This may be old news, but I just got back from a 5,000 Ly exploration trip which took in two black holes, and noticed that the lensing effect seems to have been upgraded (see the videos in my blog post Dancing with a Black Hole here), and with the Milky Way in the background is now quite spectacular. I never encountered this sort of lensing (or the "Body Exclusion Zone Hit" messages) at black holes I encountered some months ago, so think it is relatively new? In any case well-done FD, much better than the earlier "sphere of stars" lensing, which is still there as well somewhat, and very good in its own right).
New Black Hole gravitational lensing effects?
- Thread starter clavain
- Start date
No it's not new. The lensing effect, was messed up for a short period of time, the devs fixed it in the last major update. Body Exclusion zone is new since 1.2
You can find many old vids on youtube (including a few from myself) showing a huge amount of lensing
This is from 2 months ago
[video=youtube;sAUMwnsEXxw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAUMwnsEXxw[/video]
You can find many old vids on youtube (including a few from myself) showing a huge amount of lensing
This is from 2 months ago
[video=youtube;sAUMwnsEXxw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAUMwnsEXxw[/video]
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Body Exclusion Zone? I've never seen this. Can someone clarify?
Body Exclusion Zone happens whenever you fly to the boundary of an object in normal space, eg. not in supercruise. Your ship just stops, and you hug the object at the body exclusion zone range. This is now possible with black holes as the drop-out-of-supercruise range was greatly reduced in 1.2.
Also as far as I know the effects were not really 'fixed' in 1.2 either, just that you can get so much closer to black holes now, you will see a much greater effect.
Edit: to clarify, you will get body exclusion zones with planets, moons, etc, not just black holes. You would get one with stars, too, but they're so hot and you drop out of supercruise so far away that they burn you to death before you'd ever get to the body exclusion zone with your meager few hundred meters per second normal space speed. Black holes are not that hot anymore. I think a recent black hole I visited had the body exclusion zone at about 30km distance.
Also as far as I know the effects were not really 'fixed' in 1.2 either, just that you can get so much closer to black holes now, you will see a much greater effect.
Edit: to clarify, you will get body exclusion zones with planets, moons, etc, not just black holes. You would get one with stars, too, but they're so hot and you drop out of supercruise so far away that they burn you to death before you'd ever get to the body exclusion zone with your meager few hundred meters per second normal space speed. Black holes are not that hot anymore. I think a recent black hole I visited had the body exclusion zone at about 30km distance.
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That makes sense - pre-1.2 I only ever got the "sphere of stars" and no body exclusion zone, and could get no closer than .13Ls IIRC, at least in my experience. This time I got up to around 200km or even less, before hitting the body exclusion zone and the much better lensing effect - you can throttle back to zero and just hang there pitching and yawing, very cool.
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Thanks - I guess it's new to me. I haven't had time to really play that much since 1.1 and 1.2 came out until very recently, and just encountered it the past few days. I try not to look at Youtube and other people's blogs and the like, spoilers and timey-wimey spacey-wacey things and all that. Would rather run into it myself with no foreknowledge, literally in some cases. ;-)
Just wondering on this topic, has anyone found the effect to not load sometimes?
I was in a system a few nights back with a great black hole. Exited the game near the black hole to enable video recording to show others, but when I loaded back in the effects were gone! Completely disabled.
I have come across this a couple of times but wasn't sure if it was simply a small black hole or some other reason.
I was in a system a few nights back with a great black hole. Exited the game near the black hole to enable video recording to show others, but when I loaded back in the effects were gone! Completely disabled.
I have come across this a couple of times but wasn't sure if it was simply a small black hole or some other reason.
So for anyone that have been to these first person.. do they look better in game then on youtube? because when i see these.. all i can think about is how cheesy they look... granted, there is an argument to be said that ive never seen a black hole in real life of course.. but.. it just looks really lame to me that they just used a warping affect around a point and by moving your head, you move that point...
I dont know.. maybe im the only one that thinks these look really cheaply done as compared to the rest of the game... the first mention of black hole in the game and i was expecting something like this, but massive, and something in SC i could go see or fly around..
