LINES IN STAR FIELDS NEAR SAG A.

[LuciusEsox]

Hi all,

Sorry for nubness. I don't know how to post pictures so I will try to describe what I am seeing.

A couple of years back I went to Sag A and when I started to get within about 10,000 lys and the star fields started to become denser I started seeing some strange things. For instance there would be a very dense patch of stars which would end in an almost straight line to become normal patch of stars, almost as if on a tile ?

I thought it was a bug or maybe something to do with the fact I only had 2gbs of memory on my graphics card.

Well 2 years later and with a new gfx card with 4gbs of ram and 16gb of system memory I am still seeing exactly the same thing.

I know 4gbs isn't much by today's standards but I am not seeing any hitching as it loads new textures and the game is as smooth as silk everywhere else.​

As I say I wish I could post a picture as you would see exactly what I mean and will endeavour to if necessary but does anyone know about this, is it a bug, is it intentional ?

Anyone any ideas ?

 

[huehnerfaust]

It is called an Octree.

The whole galaxy is divided into cells/quads and every cell contains a certain amount of stars.
If you get closer to the core, the density in this cells are not homogeneous any more due to the number of stars and the resolution of the octree.
The octree is essential to determine the visibility of surrounding stars.

This is a flaw of the stellar forge. Not a bug, more of an artifact.

 

[LuciusEsox]

Ahh right thank you for that there is even a name for it. It feels such a strange and alien place when you start to get that far out that tbh it doesn't effect my immersion, hell we wont know what it really looks like until someone gets out there and sees it with their own eyes anyway

 

[tafkabb]

The cube generation is covered by one of the Discovery Scanner series of Elite Dangerous dev stream videos. Go to about 20 minutes (I can't time-stamp, I'm on mobile)

[video=youtube_share;Vz3nhCykZNw]https://youtu.be/Vz3nhCykZNw[/video]

 

[evoelise]

It looks awful. It's been in the game from the start and FD should have fixed it by now. It would be fairly easy to smooth out the star densities near the inner surfaces of the octet cubes to make them blend with congruent octets.

 

[Valorin]

It looks awful. It's been in the game from the start and FD should have fixed it by now. It would be fairly easy to smooth out the star densities near the inner surfaces of the octet cubes to make them blend with congruent octets.

Fairly easy you say... Maybe you can help out then! ...

 

[Ian Doncaster]

It looks awful. It's been in the game from the start and FD should have fixed it by now. It would be fairly easy to smooth out the star densities near the inner surfaces of the octet cubes to make them blend with congruent octets.

If they're allowed to reset the galaxy, sure, it's probably fairly easy to fix. They could fix the axes of suppression while they were there.

The problem is that the way the galaxy generation works it's really difficult to change what stars exist without affecting many other things too.

Remember, there are around 400 billion stars. At a tiny ten bytes per star (class, age, maybe room for a couple of other parameters) it would take around four Terabytes of storage to store them all. And you can use the galaxy map without doing massive data transfers from the server, so that would all have to be stored locally. I don't have 4TB to spare for the Elite Dangerous install. Nor does basically anyone else. So what they did instead was make an algorithm to generate the stars that could recreate them when you went looking - they could change that algorithm to make these clusters more spherical and with fuzzier edges ... at the cost of changing the position, type and system contents of every star in the galaxy except a few hard-coded ones.

(TRAPPIST-1, for example, they were only able to add to the game because the generation had already put a suitable M-class star in about the right place, so they could just rename that one and adjust the system contents.)

 

[Vandaahl]

The cube generation is covered by one of the Discovery Scanner series of Elite Dangerous dev stream videos. Go to about 20 minutes (I can't time-stamp, I'm on mobile)

That's an awesome peace of information.

 

[WR3ND]

It looks awful. It's been in the game from the start and FD should have fixed it by now. It would be fairly easy to smooth out the star densities near the inner surfaces of the octet cubes to make them blend with congruent octets.

It is pretty annoying and jarring, especially since the galaxy sim is one of my most favorite aspects of the game. Shame.

I'd be OK with them taking my ≈25K systems to fix it, if need be.

