Borg Cube
- Thread starter Brrokk
- Start date
I'm not sure that can be fixed can it?
The position & type of stars (B & O-class) will be baked into place by the Stellar Forge, which is also what produces the cubes. Potentially the brightness of each star could be varied at the point where the skybox is generated as the player jumps into each system I suppose, it would be a lot of work.
I think the way the galaxy was recreated in the game is an amazing piece of art, that it has imperfections like this an acceptable compromise of procedural generation imo.
The position & type of stars (B & O-class) will be baked into place by the Stellar Forge, which is also what produces the cubes. Potentially the brightness of each star could be varied at the point where the skybox is generated as the player jumps into each system I suppose, it would be a lot of work.
I think the way the galaxy was recreated in the game is an amazing piece of art, that it has imperfections like this an acceptable compromise of procedural generation imo.
Deleted member 110222
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I wonder if it can even be fixed without messing something else up.
If that is the case, better to just leave as is.
It is legitimately harmless.
If that is the case, better to just leave as is.
It is legitimately harmless.
Nope, the layout of stars is fixed, any attempt to change that will re-set the galaxy with who knows what results!
Deleted member 110222
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Captain Archer was the best captain IMO. He was the true pioneer of the lot.
No - there was supposed to be a fix for some of the display issues in the core, where the sheer number of nearby stars overwhelmed the skybox generator and led to the only displayed stars being over at one end of the skybox - I haven't been back that way since to see if it worked, though.
The existence of the cubes is unfixable in Elite Dangerous, and the visibility of them would only be fixable by reducing the apparent brightness of B-class stars substantially.
(Good demonstration of how a fully procedural algorithm can still produce recognisable repeating patterns, though, for the Odyssey terrain arguments)
Yeah there was display fix that changed the way some things were displayed and improved it visually, but the stars are still exactly where they were.
The existence of the cubes is baked in but the way the skybox renders stars is not.
A relatively simple algorithm to compare neighbouring cubes and smooth how many stars get rendered towards the boundaries would go some way to covering up the bones of the system. I.e render more towards the side of the less dense cube and fewer on the matching side of the more dense cube.
It can be somewhat mitigated by increasing the numbers of stars rendered. You can easily add a bunch of zeroes, the game just looks better with little performance loss. However, the galaxy map becomes almost unusable due to performance drops. So make sure you only change it for one quality setting, and switch to another before opening the map.
The actual cubes of stars must continue to exist as they're part of the procedurally-generated galaxy.
Whether or not you can actually see the cubes is something that can theoretically be changed, simply by changing the distance at which the various stars become visible. However, they have to be careful how they edit this, because the rendering-distance calculators have been specially calibrated to make sure the skybox view from Sol looks more or less identical to the view from Earth at night IRL, and it currently does a very good job at this, with no "missing stars" and very few "extra stars". If they made O and B-class stars dimmer and less visible, the constellations would become unrecognizable as many of the bright famous stars in the night sky would disappear from view: one-third of the top 100 brightest stars in our night sky are O or B class, including Achenar, Regulus, Spica, Algol, half of the Southern Cross, the entire Pleaides asterism and pretty much every bright star in Orion apart from Betelgeuse.
Yeah, they could make the change and then manually re-edit the luminosity of those hand-placed stars. But that's a lot of work, just to remove the cubes.
Whether or not you can actually see the cubes is something that can theoretically be changed, simply by changing the distance at which the various stars become visible. However, they have to be careful how they edit this, because the rendering-distance calculators have been specially calibrated to make sure the skybox view from Sol looks more or less identical to the view from Earth at night IRL, and it currently does a very good job at this, with no "missing stars" and very few "extra stars". If they made O and B-class stars dimmer and less visible, the constellations would become unrecognizable as many of the bright famous stars in the night sky would disappear from view: one-third of the top 100 brightest stars in our night sky are O or B class, including Achenar, Regulus, Spica, Algol, half of the Southern Cross, the entire Pleaides asterism and pretty much every bright star in Orion apart from Betelgeuse.
Yeah, they could make the change and then manually re-edit the luminosity of those hand-placed stars. But that's a lot of work, just to remove the cubes.
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Can we prove that's not what the sky would look like from that galactic view point? No. So who's to say it isn't accurate?
One of the issues with doing it like that is, every star you see outside the cabin when you are playing the game is actually a star, the same with nebula, once you start adding and removing stars and/or nebula then what's the point of using the galaxy map to render the skybox at all? Just throw up a realistic looking starscape for where the player is located, that would save some rendering time.
I would be against that method of fixing the problem because we are no longer looking at the galaxy we are flying through. Sure increase or decrease the contrast slightly to make the edges less apparent but not add/remove stars to blend the edges because you no longer know what you are flying towards!
The skybox is already selective about which stars get rendered. This just modifies the selection of which stars to render.
It's probably rendering all of the B-class ones in the less dense cube already, and some of the density changes are pretty spectacular so would be noticeable even skipping 90% of the denser cube. The straight-line/right-angle corner nature of the change would still be noticeable.
There probably are ways to selectively pick stars to render which would cover it up - but would they then also result in stars going missing in strange ways in the core, or on the fringes?
Deleted member 110222
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You're not wrong.
