About Nebula - Will they be Visually Accurate?

[Obsidian Ant]

So I'm really looking forward to seeing nebula in the game. It got me thinking (and there must be info around on this?), that there are many nebulea out there. Many of them we have a very good idea of what they look like, such as the Butterfly Nebula, the Ant Nebula, The Eagle Nebula etc.

All of these look very distinct...and in an accurately modelled galaxy I would expect them to be present. My question is then, how accurate will these all be made? It's not as though they can all be simply procedural generated. So getting some accurate nebula that we going to have to be fully 3D and viewable from different angles (as well as possibly flown inside of) is going to be a huge undertaking.

How do you think Frontier are going to handle this?

 

[Tinman]

Pretty much like Space Engine does it probably, but to a slightly higher level of detail. Play around with it and go to the Horse head nebula to see what I mean.

All they need to do is to make the most famous ones recognizable from the viewpoint of Earth...everything else can be guesswork.

 

[Vingtetun]

Unfortunately, the pictures of Nebulae that we see are colourised and rendered in such a way as to be visible to the naked eye in such a way as they aren't in real life. I'd love my cockpit to be able to work with the electromagnetic spectrum in such a way that they'd be visible, but I suspect at this stage that it won't....

I may, of course, be utterly wrong and they are visible, but I have a nagging doubt in my mind.

 

[Dynamo]

This question come up regularly in the forums, as do most things I guess.

The answer is, if you were in a nebula, you wouldn't see anything. They are very sparse. We see them as we do, because they are very very large, and all the tiny sparse molecules can be seen. But as you get closer, they start to fade due to the bits that make them up being far apart from each other.

It would not be like flying through a cloud.


http://www.universetoday.com/99989/in-reality-nebulae-offer-no-place-for-spaceships-to-hide/


However, how Frontier decide to implement it remains to be seen. They might have visual buffs for the HUD so you see them like you do in sci-fi shows.

 

[SlimExpert]

This question come up regularly in the forums, as do most things I guess.

The answer is, if you were in a nebula, you wouldn't see anything. They are very sparse. We see them as we do, because they are very very large, and all the tiny sparse molecules can be seen. But as you get closer, they start to fade due to the bits that make them up being far apart from each other.

It would not be like flying through a cloud.


http://www.universetoday.com/99989/in-reality-nebulae-offer-no-place-for-spaceships-to-hide/


However, how Frontier decide to implement it remains to be seen. They might have visual buffs for the HUD so you see them like you do in sci-fi shows.

Yet every space game has you flying through pea soup, with visibility down to 50 feet. I wonder what ED will do? Realistic or Pea Soup - or somewhere in between. Maybe just vaguely hazy?

Slim

 

[slartybartfast]

From what i understand they are visible but there is not a lot of color to them.

 

[Vingtetun]

If anyone remembers the old Battlestar Galactica (not the naff 1980, nor the excellent modern remake) - they had one episode where they flew through a nebula with blast shields down and using only their scanners to navigate.

<shakes fist at the universe>

WHY, UNIVERSE, WHY AREN'T YOU LIKE THIS????

 

[HeavyGroovez]

In reality all low surface brightness reflection/emission nebulosity is grey to the naked eye even using large aperture telescopes.

It is however possible to see colour on some of the closer very bright nebulas.

The Great Orion Nebula is a good example - this is often perceived to have a greenish tint even in modest aperture scopes.

In the current implementation we can see that the large and small clouds of Magellan are not showing any color at all whereas the galactic plane is showing photographic colour across a broad band of emission lines.

My guess is that artistic license will prevail and we will see colour for the sake of pleasing aesthetics which I think is a good thing.

 

[OriginalBadBoy]

Yet every space game has you flying through pea soup, with visibility down to 50 feet. I wonder what ED will do? Realistic or Pea Soup - or somewhere in between. Maybe just vaguely hazy?

Thats more to do with draw distance and optimisation. Not so much of a problem these days of course.

I would like to see some sort of nebula just for the artistic look, even though its completely unrealistic. Its a shame really that space just isnt like that, but its very easy to look at a Nebula and imagine flying through it.

Just having Nebula on the Skybox dynamically would still look pretty good.

 

[CaptainTrips]

Also, you must remember that the way we currently see stars up close in ED is totally unrealistic. The only way we could see these is to view them through an Ha (Hydrogen Alpha) filter and that in turn would filter out all the background stars AND parts of the exterior of your ship. Some will say that its a special canopy that allows you to see in the Ha emission line, but it still looks the same with a shattered canopy - so that argument is a non-starter.

I'm all up for a beautiful universe as opposed to a visually correct universe and willing to suspend my disbelief. There will be naysayers who say it is unrealistic, but to them I say that you are playing a game flying spaceships around shooting at other spaceships.. Ultimatley it is a game, not a simulator and I'd like it to look pretty!!

 

[Jenner]

Rule of cool?

 

[Zenicetus]

From what i understand they are visible but there is not a lot of color to them.

Right, not just lack of color to the Mark I human eyeball (which is used in non-enhanced mode for everything else in the game), but the fact that the scale on the more famous objects is huge, but they're very, very far away. Every Hubble image is a high magnification image of what appears to be a very small and concentrated object from Earth, and would just get more diffuse as you get closer. Especially the ones that are so large that they cover multiple star systems like the "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle nebula.

The best comparison I've heard is like noticing a nicely-shaped, distinct cumulus cloud in the far distance. Looks great, looks like a cloud. But the closer you get to it in an airplane, the fuzzier it looks, until you're just flying through what looks like fog. And you wouldn't even see that in space, due to the extremely low molecular and dust density.

I think it would be cool to see something recognizable as we we approach the big nebulae like the Eagle at a distance of maybe 500 light years. But hopefully not too colorful (no X:Rebirth gaudiness, please!), and they should fade out as we actually approach the embedded star systems. Right now FD is faking the color intensity of the Milky Way, but they're doing okay with the Magellanic clouds, so I think they may stay on the more realistic side of things.

That doesn't mean we can't see some spectacular sights. But I think they'll be the more concentrated ones, like stellar-mass black holes with accretion disks, pulsars, maybe a few proto-planetary accretion disks around a newborn star. These will be the kinds of things we actually have to go and visit a star system to see, which fits in with the overall design of the game, I think.

 

[Im_Lost]

Most nebula in visible light just look like grey dust, you probably wouldn't even see them if you were close or inside them. But for the game I think they should go with the colourful option, because it's what most people expect to see and it's more interesting

 

[Cosmo Bozo]

Yet every space game has you flying through pea soup, with visibility down to 50 feet. I wonder what ED will do? Realistic or Pea Soup - or somewhere in between. Maybe just vaguely hazy?

Slim

If anyone remembers the old Battlestar Galactica (not the naff 1980, nor the excellent modern remake) - they had one episode where they flew through a nebula with blast shields down and using only their scanners to navigate.

<shakes fist at the universe>

WHY, UNIVERSE, WHY AREN'T YOU LIKE THIS????

They could probably have this kind of experience in the upper atmosphere of gas giants while scooping fuel, complete with stormy weather etc...

No need to add made up nebula.....