View attachment 29497
but all i saw were youtube videos of pure.. Meh...
I dont know.. maybe im the only one that thinks these look really cheaply done as compared to the rest of the game... the first mention of black hole in the game and i was expecting something like this, but massive, and something in SC i could go see or fly around..
View attachment 29497
but all i saw were youtube videos of pure.. Meh...
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I think it will depend when the video was taken. Previously, they seemed a bit lackluster, but since I think 1.2 they look awesome!
The one I found had such a strong effect that everything was distorted and mixed up and would change fluidly as I moved the camera/ship around. I ended up spending about 20mins just dancing around in the distortion.
Would always say its better to see it in person regardless.
All black holes in ED are dormant and what we see is probably pretty accurate representation: they are super cold, they aren't radiating anything, they just... hang there doing pretty much nothing. When/if FDEV manages to simulate feeding black holes (like the one in your picture), and interaction between the near stellar bodies, things should get a little bit more interesting.
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Well yeah that's what black holes do. Very few of them are actively feeding, and of those that are, most of their emissions are X-ray or higher levels of energy which wouldn't be visible anyway. The image you posted is a visualization of matter accreting around a black hole, not a simulation of what it would look like.
I understand what I posted isn't accurate, its just what I had in mind when I thought of them and the visuals this game can produce with planet rings and all that.. I love the game, but like I said.. they just seem like a cheesy camera affect and not much more is all.. which is why i asked, if they were much different in person.. because it seems like I may just have to dust off my ASP and go visit one to get the full effect.. maybe it will be better when im there
Not only would this be nearly impossible to model, but black holes like the one in game are far, far, far more common than actively feeding ones.
But if it looked like the picture you shown it would not be realistic representation of what black holes look like.
Black holes look nothing like that picture, Only super massive black holes which are quasars look like a black hole which has a glowing accretion disk around them with polar beams coming out, However Quasars are the universes most ancient objects, We don't have these things anymore, most of them are gone and thus the only ones we see are billions of light years away and thus; billions of years ago.
Even if we ever had a quasar in our galaxy and it was visitable, It would look like this:
It would still have the space warping effect, just a glowing ring around it, with beams emanating from it.
Yes it looks cool, but only on feeding black holes, but for a feeding black hole to look like the picture you mentioned, it needs to become a quasar, which basically means a specific amount of matter must clog the black hole first.
Just wondering on this topic, has anyone found the effect to not load sometimes?
I was in a system a few nights back with a great black hole. Exited the game near the black hole to enable video recording to show others, but when I loaded back in the effects were gone! Completely disabled.
I have come across this a couple of times but wasn't sure if it was simply a small black hole or some other reason.
I have found it tricky to get the effect to start from time to time, and have had to make a few passes, often straight at the thing, in supercruise, before you get a very quick "passing through the lensing" animation. Once you have that, you seem to be able to then circle around it (at very slow speed) and get the full effect and the "body exclusion zone hit" messages. My experience is it is harder to trigger all of this outside of supercruise and the effects are not as noticeable in normal space.
That said my only experiences to date are three small (2-3 solar masses) black holes, it may be easier to notice the effects with larger ones, not sure.
Edit: That said the more "normal" effect of repeated lensing of certain star patterns is often visible from greater distances, (and the bouncing star effect - not sure if this is an effect or a bug) before the "sphere of stars" or more groovy, LSD-based lensing effects kick off.
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See this thread also re lensing around neutron stars and a reply from one of the developers - apparently if the mass is very small, there may not be much of an effect. Presumably this would be the case for black holes as well: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=137923
Not only supermassive black holes. SS 433, aka V1343 Aquilae (the latter is the name on the map, but it's searchable by both) is a microquasar, and has an accretion disk and jets (not in the game). There's a number of others too, V4641 Sagittarii and more you can no doubt find with a quick google.
edit to add: http://www.black-holes.org/the-scie...ty/numerical-relativity/gravitational-lensing is well worth a visit for good simulations of BH lensing - think they're the same people that consulted on Interstellar.
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