Odyssey space has "too much contrast" - breaking down the rendering of a frame

[SonnyKingarc]

Horizons was not even close to being accurate, the sky is filled with a gray fog or haze (making it blueish/purplish at times) as some like to call it, and the dust was really exaggerated and all over the place. Odyssey is not perfect, there should be millions of stars displayed, small sized nebulas should still be visible like in Horizons, the galaxy band should be white and the dust dark brown but at least the sky is black now and the dust is confined to the milky way band which is a huge improvement, Elite is supposed to be a simulation (it's not but at least it is somewhat close to it).

This is taken from the exact same spot and with the same FOV:

Horizons

Odyssey (alpha)

For what it is worth here is some pictures which are close to what you would see with the naked eye:

It should be like that in Elite (in that regard Space Engine is pretty accurate, really like it):

From Starry Night software, assembled from literally thousands of photographs; it's been imaged and processed to give the closest resemblance to what you'd see with the naked eye under dark skies.

360-degree panorama view of the Milky Way (an assembled mosaic of photographs) by ESO, the galactic centre is in the middle of the view, with galactic north up.

 

[Erei]

Horizons was not even close to being accurate, the sky is filled with a gray fog or haze (making it blueish/purplish at times) as some like to call it, and the dust was really exaggerated and all over the place. Odyssey is not perfect, there should be millions of stars displayed, small sized nebulas should still be visible like in Horizons, the galaxy band should be white and the dust dark brown but at least the sky is black now and the dust is confined to the milky way band which is a huge improvement, Elite is supposed to be a simulation (it's not but at least it is somewhat close to it).

This is taken from the exact same spot and with the same FOV:

Horizons

Odyssey (alpha)

For what it is worth here is some pictures which are close to what you would see with the naked eye:

It should be like that in Elite (in that regard Space Engine is pretty accurate, really like it):

From Starry Night software, assembled from literally thousands of photographs; it's been imaged and processed to give the closest resemblance to what you'd see with the naked eye under dark skies.

360-degree panorama view of the Milky Way (an assembled mosaic of photographs) by ESO, the galactic centre is in the middle of the view, with galactic north up.

I think the "haze" effect was made to hide the lack of stars. If I'm not mistaken, Elite use a "real" skybox, IE the stars you see are actual star you can go to. And there are possible limits to what they can do without burning your computer.
I think we went from an extreme to another. From "foggy skybox" to "black with tiny dots". As usual, I think the best would have been something in between.

 

[Decksmeck]

The stars shimmer to much. Is there pixel fighting?

 

[The Galactic Penguin]

Excellent post, OP. Thanks for taking the time to put it together and write it up for us all.

 

[horizone]

I am just going to drop this A B comparison here too, for visibility.

 

[Frankymole]

The Milky Way is largely composed of red stars except in the spiral arms where they tend to blue. But human eyesight is most sensitive in the centre of the visible spectrum, green. It wouldn't be white, in any case.

 

[TheCyo]

I'm fed up with this whole "dark space is more realistic" discussion.
From the OP you can see that this is not intentional, but multiple bugs and architectural problems in the render pipeline.

And just for what it is worth:
Fly to Neptune (or some other outer body), look in the direction of the sun. Notice that you can't find the sun as our sun is as bright as all the other stars. Broken gamma & contrast in the rendering.

Yeah, more realistic.

 

[AkenBosch]

Odyssey's stars twinkle like mad for me - that's something I'd definitely like fixed

There's no twinkle applied to stars, that is just a visual artifact caused by pixel-sized points of light moving through the pixel grid of the display. It's really just the dot pitch of the monitor showing through. It's less noticeable in Horizon since the added brightness and slight halo make them larger, enough for them to rarely get obscured in the pixel grid blind spots.
Thinking of it, if you replace the pixel grid with atmospheric turbulence and diffraction, that's exactly the same reason why actual stars twinkle while planets don't.

Science!

The stars shimmer to much. Is there pixel fighting?

Yep, the idea was to say that, but you have been far more effective.

