Backdrop of stars looks flat?

[tucker]

I like it the way it is.

FD have done a great job on their sky box.

I don't know how far the OPs eyes are apart, but mine are only 2-3 inches so everything over 300 yards looks flat.

The only other thing that helps me to work out distances, is my eyes focusing on distant objects and that wont happen sitting 3 feet from a screen (or in the rift)

I couldn't see any real difference in that ISS video to what you are trying to describe, the stars looked white and blotchy on a black background, that's all. Not very inspiring. the Earth looked great though, What happened to the city lights in ED? What happened to comets? These are the things I'd like to see added to the game and worked on as the backdrop is fine as it is.

 

[Mikey2305]

Isnt this how the galaxy looks? I think those amazing images from the hubble telescope look 'flat'

 

[SvennoJ]

As quoted in another thread about the skybox.
go into your graphicsconfiguration.xml and change GalaxyBackground Quality high Texturesize to 4096
Makes the milky way galaxy bitmap a tad sharper.

That helps. I see more stars now and also have dim single pixel stars in 1080p. The default 'high' setting of 2048 isn't enough for 1080p. The next Nebula should look a bit better now.

 

[CaptainSodom]

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.

Maybe I'm not using the term HDR correctly. By HDR lighting I mean that if you look at a star which occupies a good portion of your screen, it would wash out everything else on your screen and show the surface features on the star. Then when you turn away or go further away, it would gradually go back to normal, and the surface texture would wash out.

 

[Stavro Mueller]

I've always thought that.

I'd expected more foreground depth like the nebulas in Freespace 2.

[video=youtube;wWHp0qtkCGw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWHp0qtkCGw[/video]

This is from 15 years ago - I had hoped for a better rendered version of this ghost-fog in areas of the galaxy in ED.

Its spooky to drive through, and gives a real sense of speed and vector during dogfights.

GOOD GOD NO!

Space fog is the _worst_, most immersion breaking and downright crazy idea ever to ruin a space game. The only place space fog should show up is if you are inside the outer layers of a huge star. If it's thick enough to swirl around you, you aren't in space.

 

[Starlanced]

Look up at night does Mars look any closer then Betelgeuse, that's why it's called the Celestial sphere. It's just here on Earth we have the foreground to give some fake depth, but in space, that's how it will look.

 

[Obsidian Ant]

I like it the way it is.

FD have done a great job on their sky box.

I don't know how far the OPs eyes are apart, but mine are only 2-3 inches so everything over 300 yards looks flat.

 

[Morgo_the_MonkeyGod]

Michael Bay nebula vs real nebula....very sparse. I loved Freespace and freelancer but yeah...70's 'n 80's TV SF aesthetics. BTW the Hubble photos are very looong exposure. That richness only exists because of the exopsure time. Michael Bay vs Tarkovsky....yeah.

I'll shut up now...I have beer.

 

[stevesideas]

I'm wondering if we were all 12 year old kids we'd be having this conversation. I do kind of think that there is a certain perception as an adult that takes away from the feeling of presence within the game. I'm sure some people still feel that but I wouldn't have thought as much as a child. I'm wondering if this is having an effect on how people perceive the background stars and the feeling of being in deep space etc. I personally think I don't have quite as much imagination and fantasy creation in me as I did when I was 12/13. Unless of course it involves the wife

 

[Helvellyn]

Personally I hate big glowy nebulae all over the place, looks nothing like what I see when I look at the night sky from a remote location on a still, clear night (the atmosphere doesn't get in the way that much under those conditions), and that's incredibly immersion-breaking.

The one thing that doesn't look right is the background isn't dark enough but I'm 100% sure that that's my monitor's fault.

 

[Morgo_the_MonkeyGod]

Comparing my boring part of the galaxy with someone elses vivid, colourful milieu through voyages to the galactic hub makes me all wanderlust. Those vistas that other games have presented exist...just not close to home. Be an intrepid tourist, voyager, adventurer. yeah, agreed...it's a skybox, feels like a skybox...that's because everytime I lookup here in my safe European home, it's essentially a skybox. Flickers, sparkles, parallax at the galactic level....nah, that's for another game. ;-)

 

[Bozeman42]

Honestly you're missing the point - i'm well aware of atmospheric effects. Just look at the screenshots i'm posting, compared to the starfields seen from the ISS. Yeah it's a dark background with light dots. So was the background in classic Elite. It's the qualities of the dark background and light dots that you're overlooking. The subtleties, not the broad strokes.

Note the "processed with starstax"

They took MANY photos and composited them to put those images together. Look at the Pleiades / Aldebaran and tell me if it looks like this to your bare eyes:


Those images are the result of superhuman light collection.

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

I like it the way it is.

FD have done a great job on their sky box.

I don't know how far the OPs eyes are apart, but mine are only 2-3 inches so everything over 300 yards looks flat.

The only other thing that helps me to work out distances, is my eyes focusing on distant objects and that wont happen sitting 3 feet from a screen (or in the rift)

I couldn't see any real difference in that ISS video to what you are trying to describe, the stars looked white and blotchy on a black background, that's all. Not very inspiring. the Earth looked great though, What happened to the city lights in ED? What happened to comets? These are the things I'd like to see added to the game and worked on as the backdrop is fine as it is.

City lights announced in 1.1

"Brookes also teases some of patch 1.1's other features. "Alongside a number of tweaks and bug fixes we’re adding a shiny new gas giant shader," he says. "Gas giants now use a parallax shader which improves the feeling of depth within the layers of gas. You can see giant canyons in the gases of Jupiter and high level white clouds floating over Neptune.
"We also have city lights on the dark side of planets, which is something the community and the development team has been looking forward to for some time!"
"

 

[nexxo]

I think it is a difficult thing to get 'right'. It's an artistic interpretative decision to an extent. There's the dramatic swirling nebulae of Eve Online:

And there is the deep velvet black of Space Engine:

Two very different ways of conveying the impression of the vast beauty of space. Tastes may differ; I like them both. Elite Dangerous takes a slightly different approach again, reminiscent for me of the artistic drawings of space and space travel of the early 60's. It has a charm of its own. I suspect that the fdevs are still settling on their own signature feel. We've had the galaxy brighten, then dim; we've had a more blue universe, then a more black one; we've had X-like lens flare on some stars, then we've had them removed; we've had bright colours on the Coriolis station lighting, then we've had it muted. I think suns had more lens flare as well at some point; I certainly think that they need more to convey a feel of brightness. But it will all refine in time as the team keeps tinkering with the graphics.

 

[jamieboo]

Definitely don't want nebulae everywhere, but perhaps a greater density of tiny (maybe barely visible) stars might be nice. Also when looking at the streak of the galaxy I don't get the feel that it is created by an ever increasing density of stars, it just seems like a coloured streak.
But this is my being awfully picky.

 

[MrVibrating]

I run on a 1080p projector and I notice a pretty big difference in definition when switching to my LED TV. I've done my best to mitigate the loss of black levels but would recommend you calibrate your monitors settings, possibly gamma in windows as well as gamma in the game to see if you can get the stars to pop a little more.

THAT'S the word - 'pop'. So let people argue that "sparkle" is exclusively an atmospheric effect. Whatever. My stars just aren't glowing. They don't glisten. They're dots of colour, not points of light...

They do not 'pop'.

I've tried adjusting gamma levels to compensate, but then the cockpit illumination suffers. I think separate gamma and saturation controls (if not a host of other adjustable effects) for the skybox would help..