Why is space so unrealistically black and empty of stars in the bubble?

Many years ago i visited the US. I hired a car and drove across Nevada. One night i stayed at a motel in the middle of absolute nowhere. I remember wandering outside for a cigarette during the night. I looked up and was like "Woah". Seeing the night sky without any light pollution or clouds was amazing. I could actually see the galaxy stretching across the sky. So many colours and stars. It had a depth to it like you could see for lightyears. It's a shame that most people living in towns and cities never see a real night sky. It's no wonder that ancient people were so fascinated with the stars.
 
Many years ago i visited the US. I hired a car and drove across Nevada. One night i stayed at a motel in the middle of absolute nowhere. I remember wandering outside for a cigarette during the night. I looked up and was like "Woah". Seeing the night sky without any light pollution or clouds was amazing. I could actually see the galaxy stretching across the sky. So many colours and stars. It had a depth to it like you could see for lightyears. It's a shame that most people living in towns and cities never see a real night sky. It's no wonder that ancient people were so fascinated with the stars.

Yeah I live en Exmouth, 360km from the next small town, 1,200km from the nearest city;

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=...byo5LXAhXBf7wKHf3lAB8QsAQIJw&biw=1600&bih=731
 
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Pioneer supports custom starfields, like this one:

Pioneer_Starfield.png


...and here's my starfield from FFED3D:

[video=youtube;rJO7UEgNtTo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJO7UEgNtTo&t=69s[/video]

...spent a good while trying to really crank up the perception of depth, to heighten the sense of distance and scale..

But hey no ED's blurry orange thing is good too. ;)
 
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Many years ago i visited the US. I hired a car and drove across Nevada. One night i stayed at a motel in the middle of absolute nowhere. I remember wandering outside for a cigarette during the night. I looked up and was like "Woah". Seeing the night sky without any light pollution or clouds was amazing. I could actually see the galaxy stretching across the sky. So many colours and stars. It had a depth to it like you could see for lightyears. It's a shame that most people living in towns and cities never see a real night sky. It's no wonder that ancient people were so fascinated with the stars.

This is one of the reasons they hold the Burning Man Festival out there in Nevada. I live near Akron in N.E. Ohio, so just horrific light pollution. But...drive just 2 hours due west and it's whole other thing. The land out there is much flatter and the night sky is remarkably stunning! I've been told 75 miles (121 Km) from the nearest wide spot in the road, is plenty enough to get a very pure and unpolluted view.

Yeah I live en Exmouth, 360km from the next small town, 1,200km from the nearest city;

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=...byo5LXAhXBf7wKHf3lAB8QsAQIJw&biw=1600&bih=731

Yeah, I'm already jealous, lol. I'd love to retire somewhere that remote. I'd give up gaming in a heartbeat, to have a mountain in my backyard and skies like yours. My gaming would become my camera and telescopes. I doubt anyone could keep me in the house, tbh. [up]
 
Ideally to show the stars as accurately as possible, we'd want LEDs with a highly variable brightness settings for each pixel and a "retina" display resolution, and the inkiest black background possible. Most monitor's black levels are still pretty bright, as you can see the black monitor glowing in a dark room, which means your "black" screen is technically brighter than the dimmest stars :).
What you describe is OLED technology :)

In OLED you have true black as each pixel can be switch off independantly.
 
Yeah, I'm already jealous, lol. I'd love to retire somewhere that remote. I'd give up gaming in a heartbeat, to have a mountain in my backyard and skies like yours. My gaming would become my camera and telescopes. I doubt anyone could keep me in the house, tbh.

The mosquitos might (keep you in the house, that is). I speak from experience ;)
 
What you describe is OLED technology :)

In OLED you have true black as each pixel can be switch off independantly.

Awesome! Didn't know this. Wonder if Elite stars can take advantage of OLED to accurately display stars as point sources?
 
Awesome! Didn't know this. Wonder if Elite stars can take advantage of OLED to accurately display stars as point sources?
Display on OLED TV is more beautiful in Full HD compared to a normal LCD in Ultra HD. Contrast are wonderfull.

For now OLED is only available for mobile phone and very expensive TV as the failure rate in production is high : It's very expensive to produce them right now. They need to get better with the technology.

Any game in OLED would be really more beautiful indeed.
 
That reminds me that I use a Skyrim mod that has a high resolution star field/galaxy texture. The fine detail is great, but many of the stars blur out and become invisible when the player POV camera moves at all. It's a little jarring. Might be related to some of the graphics settings I use for it like TAA, or of course maybe just limitations of my display.

The apparent size of some of the stars is also larger to make them more visible. But at least it's higher resolution than what Elite uses on ultra. I hear you can mess with some file text to change that as well, but I'd rather give an accurate representation of the vanilla game to others with the screenshots I take.

hRdIoIi.jpg

Huh. I didn't really notice this until now, but it kind of looks like some of the other "stars" might be galaxies. There's what look to be many spiral galaxies, if you zoom in, for example.
 
