded. They won't match reality, but that is not because of a failing of Frontier to include all the appropriate physics, but rather our limitations in our knowledge of what reality actually is :)
 
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