Backdrop of stars looks flat?
- Thread starter DogTailRed2
- Start date
Very long exposure photo?
Agree HDR wouldn't and shouldn't do much to the star background, but would do wonders to nearby stars (a few hundred Ls away) or FSD wakes.
They wouldn't make any difference. The only real reasons to use a HDR would be to light an object or create reflection for an object. Assuming the object doesn't emit light itself. Any nearby stars emit light to such a degree that any ambient light coming from exterior sources would be totally negated....and you certainly don't want a sun to reflect a HDR that would just look silly.
Nearby stars would look better if they didn't look like big balls of reflective mercury as they do at the moment. Some sun spots would also break up the monotony of their appearance.
For me, the one big thing that made a difference to the feel of a game was motion blur of the star field. I remember a game called I-war that had that feature and it worked fantastically.
Here's a grab of my screen - i play at 3840 x 2048 double triplehead:
http://postimg.org/image/hsc4cz5zd/full/
As you can see, it's not-at-all sparkly or vertigo-inducing. It's flat, dull, lifeless, too sparse, most stars are too grey or brown or beige..
Yet if i increase the gamma any further, the space between stars becomes a horibbly splotchy pixelated purple sprawl.
I don't know if you've seen Assetto Corsa, buts its HDR is amazingly lifelike - compared to say rFactor 2, which looks atrociously garish and over saturated... point being that there's good and bad implementations of HDR effects.
But you can't tell me that image above is supposed to pass as an awe-inspiring enrapturing rendition of a realistic sky. YEAH the brighter ones are too big. But that's not the half of it... i could make a more evocative image of heavenly serenity by spraying my living room windows with muck and setting the on fire.
The stars should glow, and the space between them should emit a low hum of ambiguous radiance - so a given pixel could be a distant star, or it could just be a figment of your eyes.. that sort of thing, which we all see on a clear night in the countryside. I know "depth of field" has a different, particular, meaning in GFX-speak, but it's the literal definition of what we're lacking here.
For a start, i'd suggest the starfield needs to render at higher resolutions for higher-res displays, but that'd only be the tip of the iceberg. The sky in that screenshot i've posted wouldn't be out of place in a Hannah-Barbera cartoon. For all it's astronomical accuracy, it's about as magnificent and humbling as a high-school drama prop. I'd forego the placement accuracy in a heartbeat for a randomised but realistic-looking alternative. I need to be impressed by visual spectacle, not technical specifications.
http://postimg.org/image/hsc4cz5zd/full/
As you can see, it's not-at-all sparkly or vertigo-inducing. It's flat, dull, lifeless, too sparse, most stars are too grey or brown or beige..
Yet if i increase the gamma any further, the space between stars becomes a horibbly splotchy pixelated purple sprawl.
I don't know if you've seen Assetto Corsa, buts its HDR is amazingly lifelike - compared to say rFactor 2, which looks atrociously garish and over saturated... point being that there's good and bad implementations of HDR effects.
But you can't tell me that image above is supposed to pass as an awe-inspiring enrapturing rendition of a realistic sky. YEAH the brighter ones are too big. But that's not the half of it... i could make a more evocative image of heavenly serenity by spraying my living room windows with muck and setting the on fire.
The stars should glow, and the space between them should emit a low hum of ambiguous radiance - so a given pixel could be a distant star, or it could just be a figment of your eyes.. that sort of thing, which we all see on a clear night in the countryside. I know "depth of field" has a different, particular, meaning in GFX-speak, but it's the literal definition of what we're lacking here.
For a start, i'd suggest the starfield needs to render at higher resolutions for higher-res displays, but that'd only be the tip of the iceberg. The sky in that screenshot i've posted wouldn't be out of place in a Hannah-Barbera cartoon. For all it's astronomical accuracy, it's about as magnificent and humbling as a high-school drama prop. I'd forego the placement accuracy in a heartbeat for a randomised but realistic-looking alternative. I need to be impressed by visual spectacle, not technical specifications.
Yes, Assetto Corsa and a lot of other games use HDR lighting for lighting and reflection but they only work in games like that. I'm not sure how FD are lighting the ships in ED, they may well be HDR maps with point sources for the nearby suns/stars etc
I would love a higher res more interesting/realistic background. It would definitely make the game feel more awe inspiring.
I would love a higher res more interesting/realistic background. It would definitely make the game feel more awe inspiring.
