Amaaaazing!! But why is there 3D depth on planets and stars?

Brantisky

B
Amaaaazing!! But why is there 3D depth on planets and stars? - Nevermind, I think I'm insane. . .

EDIT: I concede. Played some more and now I'm seeing things properly. I think my mind is playing tricks on me.

Firstly, I apologize if this has already been discussed. I searched a good bit and couldn't find a thread about this topic.

I want to start this on a positive note because in the end, I can live with my gripe if it doesn't change. I am incredibly amazed by this game and have been obsessing over it since my first play sessions last Friday. VR-only from the start. It is the greatest thing I've experienced with either the DK1 or DK2, even though my lowly GTX 760 3GB (lightly oc'd) only gets me 75fps about 60% of the time. (85% if I avoid big ports and RES) That took a lot of tweaking, and it would be completely unplayable if not for the great info here on this sub-forum. Thank you! Elite and its community are amazing. :)

On to my point... I am perfectly okay with minor lacks of realism when it comes to limited velocities, etc, but why do planets and stars that are many LS away have perceivable depth? (ie, appear differently in each eye) When in SC or parked near a star or planet, they appear to be of a measurable size to me, like in the 10m-100m diameter range. Depth shouldn't be perceivable until you're basically about to land on a planet's surface, right? Is this just me? It seems easily correctable by rendering nearby stars and planets in a separate pass/layer with SBS being a duplicated image from a single cam in the center (between eyes) position, masking out anything that's closer to the camera of course.


tldr: Exactly what the subject says. ;]
 
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Soda Popinski

Soda Popinski
It's an artifact of the relatively low resolution in the DK2. The game engine is rendering them at the proper scale and proper distance, but due to aliasing issues (specifically with craggy looking planets / lava planets / cracked ice worlds), the bump mapping rendering for each eye has some aliasing errors. That makes it appear there are difference, when there shouldn't be any. This leads to the perception of inaccurate scale / distance.

You don't get this in Star Citizen, by the way, because the planets are pre-rendered as flat images on the skybox, so no bump mapping done for each eye.
 

Brantisky

B
Hey Soda, I definitely don't think that's what I'm seeing. The textures are set to low so I can't really even see any bump-mapping, plus this applies to homogenous-looking gas planets, stars, etc. My natural depth perception (which detects scale as 100% accurate in the cockpit) tells me that these objects are about 3 meters away when it says real distance is 1000's of km for instance. They pop out instead of looking flat as they should. Like I'm looking at a tiny (compared to real scale) replica of a planet at a museum or something.

Like I said, I love the game so much this isn't enough to put me off enjoying it, but it be really cool to see the planets the way you see mountains. So big and so far away that is just looks flat, like a painting. I'm guessing that's how Earth looks from the ISS, but I've never had an astronaut to ask.
 

Brantisky

B
I'd been dying to play all day because it was bugging me to feel like it's only me that's noticing this. Just got done with another session and now, confusingly, I disagree with my earlier observation. I think my brain is sometimes trying to find depth where there is none. Whatever planet/moon is hanging in your view on pad 2 at Engle Orbital looked properly enormous and flat as if part of the backdrop. I concede. Space does strange things to the human mind.
 
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seanwasere

seanwasere
i think what you are seeing is a result of the chromatic aberration that is caused by the physical placement of the red, green and blue led layers on the screen,
and is made more prominent by the dk2 magnifying lenses being so close to the screen.
 

Soda Popinski

Soda Popinski
Is your IPD set correctly? Try changing it in Elite Display Switcher (search the forums).

It could also be our brains using parallax movement to estimate distance. We typically don't move at SC speeds, our brains aren't evolved to determine distance of things thousands of miles across while moving at millions of miles per hour.
 
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Brantisky

B
I think you're right on when it comes to what kinds of scales/speeds the brain finds familiar. I did try setting my IPD via Oculus Util (59mm) a while back and strangely this made the game very uncomfortable for my eyes, although it works for me in other games/demos. Normally I do leave most things at 64mm as it works fine for me. The time I tried setting the IPD was the same as when the planets were looking small to me, so maybe there was something going on with my eyes in general. I'll try setting Oculus back to my profile and mess around with results.

One thing that also comes to mind is I more recently started using the LumaSharpen filter and AA that's been recommended (via ReShade since SweetFX doesnt play nice with Win8.1). The less expensive AA helps a lot with my low specs, but I'm wondering if the LumaSharpen is doing something my eyes find disagreeable.