 

[Montgomery Dog]

It's broken. Objects are not illuminated even halfway convincingly by light sources. Relative intensity of sources closer Vs sources further away is completely borked. Much of the FX (supercruise effects on other ships, coronal features, light flaring, boost effects, heat dissipation effects, emissives, canopy effects, space dust etc...) are completely missing or suppressed. The starfield flickers, deepsky objects are miscoloured, missing or dim, star colour is largely missing.

It's neither realistic nor visually attractive. The worst of all possible worlds.

 

[Deleted member 182079]

In the end whether you agree or not about the "realistic" part of it, it's a game. And I'd like it more if I was awed by the amount of stars, with varying size and color, the nebula and whatever else, than by having what we have now. Something very black with tiny white dot and a red stain I assume is the milky way.

I'll wait for a fix myself, but thanks

What they mean is this:

This was taken in EDO, in a WD system, a few days ago. Was shocked when I saw it, in a "still got it!" kind of way. Such a shame WD/Neutron systems seem to be the only one to bring the skybox alive again like that.

 

[Montgomery Dog]

There's no twinkle applied to stars, that is just a visual artifact caused by pixel-sized points of light moving through the pixel grid of the display. It's really just the dot pitch of the monitor showing through. It's less noticeable in Horizon since the added brightness and slight halo make them larger, enough for them to rarely get obscured in the pixel grid blind spots.
Thinking of it, if you replace the pixel grid with atmospheric turbulence and diffraction, that's exactly the same reason why actual stars twinkle while planets don't.

Science!



Yep, the idea was to say that, but you have been far more effective.

This sounds convincing at first pass but unfortunately isn't actually true on both counts.

Persistence of image and latency would overcome any pixel grid effects. You can even test this for yourself by creating a panning 'starfield' of single pixels in python (or whatever else you clever people can do). There may be oddities and limitations to your animation techniques - but they don't flash on and off.

Secondly, actual twinkling (scintillation) of stars viewed through the atmosphere is not an analogue for light sources moving through a fixed grid. It is largely a result of refraction of point sources (as you have noted) and a function of constantly changing air density in a turbulent atmosphere.

 

[AkenBosch]

The Milky Way is largely composed of red stars except in the spiral arms where they tend to blue. But human eyesight is most sensitive in the centre of the visible spectrum, green. It wouldn't be white, in any case.

That's not how we work, sadly. It's true that human eyesight has evolved to be more sensitive in the green spectrum, but that only works when there's enough light. Due to evolution we have far more light-sensitive cells (rods) than colour-sensitive (cones), that's why in dim light conditions we see progressively less colours (with green hues being the last to fade away and the first to come back again) until we just see shades of grey in very dark environments. Also, most of our light cells are on toward the borders of the retina, while the center has the most colour ones. That's why amateur astronomers and stargazers use a technique called "averted vision" to spot faint objects: many deep sky targets are so dim, they only appear on your peripheral view, when you are not looking directly at them. Center on them, and they magically disappear because your center retina isn't sensitive enough.

To our naked eyes the night sky, as beautiful as it is, is just different shades of grey, with hints of green and blue. Red and yellow require far more than our eyes are capable of. Even the Orion Nebula, one of the few large and bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, looks just like a tiny milky smudge. You'll need at least a 3-4" aperture to see it as a green fuzzy patch, and no less than 7-8" from a dark enough sky to start noticing the purple. Expose it for just a few seconds, and you'll get a wonderful palette.

TL;DR: we see the Milky Way like we see it because we are basically black and white creatures in the dark. And if you see some green near the horizon, you have the luck of being in a place dark enough to spot airglow. Whoever see it beautifully coloured, either is a mutant (no joke, it can happen I guess) or is making the colours up.

We have been calling it "milky" for millennia for a reason.

@Montgomery Dog - I suppose it could be indeed. Just a very bad case of aliasing then!