Actually it IS flat. Oculus or 3DTV play is the same. You can SEE the sphere your ship is sitting in that has a star field image mapped to the inside of it. It's like your ship is sitting inside a giant ball. The background doesn't look infinite, it looks like there's a flat wall you simply can't get close too.
Which is the way it's supposed to look with the two to three inches of parallax your eyes give you.
No, just... No! That would NOT be realistic.
That sort of thing, which we all see on a clear night in the countryside with a thick layer of atmosphere in between that generates those effects. Go out in space and what you see are just little spots of light on a black background. Exactly what you see in the game.
Honestly, I'm more in favor of breaking some "realistic" physics rules if it produces a more compelling image in a game.
In reality, Yaw in space is exactly the same as Pitch and Roll, yet somehow that's not the case in ED?? Compromises in the interest of game play.
- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -
No. Viewing infinite distance does not produce a giant flat wall you feel you can almost reach. There's a physical and very discernible edge quality to the background in ED that makes it feel like a game skybox (which it is). The issue is 10x more apparent when viewed in 3D.
Thanks for the tip - i applied it (my path was slightly different, Program Files (x86)\Frontier\EDLaunch\Products\FORC-FDEV-D-1002):
http://postimg.org/image/taj2iupv7/full/
Without having done a side-by-side comparison, i really can't see a significant difference. The main impression of a dull, sparse field lacking sparkle, hasn't changed.
The stars need to be small white dots with subtle hints of colour, slightly iridescent (changing hues slightly as the view changes - not talking about atmospheric distortion or refraction, but some degree of colour dispersion will be caused by intervening intersellar dust and wotnot).. you know, sparkle..!
It's just underwhelming in so many ways, i won't waste more bandwidth trying to describe it... you all know what i'm talking about. I'm just not getting the thrill - the cold chill down my spine, the mojo.. of a natural starscape.
You create a game with 400 Billion stars, with true to life distance, system with planets to far it would take years to get to them without a fantasy mode of flight and people still dont realize how small and insignificant they are. The "sphere" looks like it does because that's how it should look, it is 3d but you're hardly more than the remnant of a speck of dust in it. Also you can't see to infinity, would be a great way to become blind instantly though.
From most places in the galaxy you would see a night sky which is very similar to our own - bright stars scattered all around and a big hazy band in the galactic plane.
To see something different you'd need to go a long way towards the galactic centre or a long way out of the galactic plane.
(Bear in mind that we only see bright stars. You can't see red dwarfs (M V, by far the most common stars) from Earth with the naked eye, not even Proxima Centauri which is the closest star to us, so wherever you are you're not going to be able to see the great majority of stars around you. A cluster of bright stars would make for a distinctive view - say if we were a bit closer to the Pleiades - but otherwise you're just going to see "like Earth's night sky" or "like Earth's night sky, with a few more stars" or "like Earth's night sky, with a few less stars" unless you go a long way.)
Tl;dr - the game gets it right.
To see something different you'd need to go a long way towards the galactic centre or a long way out of the galactic plane.
(Bear in mind that we only see bright stars. You can't see red dwarfs (M V, by far the most common stars) from Earth with the naked eye, not even Proxima Centauri which is the closest star to us, so wherever you are you're not going to be able to see the great majority of stars around you. A cluster of bright stars would make for a distinctive view - say if we were a bit closer to the Pleiades - but otherwise you're just going to see "like Earth's night sky" or "like Earth's night sky, with a few more stars" or "like Earth's night sky, with a few less stars" unless you go a long way.)
Tl;dr - the game gets it right.
Of course not, and it is because of exactly two reasons:
1) You know this is only a game, and
2) You have decided that what you now see is not enough
Last edited:
HDR is High Dynamic Range lighting. What that means is that the rendering engine works with real light levels, well beyond the capability of the human eye to perceive properly, and then uses a response function to map those levels into a range similar to what our eye's can perceive, complete with compression/clamping. It is a realistic representation of light levels and our eye's ability to respond. The response function could actually be modeled on a particular type of film or digital camera sensor rather than our eye if they so chose. It isn't an effect, it's a core engine feature.
I actually like the dynamic gamma shift of the backdrop when you fly from the star towards a station. It's nicely done.
The backdrop itself could use some improvement, it looks kind of low-res compared with other textures like stations etc. the galaxy looks especially blurry.
The backdrop itself could use some improvement, it looks kind of low-res compared with other textures like stations etc. the galaxy looks especially blurry.