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hs0003

Banned
That's not how it happened. When they originally modelled the galaxy sky box using the generally accepted amount of dust it *didn't* look like what is actually observed, so they gradually increased it until there was a better match.
Watch this https://youtu.be/wQaK-j1n8co?t=2m40s, it's just one instance of David talking about dust but he DOES mention that there is more dust in the Elite galaxy than science suggests there is in the real galaxy.
 
It looks like there's too much reddish interstellar galactic dust and too much of an ambient galactic star glow emanating from the core and the like. I don't think they're really going for a realistic looking aesthetic here, but a more visible one, such as enhanced time exposure pictures of galaxies you might see.

With that and how the nebulae look in the game, it's kind of sad how pathetic Andromeda looks, relatively speaking. Also, I would like there to be more aesthetic variety and accuracy for many of the real nebulae that are represented in the game. → https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ula-graphics-for-the-known-nebulae-out-there? But I digress.
 
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Another point I'll bring up here, since I think it's relevant...

The scale of the galaxy, star field, and nebulae look off to me in general, like someone "painted" them in 3D on a computer at too large of a scale, resulting in a lack of finer detail overall for the generated backgrounds. Just some constructive criticism.

This may just be a concession for performance optimizations or similar as well. Considering the game generates a whole new background for each stellar system when you jump there, it does a pretty good job of it.

For those of us with more beastly computers, it'd be nice to have the option to crank up the generated background detail more in the menu settings.
 
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If you are on PC then there are various tweaks you can do to make more stars to appear.
in particular the <StarInstanceCount> under galaxy map in the GraphicsConfiguration.xml file.
increase the value by 10x or something, that works nice while in the bubble (but might be a little over the top if you hang around the core)

Don't know if you are a VR player - are you aware how (or if?) these settings work in VR - adjusting the StarInstanceCount doesn't seem to make any difference for me - and I wonder if this is a profile name issue - there doesn't seem to be any mention of "VR ULTRA", "VR HIGH" etc. in the GraphicsConfiguration.xml file.

There are files called (eg) VRUltra.fxcfg with settings. don't see how they might relate...
 
Another point I'll bring up here, since I think it's relevant...

The scale of the galaxy, star field, and nebulae look off to me in general, like someone "painted" them in 3D on a computer at too large of a scale, resulting in a lack of finer detail overall for the generated backgrounds. Just some constructive criticism.

This may just be a concession for performance optimizations or similar as well. Considering the game generates a whole new background for each stellar system when you jump there, it does a pretty good job of it.

For those of us with more beastly computers, it'd be nice to have the option to crank up the generated background detail more in the menu settings.

I've had exactly this problem since launch - on a 4K rig ED's skydome just looks awful, cheap and nasty, badly daubed in blurry orange and oversized stars. It has no sense of depth or reach, it looks like a low-definition 2D bitmap. The stars just don't 'pop'.
 
...more FFE3D Starfield pr0n:

[video=youtube;QuhEhj_avs4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuhEhj_avs4[/video]


Select 1080 quality.. see how tingly and sparkly the stars are? See how deep blue can accentuate the perception of depth and distance, with a kind of volumetric fog around distant dense star clusters? These stars pop. They look like 3D point sources - there's almost a slight illusion of parallax when panning, even though this is just a 2D bitmap with some processing..

This looks way better, and more realistic, to me at least, than ED's super-accurately-rendered orange haze..
 
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Lots of people saying space should be black.
Technically it shouldn't. The colour temperature of space is about 3 Kelvin due to residual energy from the big bang. It's dark red.
 
To all who want "more realistic picture" : next time you jump out of witchspace right next to the star , dont forget blind youre self with blowtorch, becouse that what would REALISTICLY happens when u try look at star from such close range.
This should lead you to the idea of a special glass in cockpit, apparently adaptively protects from light. Realistic enough? No? Then prepare blowtorch :D
 
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Lots of people saying space should be black.
Technically it shouldn't. The colour temperature of space is about 3 Kelvin due to residual energy from the big bang. It's dark red.

You say that like the Big Bang is something more than an adult fairy tale. I hate to break it to you. But unless a time machine is invented, it can't really be chalked up as anything other than conjecture. Just because something isn't contradicted by what we know, doesn't mean its a fact. It just means its not a stupid idea. Nothing is proven until its witnessed. If eat a cookie when no one is looking, I can say the dog ate it. From the point of view of everyone else, there is nothing that shows the dog didn't eat it. It has as much supporting evidence as the Big Bang Theory. But in reality the dog didn't eat the cookie, I did.
 
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Lots of people saying space should be black.
Technically it shouldn't. The colour temperature of space is about 3 Kelvin due to residual energy from the big bang. It's dark red.

It should be a lot blacker than what back-lit computer monitors and the like can generally display when being on. Also, off the top of my head, I thought it was in the infrared or even microwave range, which isn't visible anyway.
 
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