 

[Rat Catcher]

Quite odd to look at, this is a screenie somewhere (relatively) close to Colonia:

Star Cube Edge

 

[FNLWA]

It is called an Octree.

The whole galaxy is divided into cells/quads and every cell contains a certain amount of stars.
If you get closer to the core, the density in this cells are not homogeneous any more due to the number of stars and the resolution of the octree.
The octree is essential to determine the visibility of surrounding stars.

This is a flaw of the stellar forge. Not a bug, more of an artifact.

The only word in the post I can read is "Octree" 3 times. Might not wanna change your text colour.

 

[ApexWanderer]

We had this in our home system near Colonia when I logged on last night and then it disappeared later in the evening.

 

[evoelise]

Fairly easy you say... Maybe you can help out then! ...

I could do but I doubt they would want me to when they can do this themselves. It's very simple math/coding; for any given octet you know the 6 faces and the congruent octets. You know the density of stars in this octet and the congruent one, from that you can smooth out the distribution as you approach to the faces. This would mean adding more systems (or maybe moving a few between octets) but I doubt anyone would notice much and it would look much better.

Why spend all this effort to make a realistic galaxy - then shoot yourself in the foot by not distributing systems properly and making it look totally unrealistic?

 

[evoelise]

So what they did instead was make an algorithm to generate the stars that could recreate them when you went looking - they could change that algorithm to make these clusters more spherical and with fuzzier edges ... at the cost of changing the position, type and system contents of every star in the galaxy except a few hard-coded ones.

Nice post. I think that moving the systems/stars around wouldn't be noticed much by the players - especially if these were unexplored systems. Worth it to not have the "awful" looking straight edges in the galaxy.

You would only need to move a small percentage of the stars (or add some) around the sides of octets where there are noticeable differences in star density (yes, lots even a small percent is still a lot of stars).

 

[Valorin]

I could do but I doubt they would want me to when they can do this themselves. It's very simple math/coding; for any given octet you know the 6 faces and the congruent octets. You know the density of stars in this octet and the congruent one, from that you can smooth out the distribution as you approach to the faces. This would mean adding more systems (or maybe moving a few between octets) but I doubt anyone would notice much and it would look much better.

Why spend all this effort to make a realistic galaxy - then shoot yourself in the foot by not distributing systems properly and making it look totally unrealistic?

I am pretty sure you never got to peek under the hood of the stellar forge, so you can't possibly know anything about it and you're just assuming and trying to make it look like facts. Didn't work.

 

[evoelise]

I am pretty sure you never got to peek under the hood of the stellar forge, so you can't possibly know anything about it and you're just assuming and trying to make it look like facts. Didn't work.

I am making a lot of assumptions, I agree.

But regardless of how it's coded it's just the rendering of objects with X, Y & Z co-ordinates. So alter (or smooth) those co-ordinates. Just basic geometry - nothing more, no "magic" here.

 

[babelfisch]

I am making a lot of assumptions, I agree.

But regardless of how it's coded it's just the rendering of objects with X, Y & Z co-ordinates. So alter (or smooth) those co-ordinates. Just basic geometry - nothing more, no "magic" here.

They aren't handplaced though. So you would need to change the seed, probably breaking some stuff, having explorers stranded and removing exploration data. Maybe not impossible but it isn't easy either.

 

[LuciusEsox]

BongoBaggins, great reply thank you.. well remembered about that video.

Still loving it even though I hear people say it looks awful I have to pinch myself when I think of what is trying to be recreated here...

Happy xmas you all

 

[WR3ND]

BongoBaggins, great reply thank you.. well remembered about that video.

Still loving it even though I hear people say it looks awful I have to pinch myself when I think of what is trying to be recreated here...

Happy xmas you all

Six of one and a half dozen of the other. Great minds don't compromise with their "vision."

On the other hand, other great minds may be more apt at making them a reality, or at least selling them.

RIP, Steve Jobs.

 

[WR3ND]

They aren't handplaced though. So you would need to change the seed, probably breaking some stuff, having explorers stranded and removing exploration data. Maybe not impossible but it isn't easy either.

Might be able to be sorted on a post processing level, as it were, for graphics seaming. But yeah, it would add to the workload ever time the skybox is generated on each jump.