NASA's Flyover Video of Pluto Suggests Planets in Horizons may be too Conservative !
- Thread starter Lightspeed
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I sort of think those (extremely post-processed) animations shows that Frontier is pretty right on with what they've done. The colours are amplified, planet texture is extremely enhanced, to the extent the stars are bouncing all over the place in the background.
I think we should actually be impressed that "our" planets are in fact pretty accurate.
There are some things I miss, the really tiny failed moons and planetoids. Like that "collapsed" moon around Saturn:
I think we should actually be impressed that "our" planets are in fact pretty accurate.
There are some things I miss, the really tiny failed moons and planetoids. Like that "collapsed" moon around Saturn:
I find that Elite does icy bodies / worlds quite well, they can have pretty dramatic terrain with all the canyons. Canyon floors tend to be very choppy. One of the interesting things about Pluto's terrain that has been talked about a lot are the dramatic ablative forms from repeated sublimation/ condensation cycles. You can see some of these blade like forms in video, given the problems encountered with sharp terrain in ED already I wont be expecting such features in game. The choppiness of the terrain does make for interesting landing choices, might be an nice addition to the game.
The lighting model is all wrong in the video. Sun intensity should be way up so that the color desaturation makes the colors more realistic. What we saw in the first video is clearly cartoon coloring ( sRGB should never be used. ).
Yeah, I'd agree that ice worlds and rocky ice worlds in Elite are done pretty sweet. Rocky worlds are mostly bland now but not all of them. In my quest to find non-beige HMC's and MR's I've come across quite a few rocky worlds that were standouts with incredible colors and interesting terrain, so at least they have some probability of generating cool.
If I could change anythign about ice worlds in Elite though, I'd like to see some more variatons in the surface striation geometry. Actual ice moons in our solar system show some great diversity in suface features due to the ice melting, moving, and refreezing, creating some varied and interesting features. Elite's ice worlds could just use a little bit more variety in the surface features, but I'd put that far down on the list of stellar forge things to fix if I were Frontier. It's more of a potential future improvement thing than a real issue IMHO.
Now those HMC and MR's, well.....
a) that's arguable
b) we are comparing it to moons in horizons aren't we? that's the message I got from this thread anyway
Frontier should try to make it as close to the real thing as possible.
Pluto is a dwarf planet.
Pluto is a dwarf planet.