Questions about the blocky skybox...

[BoKiller]

During my recent trip to Colonia, i have noticed some immersion breaking skybox rendering flaws. Of course, as most of the intermediate explorers already know about this and Frontier is well aware of the issue i didn't want to start another bug report on the topic because there is already a lot of them already, but Frontier never gave us a full answer.

I know that it is an issue with the procedural generation of the game and comes from the incomplete NASA maps that they used. They said that they have to tear down the whole galaxy and build another one just to fix this issue.

Will Frontier ever fix it, or at least reduce the obviousness of the presets that the game uses to render the skybox? I think that it's well within their ability because they have a team of developers that is able to do things that no other development team can do.

Do not think of this as another post that is complaining about Frontier. I love the company and love everything about elite, and i'm not the person to completely write off a game just because of some flaw. I just want a straight up answer about this topic because i'm interested in the issue.

I know that i'm asking for a lot.

Some of the screenshots showcasing the problem:

http://imgur.com/a/vDrJs

 

[iain666]

The skybox is rendered from what is in the in-game galaxy. If you can see it in the skybox you can find it in the galmap and you can go there (unless it's another galaxy). The blockiness of the forge is unfortunate but probably not something that they can smooth out now (without massive upheaval) so removing it from the skybox would require stopping that being an accurate representation of the ED galaxy.

I really hope they never do that because it's brilliant, even when it does show up the quirks of the forge in as stark a fashion as those sectors with an excess of blue-white stars compared to their neighbours, the fact that I know I can go to every star I can see and I can see every star I can go to that's bright enough to see from where I am is an inherent part of the awesomeness of this game.

 

[Sapyx]

"Star beams" like around NGC 7822 are caused by insertion of "real-world" stars, but "star cubes" aren't caused by insertion of real-world stars. They're caused by the Stellar Forge that procedurally generated all the non-real-world stars in the ED galaxy.

As I understand it, the Stellar Forge generated stars by sectors. Sectors are 1024-LY-wide cubes of space. Each sector is subdivided into subsectors, with eight "mass classes" subdividing each sector.

The "cubes" happen when a certain sector or subsector is given a large number of O-class and B-class stars. These stars are visible on the skybox from hundreds or thousands of LY away, whereas K, G and F class stars fade to nothing after about 50 LYs. So if a sector dominated by Os and is surrounded by sectors with just as many stars but dominated by Ks and Gs, then from a couple hundred LYs away it will appear as a cube of stars in the sky. The cubes I have seen have typically been 128 LY across.

Each of those stars you see on the skybox is an in-game star which you can travel to and explore. Some players may already have explored those stars, so FD can't simply delete some of them; they're procedurally-generated from a single seed; the only way to alter the basic layout of the galaxy is to delete the whole galaxy and start again.

There are some less drastic things FD could do to resolve the issue, but I don't think any of them are satisfactory.

- They could decouple the skybox from the in-game galaxy and just show us a purely randomly-generated starfield. I think the "each star you see is a star you can travel to" concept is good and would hate to lose it.
- They could reduce the range Os and become visible. But since the apparent magnitude calculators have been specifically calibrated to generate a reasonably accurate facsimilie of earth's night-time sky when you are in Sol system, reducing the visibility ranges would have the unpleasant side-effect of having some real-world-visible-from-Earth stars suddenly disappearing from the skybox of Sol. Achenar, for example, and the entire Big Dipper asterism. So many stars would disappear, they might as well get rid of the whole concept of generating a "realistic sky" in Sol system.

 

[Kenneth McGrew]

*snip*

I don't think its immersion breaking at all, I think the quirkiness of this is quite endearing and makes for areas of space (otherwise dull) worth visiting to see "borg cubes"

in reality we don't know what's out there, maybe there are perfect cubes of certain stars, and until you can dis-prove otherwise and map the entire galaxy its not immersion breaking.

 

[Redfox]

[...]immersion breaking[...]

Cubes break your immersion? Only in-game or also IRL? Let me hit you with some Pyrite!

Spoiler

Just joking. Yeah, out there those structures do seem a bit odd/off, but as Kenneth points out, they can make a monotonous area somewhat more interesting.

 

[Jackie Silver]

Cubes break your immersion? Only in-game or also IRL? Let me hit you with some Pyrite!

Argh, the Melding Plague! Flee the galaxy! Women and insectoids first!

 

[BoKiller]

It was really late when i posted that so i might have said some weird things...

This is certainly not a big problem for me as i'm not a player that likes to nitpick and i will never quit elite dangerous just because of a problem as small as this. I just wanted to know what causes the problem from a technical standpoint.

After reading some of your replies, i understand the issue. The game generated some sectors with O and B stars which are much brighter than the sectors with K, G and F stars. That's why we get the brighter sectors on the skybox.

 

[marx]

After reading some of your replies, i understand the issue. The game generated some sectors with O and B stars which are much brighter than the sectors with K, G and F stars. That's why we get the brighter sectors on the skybox.

Not entirely. The problem is that between some sectors, the density of class B (and O) stars jumps so dramatically that the sector borders between the two are plainly visible. This could be solved in two ways:
1. modify the Stellar Forge so that there wouldn't be so large differences between any two sectors
2. tweak the visibility of the brightest stars in such cases, dim them near borders so they aren't that visible

Unfortunately, neither of these would be worth it. Option 1 is easy to see why not: it would involve rerolling huge parts of the galaxy, which isn't going to happen for obvious reasons.
Option 2 might sound better at first glance, but if you think about how implementing this (rather ugly) hack might actually go, it would likely be unfeasible too. You see, when the game would render the skybox for the system, this would mean an additional (and likely complex!) check for each star on it. Given that these "problematic" edge cases involve a lot of stars, this would likely cause a brutal slowdown. And bear in mind that this would be just to fix a minor aesthetic error, only present in certain parts of the galaxy.

If Frontier could actually devise some sort of good solution for this, I would be thoroughly impressed. It's unlikely though that they'd invest the hours needed to even investigate the problem, because there are much more pressing tasks to be done first.

 

[firmicute]

Argh, the Melding Plague! Flee the galaxy! Women and insectoids first!

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​(¬_¬ ) ... (눈_눈)

(ಠ_ಠ ) ....


٩(ఠ益ఠ)۶


how rude...




also: those borg cubes remind me very much of those clumped star clusters, just less round and more borg-alike
look pretty nifty tbh, I like them.
But i like most glitches because they seem rare enough to be something precious.

 

[malenfant]

in reality we don't know what's out there, maybe there are perfect cubes of certain stars, and until you can dis-prove otherwise and map the entire galaxy its not immersion breaking.

We know stars aren't going to naturally form in sharply defined cubes. We don't need to go out there and map the galaxy to prove that.

The star cubes and sharp boundaries annoy the hell out of me, but there's nothing to be done about it - FDev won't regenerate the galaxy or fix Stellar Forge. Maybe someday they'll re-introduce the galactic hyperdrive and let us go to a new galaxy that has all these problems removed.