In any case I am absolutely loving the game and playing every possible chance I have. Since I'd finally gotten some nice bounties and my sidey's FSD, power disto, thrusters and weapons were all upgraded, I got a bit too hasty today and decided to attack a wanted pilot in an Eagle, not noticing the rank before I started shooting. Elite! Oops! Got some good shots in and managed to dodge a lot of heavy fire, but I ultimately had to pick a random nearby star and jump. I'm sure I was grinning like an idiot through the whole ordeal. :D Only a week with it and this is now easily in my top 5-10 games ever.
 

grodenglaive

grodenglaive
Your perception certainly plays a big role, but also the planets are MUCH closer than they indicate they are. The solar systems are scaled down a lot in order to fit within the limits of a 32 bit engine.
 

Ben Parry

Ben Parry
grodenglaive said:
Your perception certainly plays a big role, but also the planets are MUCH closer than they indicate they are. The solar systems are scaled down a lot in order to fit within the limits of a 32 bit engine.
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The first part of what you said is definitely true, and there's definitely something that gives some people a sense they're undersized (though it's not eye separation). It may be texture softness. We really don't know.

The second half, though, you're a little off. The maximum value of a 32-bit float is 3.4028235×1038, which is kind of a meaningless number, right? During early development I was always running with an assumption that we had a pretty big range, but there'd be a few things that got problematic near the edge of that range. One day I was asked what that limit actually was (probably for the newsletter)and it turns out a light year is only 9.46 × 1015. Well, divided, that gives us 3.597 × 1022, or in other words, more light years than there are metres in a light year.
Sure, there are caveats - I wouldn't rely on depth buffering at those distances (but you can sort stuff by hand), and if you went near those numbers you'd have to be on guard for code that at any point needed to square a value (which everyone does, constantly, for everything). But suppose we said we can support drawing things up to 1LY away, that gives us more than enough headroom for things that go via a square and back, and is still a ridiculous number. We've yet to run into a thing that's big enough that it can't be represented as a dot when you're a light year away from it.

tl;dr: 32 bits is quite a lot.

Obviously, at big ranges, the precision sucks, so for working out relative positioning of stuff you can do stuff in 64-bit anyway.
 

atlas974

atlas974
Ben Parry said:
The first part of what you said is definitely true, and there's definitely something that gives some people a sense they're undersized (though it's not eye separation). It may be texture softness. We really don't know.

The second half, though, you're a little off. The maximum value of a 32-bit float is 3.4028235×1038, which is kind of a meaningless number, right? During early development I was always running with an assumption that we had a pretty big range, but there'd be a few things that got problematic near the edge of that range. One day I was asked what that limit actually was (probably for the newsletter)and it turns out a light year is only 9.46 × 1015. Well, divided, that gives us 3.597 × 1022, or in other words, more light years than there are metres in a light year.
Sure, there are caveats - I wouldn't rely on depth buffering at those distances (but you can sort stuff by hand), and if you went near those numbers you'd have to be on guard for code that at any point needed to square a value (which everyone does, constantly, for everything). But suppose we said we can support drawing things up to 1LY away, that gives us more than enough headroom for things that go via a square and back, and is still a ridiculous number. We've yet to run into a thing that's big enough that it can't be represented as a dot when you're a light year away from it.

tl;dr: 32 bits is quite a lot.

Obviously, at big ranges, the precision sucks, so for working out relative positioning of stuff you can do stuff in 64-bit anyway.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your answer on this matter!
Could you please tell us if some VR specific changes will be in 1.3 update? :)
 

Ben Parry

Ben Parry
atlas974 said:
Thanks for your answer on this matter!
Could you please tell us if some VR specific changes will be in 1.3 update? :)
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I'm explicitly banned from telling you anything about anything that could be construed as an upcoming feature or change, sadly.
 

Andargor

Andargor
Ben Parry said:
For clarity, I'm also not allowed to tell you something isn't happening.
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You guys have to work on your Glomar responses. This community will take any tidbit of information as a feature promise, or it will take on a life of its own even if it's a wild theory, as Michael has experienced on many occasions :D

We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information requested but, hypothetically, if such data were to exist, the subject matter would be classified, and could not be disclosed
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wstephenson

wstephenson
Is this a new thing, a graphics team thing, or does SJA have explicit permission to tell us about her AI/Docking Computer changes?
 
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