How much energy do you think it would take to move the ships at the speed they move in supercruise? Perfectly reasonable for that to produce intense light.
Can you see other ships in supercruise? Yes, you can.
- Thread starter CMDR_Fru
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How much energy do you think it would take to move the ships at the speed they move in supercruise? Perfectly reasonable for that to produce intense light.
It's not really an atmosphere (the planet info would show no atmo), it's just the weird space fog that occurs on some planets.
You don't even have to be all that close. And sometimes it's nice to just sit back and watch people do their thing.
Just what exactly did you think those fast moving lights were that you could target and scan in supercruise in the first place were?
I remember seeing dozens of ships flying in formation in supercruise on the Distant Worlds expedition. Can't find that video but this one shows multiple ships in supercrueise heading down to a planet. They look like comets entering a planets atmosphere
Source: https://youtu.be/InSvic7wjpM?t=621
In a strange way that summons up why I still play ED. That - and a bit of Snaps
.It may not be very realistic but I just love that fog.
Obviously you didn't search the entire forum and the WWW for it then. Obviously. /sarcasmI've been playing ED for a couple of years. I've never seen this before, and didn't think it was possible. Good work!
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@The rest of you: Did you try it yourselves, or was it just a rumor? I'd also heard that there actually were a free Conda at Hutton, but that you had to find the hidden planet out there to salvage the ship. That used to be just a rumor to me...
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In fairness, for maybe my first half dozen hours I thought they might actually have been comets. But I was pretty heavily drinking from the firehose at that point, so the finer details of the game were often missed.
It's roughly 3 years on now and it just recently clicked that the galaxy has its own sound when you're looking at it. I think I noticed long ago, subconsciously. But it took until now for me to really realize it.
It's touches like that that I really love about this game.
its funny reading the comments of people thinking the op is just talking about seeing the comets, not the actual ship models themselves.
I suspect a number of contributors to this thread have neither understood the OP's post nor watched the video(s).
I've been playing since alpha and was totally unaware that this was a thing. It's actually changed my perspective on how the game is working to some degree, because I'd always assumed that supercruise was a mechanic or domain almost completely divorced from the environment of "normal" space, with ships rendered as bright comets for speed and visual convenience. Seeing the actual ship models there has changed all that, because I doubt FD put those in just in case players flew insanely close to each other. The engine must be ready to render them all the time, which means supercruise has a lot more in common with "normal" space than I thought.
The lights never bothered me much, but I still hate the comet tails. Not only do they look really bad close-up, but the way they swing around as the ships make rapid turns makes them look less like the result of exotic physics and more like what they are: simple rendered primitives in a 3D computer-generated volume, aligned to a vector. They're one of the few things that can take me right out of the game when I see them up close. They don't even add any useful or tactical information. If there was a way to disable them, but keep the glowing lights, I'd be all over it.
Fortunately they're only an issue around busy planets. Most of the time I barely notice them. And most players don't seem bothered by them at all, to be fair.
I've been playing since alpha and was totally unaware that this was a thing. It's actually changed my perspective on how the game is working to some degree, because I'd always assumed that supercruise was a mechanic or domain almost completely divorced from the environment of "normal" space, with ships rendered as bright comets for speed and visual convenience. Seeing the actual ship models there has changed all that, because I doubt FD put those in just in case players flew insanely close to each other. The engine must be ready to render them all the time, which means supercruise has a lot more in common with "normal" space than I thought.
IIRC the lore is something to do with frameshift physics, and the bubbles around the ships acting as an amplifier for certain types of EM radiation, most notably visible light. Meh.
The lights never bothered me much, but I still hate the comet tails. Not only do they look really bad close-up, but the way they swing around as the ships make rapid turns makes them look less like the result of exotic physics and more like what they are: simple rendered primitives in a 3D computer-generated volume, aligned to a vector. They're one of the few things that can take me right out of the game when I see them up close. They don't even add any useful or tactical information. If there was a way to disable them, but keep the glowing lights, I'd be all over it.
Fortunately they're only an issue around busy planets. Most of the time I barely notice them. And most players don't seem bothered by them at all, to be fair.
@Jack ... I don't mind the lights as much as I do the tails. Usually I don't notice the tails until I'm approaching a station with SC traffic around it. I've followed lights around like in the video above. But when those tails show up (flipping around), the light intensity goes up a lot.
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