 

[jojon]

For what it's worth, the stars stabilise greatly if one apply a lot of supersampling, to deal with their aliasing -- too bad about the performance hit. :7

I wonder whether the skybox texture filtering type has changed, and whether maybe the stars have been given their own separate layer texture, set apart from the galaxies and nebulas one, or if the new aliasing is mostly an effect of the increased contrast (...not that I miss the stars looking like big blurry fuzzballs).

 

[TheCyo]

So I quickly flew to Neptune just to make the two screenshots.

Top: Horizons (of course)
Bottom: Odyssey (also of course)

Notice how in Odyssey Neptune is basically black, the beautiful faint rings are totally gone and all stars have about the same brightness and only differ in size. I'm not saying that Horizons is 100% realistic, but for sure Odyssey is not one iota closer to realism. It is just darker and uglier.

I preordered Odyssey out of pure fandom. I couldn't care less about shoehorning a bad and underdeveloped shooter into a spaceship game. If I want to play a shooter there are lots of options infinitely better than what Odyssey has to offer. But there is basically only one spaceship game. And they broke it.

Like a lot of other people I continue to play Horizons till they port all the bugs and "features" from Odyssey over and then I say goodbye.

 

[Florelit]

They just completely disabled automatic glass dimming while looking at the nearest star, but made the skybox (and a lot of other things) brighter.
I still prefer Horizons lightning but looks like the developers are not even close to make it the same.

 

[Bonsaipanda]

For what it is worth here is some pictures which are close to what you would see with the naked eye:

Dark viewing conditions, 2.22 gamma, no light pollution in the original environment (not true to the actual conditions) - stars too bright compared to porchlight but they are burned to pure white in the photo so this is just a close approximation >>

 

[SonnyKingarc]

I am just going to drop this A B comparison here too, for visibility.
View attachment 235866

I'm not sure it is the same everywhere between stations and outposts but there is a light source just on top of the cockpit hence the lighting in Odyssey:

 

[Just]

Everything I was able to do is a workaround:

Naturally not thanks to FD.
Nvidia filters > "brightness & contrast" >highlights -100%, shadows -100% or-90%

Helps with both "too black" and "too white" problems, of course only "a bit".
And game looks worse in full light for a change (eg. concourse with a lot of light)
I have a hotkey to enable/disable this tweak, but I mostly just leave it on to be honest.

 

[Helvellyn]

The Milky Way is largely composed of red stars except in the spiral arms where they tend to blue. But human eyesight is most sensitive in the centre of the visible spectrum, green. It wouldn't be white, in any case.

What you see is white. Partially because faint things in dark conditions are only detectable by the rod cells, which can't determine colour, and partially because whilst there are a lot more red stars they're also so faint that the majority of ones you can see are not red.

An odd thing about the rod cells is that their's more of them away from the centre of your vision. An old visual astronomeer trick is to try to see something faint by not looking directly at it, because when you turn to look it may not be there, due to the centre of the vision being slightly less good in just about visible dark. I've sometimes wondered if this might explain some ghost sightings, seeing something out of the corner of your eye that's not there when you turn to look (gone way OT there!)

edit to note that someone else has already explained most of this, in better detail.

 

[Helvellyn]

To our naked eyes the night sky, as beautiful as it is, is just different shades of grey, with hints of green and blue. Red and yellow require far more than our eyes are capable of. Even the Orion Nebula, one of the few large and bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, looks just like a tiny milky smudge. You'll need at least a 3-4" aperture to see it as a green fuzzy patch, and no less than 7-8" from a dark enough sky to start noticing the purple. Expose it for just a few seconds, and you'll get a wonderful palette.

Completely agree, you're absolutely right, although maybe it's worth pointing out the odd exception. Betelgeuse is noticeably reddish, as is Mars (not that it would be in Elite, since it's been terraformed). A few other stars show their red too, like Aldebaran and Arcturus, although I've always found Betelgeuse the most obvious. Through a small telescope the yellow - blue contrast of Albireo is clear, but then again you've magnified the light with a telescope.

Good points about green being the last to go; the Orion Nebula can have a bit of a greenish tinge when viewed through a telescope, even though it's actually red.