Approaching a Nebula
- Thread starter Avigrace
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We don't know yet. There are two fast modes of travel Hyperspace & Super cruise (sometimes called Frameshift drive) but we can only speculate on what they will look like. The capital ship video from last year has kind of lead to speculation that travel will be seamless - but this is a huge technical challenge to pull off. Maybe we will find out in Alpha 4 ;-)
Yes.
Long answer: the skybox is dynamically drawn from the surrounding universe, every star and feature you see will be a location, and you'll see it change as you approach it.
Of course, some of them will be a long long way away, and you may not reach them in the lifetime of your ship, but...
Long answer: the skybox is dynamically drawn from the surrounding universe, every star and feature you see will be a location, and you'll see it change as you approach it.
Of course, some of them will be a long long way away, and you may not reach them in the lifetime of your ship, but...
Theoretically if you jumped system-to-system towards the nebula the yes, it should become larger, and once you jump to a star inside it you should see it constituting the "backdrop" of the sky,
However, although the travelling part is confirmed, the actual modelling of nebulae in the game is not, as far as I know, confirmed. They would have to be defined as objects of some sort, which is not that difficult so I can't see why they wouldn't do it. It is exactly what happens in Space Engine at the moment, so if Vlad can figure out how to do it I'm sure FD can as well. I would be very dissapointed if they didn't, but it might not be a feature of the initial game release.
Thanks, this is what I want to see, a dynamic sky based on real things around. Not just a black sky with stars in it.
Hopefully they can accomplish this as I am interested in navigating to places like the horse head nebula, it may be 1500 LY away but I can dream.
If they can accomplish this they might also be able to 'prefer' pretty places when creating populated procedural systems.
Hopefully they can accomplish this as I am interested in navigating to places like the horse head nebula, it may be 1500 LY away but I can dream.
If they can accomplish this they might also be able to 'prefer' pretty places when creating populated procedural systems.
Don't get your hopes up, as I believe Nebula are so diffuse, getting up close to them would cause them to disappear, as the gas particles are still very far apart from each other.
http://www.universetoday.com/99989/in-reality-nebulae-offer-no-place-for-spaceships-to-hide/
http://www.universetoday.com/99989/in-reality-nebulae-offer-no-place-for-spaceships-to-hide/
Same with asteroid belts, but the realism was sacrificed for gameplay, so it may be with nebulae...
Not sure about this but AFAIK devs said that skybox will be separately rendered for each star system, I don't remember any word about dynamically changing sky. I can be wrong however, could anybody post any quote or info from devs?
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I think what we have seen in beta/alpha is a planetery accretion disc (correct me if i'm wrong but i thought i saw it mentioned somewhere in the forums but i'd need to search). In which case it is fairly realistic, and hopefully asteroid belts will have more space in them. I guess we'll see soon.
"skybox rendered for each system" and "dynamically changing as you jump from one system to another" means the same thing here.
There's mentions of nebulas in the Stellar Forge strings in the exe. So one might presume they will get drawn on the skybox and mapped on the map.
Sorry to shatter your dream but no
A nebula ,your talking like milkyway size the game will just contain 1 nebula
And that's the one were in...sort of.
After some distance the stars in it won't be placed correctly but purely procedural generated.
Just like FE2..
The Milky Way contains many nebulae
http://www.astro.washington.edu/users/anamunn/Astro101/LecturesFraknoi/astro101s08_nebulae_map.html
I'm particularly interested in seeing what the Orion nebula looks like from Betelgeuse or Bellatrix.
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This is a cool image of the Horsehead Nebula in infra-red - we won't get to see it like that though.
We might...
One of the backer's peeks shows a shot of a close star through a filter. No reason to go to that level of detail if we can't use the filters in-game, and if we can filter the sun...
Yaffle
Volunteer Moderator
Also the size of these things beggars belief - IIRC The Great Nebula in Orion is something like 24 light years in diameter. Amazing. Estimated mass - 2,000 x our sun. So that's pretty diffuse. I'd imagine being in it you'd be hard pushed to know, other than distant stars appearing red(?) through the diffuse haze.
About the only approach I can think of which *might* work would be to start pre-loading game assets for the destination the moment the hyperspace countdown starts and compute frame 'snapshots' for the journey that can be used as part of the animation/blending. I'm hoping for it to be like in the capital ship video also as that looked pretty good
Most of the pretty NASA nebula pictures are taken in invisible part of the light spectrum using very long exposure. So don't be disappointed if you can't find your current desktop wallpaper in the game, it might not be Frontiers fault .
Also, if Earth was in the middle of some nebula, you could't tell by looking at the night sky, they are really diffuse. It will depend on the developers how much eye candy for skybox they use, what wavelengths they use and how they generate it.
. Also, if Earth was in the middle of some nebula, you could't tell by looking at the night sky, they are really diffuse. It will depend on the developers how much eye candy for skybox they use, what wavelengths they use and how they generate it.
