Borders between Codex regions seem to also be borders between different background star fields

Mika L

Mika L
I have recently been traveling around the border point of Sanguineous Rim, Elysian Shore and Kepler's Crest. I have noticed this weird thing when I look at space towards the center of the galaxy and away from it: The background star field is looking nice on the side of Sanguineous Rim, but almost void in the other two regions. Have other players noticed this? This looks like some kind of an issue in the rendering of the skybox. I play solely in Odyssey so I don't have corresponding observations from Legacy mode.

Here is a screenshot from Schadgae JC-M d7-0, looking towards the center of the galaxy. This system is in Elysian Shore, about 55 ly from Sanguineous Rim and about 16 ly from Kepler's Crest. Elysian Shore is on the left and Sanguineous Rim is on the right.
20230430_1 Schadgae JC-M d7-0.png


And here is a view from the same spot to the opposite direction. Sanguineous Rim is now on the left and Kepler's crest is on the right.
20230430_2 Schadgae JC-M d7-0.png
 

0threeleven

0threeleven
Your in the void, right? I've noticed when I go beyond the halfway point in a void it reverses prospective. The galactic arm on the other side appears and the one behind you disappears, I don't know for sure. Must be the way the stellar forge renders it.
 

Mika L

Mika L
0threeleven said:
Your in the void, right? I've noticed when I go beyond the halfway point in a void it reverses prospective. The galactic arm on the other side appears and the one behind you disappears, I don't know for sure. Must be the way the stellar forge renders it.
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Well, my position is almost outside the Perseus Arm to the galactic south. Here stars are quite sparse, but this is not a complete void. I can still easily travel around in my Orca which currently has a jump range of about 47.3 ly.

But as you can see in my screenshots, the denser star field seems to be limited to the border of Sanguineous Rim in both directions, north and south, when it in the view to the north should continue with a similar density to Elysian Shore. Actually the view to the south may be somewhat correct, because the Perseus Arm continues only in the Sanguineous Rim, and Kepler's Crest contains areas to the south from Perseus Arm, which have much less stars. But also there seems to be some kind of a hard limit in star density where Sanguineous Rim changes to Kepler's Crest.
 

0threeleven

0threeleven
Mika L said:
Well, my position is almost outside the Perseus Arm to the galactic south. Here stars are quite sparse, but this is not a complete void. I can still easily travel around in my Orca which currently has a jump range of about 47.3 ly.

But as you can see in my screenshots, the denser star field seems to be limited to the border of Sanguineous Rim in both directions, north and south, when it in the view to the north should continue with a similar density to Elysian Shore. Actually the view to the south may be somewhat correct, because the Perseus Arm continues only in the Sanguineous Rim, and Kepler's Crest contains areas to the south from Perseus Arm, which have much less stars. But also there seems to be some kind of a hard limit in star density where Sanguineous Rim changes to Kepler's Crest.
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Sorry, what I meant by the void is the Perseus Fade, closer to Xibalba. There's not much out there and I passed through it sometime ago, found it way too heavily explored. Wish I could be of more help.
 

rOmiLaYu

rOmiLaYu
It's been like this since the very beginning of the game. The engine renders the galaxy in "cubes" of sorts that all stack together to form all of playable space in the Milky Way. Each cube has an assigned "stellar density" value assigned to it which tells the game how many stars to paint on the sky box. It's only noticeable when you are between these two disparate cubes and the numbers are not equal.

It's one of the quirks of the game. Don't look for it to change as we were told many, many years ago it would require a re-write of the base code of Stellar Forge...or something like that.
 

GroG79

G
You can also notice differences between cubes when for example suddenly neutrons appear no more or suddenly a cube is full of red dwarves or just simply lacks star density compared to the previous cube. Near the edge these kind of changes are much more easy to spot.
 

Mika L

Mika L
rOmiLaYu said:
It's been like this since the very beginning of the game. The engine renders the galaxy in "cubes" of sorts that all stack together to form all of playable space in the Milky Way. Each cube has an assigned "stellar density" value assigned to it which tells the game how many stars to paint on the sky box. It's only noticeable when you are between these two disparate cubes and the numbers are not equal.

It's one of the quirks of the game. Don't look for it to change as we were told many, many years ago it would require a re-write of the base code of Stellar Forge...or something like that.
Click to expand...
That explanation makes sense. I had learned that the Stellar Forge placed all stars of the galaxy in cubes that in my understanding have 1280 ly long sides. Do you mean those cubes with the term "sky box"? But I didn't know that the borders between those cubes can have so discontinuous star densities.

I was in the belief that the stars that can be seen in the sky from ship are positioned according to their positions in the galaxy map so that every star in the sky is a certain star in the galaxy map. Isn't it so? Then my screenshots do really show how discontinuous the star density is in that border area of two Stellar Forge cubes.
 

Mika L

Mika L
GroG79 said:
You can also notice differences between cubes when for example suddenly neutrons appear no more or suddenly a cube is full of red dwarves or just simply lacks star density compared to the previous cube. Near the edge these kind of changes are much more easy to spot.
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Ok. This is good to know. I have not travelled so much yet to have noticed such things before.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Mika L said:
. I had learned that the Stellar Forge placed all stars of the galaxy in cubes that in my understanding have 1280 ly long sides.
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It's slightly more complex than that - there are 8 nested sizes of cube, in powers of 2, each corresponding to a particular mass range of systems.

The 1280 LY cubes which form the named regions (e.g. Wregoe) correspond to the placement of the heaviest ("H"-mass) systems. But even near the core there's only a few hundred of those super-heavy systems per sector, so differences between adjacent H-cubes are pretty hard to spot.

On the other side, the 10 LY cubes for the lightest ("A"-mass) systems contain brown dwarf stars and maybe the occasional very light M-class. Differences between those are also hard to spot because you can't see those systems until you're almost on top of them.

The mid-range cubes - especially the E-mass ones at 160 LY a side - you can get this quite visible effect with because the stars are visible at quite a distance and the cubes can be dense enough on the denser side to see the edges very clearly. Lots of pictures of those from nearer the core.

The borders do often have significantly different densities even within a region - but the galactic region borders are often themselves placed to match broader changes in star density for moving between arms or similar, so can be more noticeable.

Mika L said:
"sky box"
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"Sky box" is a graphics term for the background texture which gets rendered when there's no actual objects in the way. And yes, that's generated from the real star positions - but there is a (fairly low default) limit on the number of stars which are pictured at all, even if you could see more in the "real" sky, which can sometimes highlight this sort of discrepancy even more than it looks.
 

rOmiLaYu

rOmiLaYu
Mika L said:
That explanation makes sense. I had learned that the Stellar Forge placed all stars of the galaxy in cubes that in my understanding have 1280 ly long sides. Do you mean those cubes with the term "sky box"? But I didn't know that the borders between those cubes can have so discontinuous star densities.
Click to expand...
No....when I say "sky box" I mean the 2D image that you see as "the galaxy. The only thing rendered in 3D is the actual system that you are in. Everything else is a 2D bmp (or something) wrapped around a 3D model.

And yes, unfortunately those cubes can have so discontinuous star densities.

Mika L said:
I was in the belief that the stars that can be seen in the sky from ship are positioned according to their positions in the galaxy map so that every star in the sky is a certain star in the galaxy map. Isn't it so? Then my screenshots do really show how discontinuous the star density is in that border area of two Stellar Forge cubes.
Click to expand...
Yes, that is more or less true, but it's a snapshot in time, generated upon jumping into a system. It is static and only changes once the loading screen (hyperspace) stops.
 
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