Thank You Frontier for Fixing Black Hole Lensing, For Science!

Ziljan

Ziljan
UPDATE: May 27, 2016

It appears that Frontier has updated the lensing effect for Black Holes to make the back ground stars only move when you move your ship! So a huge THANK YOU to Frontier for tackling this technical issue in the name of science! Thanks to you, thousands of Explorers will have a more intuitive and accurate idea of how lensing works around black holes. And black holes will be truly awe inspiring, beautiful, and stately as they would be in nature.

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There has been a lot of justified complaints about the lack of any dangers near black holes, but this thread is different. Instead I am here to talk about the dangerous lack of science. Yes, the gravitational lensing effect is very nice, and as long as you stay perfectly still and don't turn your head or rotate your ship, then it is roughly stable and accurate. However, if you have TrackIR or a VR headset, you will notice that the background stars will actually MOVE position in the sky when you turn your head. The result is a seasick swimming effect that IS ABSOLUTELY WRONG.

In fact, only way turning your head would move the background stars is if:



Possibility A) (FALSE) The black hole focused light to a point, and that point just magically happened to be where ever you currently are! Black holes are amazing and exotic objects, but they are not magical. Yet in ED they use a kind of optical voodoo that is as nauseating as it is inaccurate. As you can see in the image below, the different paths of light for the same star all end up pointing directly to you, no matter where you look. So if you are close enough, you can turn your head, and star will appear to move in the sky. Black holes are not eye glasses. They cannot focus light from a single source onto the same point. They can only focus it onto a rough line. So the image below (while an accurate interpretation of ED gravity) is completely false.

KElKva7.png





Possibility B) (FALSE) This leaves us with one option to explain ED's "bad astronomy" lensing effect: your ship must be roughly the same size as a black hole!!! Here we see an accurate lensing effect, with the black hole focusing light onto a line. However, in order to match the moving star effect we see in ED, the ship is forced to be so ENORMOUS (or the black hole is so small) that rotating the ship changes the apparent position of the background star! Below you can see a picture of the way accurate lensing would hit a humongous Asp at different points along the hull, so that turning your ship would move the background stars... again, utterly false.

rT5UAjX.png







THE CORRECT LENSING EFFECT:
(Frontier Devs please look here for how to fix lensing)

Reality C) (TRUE) As stated above, black holes focus light onto a line, not a point. And we all know intuitively that an Asp Explorer is minuscule even compared to a small stellar mass black hole. So below you can see what should happen to a background star when you turn your head or rotate your ship from a given distance. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. That's right, the background stars will not move at all. Each little pocket of space surrounding your ship would be like a static bubble with only a single radial path for light to hit your ship from the same distant star. The only thing that can alter the apparent position of the background stars would be if you dramatically change your(x,y,z) position in space so that your ship would be hit by a different yellow light beam path. Eg, change your distance from the black hole by several Light Seconds (Ls).

rXsgruv.png
 
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PanPiper.

PanPiper.
Spot on,static point you should have its distortion vs background stars.
You don't get it with n system objects yet,alas
But what's the worry,with a good pilot,you can orbit and debug cam it for some specular effects
Done plenty of black hole surfing as I call it. Vids available if interested.

Not used VR or tracking, but i can imagine if the position of view is out it could then create a well bad effect at least.

now remembering some other old artifact of black holes with the willo the wisps effect. how the hell would they look.?
from last time i tried they were only visible on certain ships,, something due to the cockpit screen i assumed.

the effect of the wisps was all down to where pilot was looking,, so would be interesting with the headtracker and VR.
DBS DBX and a few other small ship'ski's although i would imagine those have been removed by now with updates.

The lack of danger aspect, well yes there is that,, i assume programmed into our ships as a safety, quite similar to the drive tech.
You cant do that action due to safety of fuel to jump range, or no jump target. in this case you cannot approach closer to the spaghetti event horizon.
Even you're ship has some self presevation tactics against pilot folly.



if those glitches are still ingame could be interesting views from a headtracked view VR.

knew i had something like that tucked away, some old black hole somewhere.
havin fun with black holes.
[video=youtube;Nw661YLFGqc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw661YLFGqc[/video]

now do that with a VR with headtracker and i'd love to see the video you make.

all in all the movement and perspective makes all the diff. if the head tracker is out ,, maybe seasickness could be an adverse effect... if so take care watching that vid :D
 
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Ziljan

Ziljan
mossfoot said:
So would it be hard for FD to fix this graphical issue, and do they have any interest in doing so? Inquiring minds want to know!
Click to expand...

It's a dead simple fix. All they would have to do is remove the ship orientation from the lensing effect calculation, and anchor the effect to the "camera view" that faces the Black Hole. If anything it might increase FPS slightly.


PanPiper. said:
now do that with a VR with headtracker and i'd love to see the video you make.
Click to expand...

You are moving very fast by the object with a steady vertical axis, but at around t=0:40s your camera moves only slightly vertically, and the false lensing effect is already quite apparent. Also, you are not that close to this small mass black hole. If you move in closer, or go to say Sgr A or the great annhilator, even racing by the object with debug cam won't hide the Bad Astronomy.

I think it's really a shame that we have to resort to camera trickery to get a semi-realistic lensing effect. But I salute you for the effort :D
 
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PanPiper.

PanPiper.
in the end the game is a simulation as it portrays, or tries to.

In that aspect there is only so far we can speculate, theory is nice, but until direct observation it would be early to commit all BH to our observations. The heat effect was removed a long way back before i started diving into them, but imagine that as a safety net to prevent many others trying to spagettify themselves,:D .
Acresion discs too are theorised and possibly proven with the latest black hole merging if that is to be taken for granted,
possible future inclusion would be nice, but always on the edge of being disproven or update in some new way. I think this could apply to not only BH in game.
Who can know yet, FD have kept Elite up to date on most new discoveries and implemented into game when they can.
Some new discovery about BH or the universe in general in RL, could then change the perspective,, but unless we get a real person into orbit and they fall into a BH we just find close by i doubt it soon.

Until either new scientific discoveries or theories come up with something concrete, its up to FD to speculate and thats ,, well hard. They cannot prove or disprove a theory, but mearly try to simulate our best hypothosis.l
 
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MarcusKross

MarcusKross
The only way Fdev will ever satisfy you guys is them calling Kip Thorne and borrowing his techniques he used to create Gargantua and implement it in the game. :D
 

Bacalao

Bacalao
Those poor heatracking and VR players...I feel so bad for them...no, really I do...

While I appreciate scientific fidelity (I am an analytical chemist) I like that it is far more dramatic than it would be if it were more realistic. Flashy effects trump science for me here, because it's a game and this literally has no negative repurcussions, it just looks cool.
 

Winterwalker

Winterwalker
InMemoriamSirocco said:
Maybe they ought to go ask the developer of Space Engine how to animate black holes.
Click to expand...

Firstly, I'd like to thank intrepid explorers for testing, by entering, the black holes.

In the end FD could probably make them graphically look like anything they want. What I'm glad of is, with Cmdr's testing, FD seem to have made sure Cobra game engine doesn't actually divide anything by zero at the singularity! This could have deleted all our saves!? In game paradox, safely avoided, carry on Commanders. :D

I suspect blackholes would be a bit of a Sunday project while there is much dev work to do on planet surfaces etc.? We seem to see only the singularity in the game at the moment. It sure could might be fun to see some exotic speculation at a later date while the rest of the galaxy stays true to what we know better about planet bodies. Am I correct in thinking though, that no observations have ever been made of the blackest part of any real blackhole hole, always occluded by dust or stars in orbit in real life?
 
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Aewarin Jameson

Aewarin Jameson
PanPiper. said:
Spot on,static point you should have its distortion vs background stars.
You don't get it with n system objects yet,alas
But what's the worry,with a good pilot,you can orbit and debug cam it for some specular effects
Done plenty of black hole surfing as I call it. Vids available if interested.

Not used VR or tracking, but i can imagine if the position of view is out it could then create a well bad effect at least.

now remembering some other old artifact of black holes with the willo the wisps effect. how the hell would they look.?
from last time i tried they were only visible on certain ships,, something due to the cockpit screen i assumed.

the effect of the wisps was all down to where pilot was looking,, so would be interesting with the headtracker and VR.
DBS DBX and a few other small ship'ski's although i would imagine those have been removed by now with updates.

The lack of danger aspect, well yes there is that,, i assume programmed into our ships as a safety, quite similar to the drive tech.
You cant do that action due to safety of fuel to jump range, or no jump target. in this case you cannot approach closer to the spaghetti event horizon.
Even you're ship has some self presevation tactics against pilot folly.



if those glitches are still ingame could be interesting views from a headtracked view VR.

knew i had something like that tucked away, some old black hole somewhere.
havin fun with black holes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw661YLFGqc

now do that with a VR with headtracker and i'd love to see the video you make.

all in all the movement and perspective makes all the diff. if the head tracker is out ,, maybe seasickness could be an adverse effect... if so take care watching that vid :D
Click to expand...

Nice vid.

only for the final sound track that I haven't heard in a long time and it took 30 mins to ID it (download vid as MP3 / Splice / upload to ID site / bingo!) - Orbital .. ahh, a blast from the past and a reminder that life isn't as bad as you think it is.
 

Ziljan

Ziljan
MarcusKross said:
The only way Fdev will ever satisfy you guys is them calling Kip Thorne and borrowing his techniques he used to create Gargantua and implement it in the game. :D
Click to expand...

I don't need accretion disks, or spinning black holes. I would be thrilled if the lensing effect were properly attached to the vector line between the center of my ship and the black hole. ;)
 
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Varrag

Varrag
Ziljan, it's always a pleasure to read your scientific posts. Did you check out latest development of black holes in Space Engine? Pretty cool stuff, besides the accretion disk they are now simulating blue and red shifts, and you can even look at the outer space from inside the event horizon.

I am almost sure that you will find some inaccuracies there too, though :)
 
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CMDR Pugwash

CMDR Pugwash
Very informative, thank you OP. I'm sure FD would love to be as accurate as possible and hope that they find development time to address this. Such things are why I play the game.
 

Sergio Smegolia

Sergio Smegolia
Winterwalker said:
Am I correct in thinking though, that no observations have ever been made of the blackest part of any real blackhole hole, always occluded by dust or stars in orbit in real life?
Click to expand...

"Well, the thing about a black hole - it's main distinguishing feature - is it's black. And the thing about space, the color of space, your basic space color - is it's black. So how are you supposed to see them?"

Anyways +1 for better black hole effects. We're getting the rings we wanted back, now put that team on black holes. Sorted.
 
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