Besides the strange choice to have a horizon the space cloud effect itself is pretty. How hard is it to make the space cloud background without horizon on the horizon?
Or if you insist to have some kind of ‘horizon’ effect, why does it have to be boring Earth-like horizontal? Why not diagonal? Vertical?
Clouds vanishing on the horizon is stupid silly. They’re using it not only for winter events but also in many ‘serious’ settings like regular ice belts, Pochven and Metaliminal storms.
The rich chocolate cookie blends into the dark vast of space; you cannot see it above or below. You can only subsist within the creamy frostiness that expands in perfect euclidian rectangularity, far beyond the bounds of stellar gravity.
The horizon is an illusion. You cannot escape. Embrace the sandwich.
This “horizon effect” is truly one of my favorite little visual quirks in EVE right now. While some folks stare at it like it’s the end of graphical integrity, I look at that soft dark band under the holiday snow and cloud layers and think, “Yes, give me more of that weird, moody, space-theatre energy.” It doesn’t break immersion, if anything, it adds a sense of scale, like the void is flexing its own mood just to keep things interesting. And if it is a bug? Even better. I adore a bug with personality. CCP can leave it as long as they want.
I have always felt the backgrounds are too busy in my opinion. While I have never been to deep space of course, in Eve it looks cluttered in deep space. I figure they get their ideas from the photos of nebulas in the Hubble Telescope collection.
But we are use to seeing our own night sky, we are not enveloped inside a nebula. I think they would have been best to stick with mostly black and fewer star than George Lucas used in his Star Wars movies.
I would be satisfied with something like this myself.
I am not sure how they apply the ice clouds in space, but I am guessing they used 2 flat geometric plains and mapped the textures to them. I would have done a sky sphere within the confines of the system. Too bad this looks like another “can’t be fixed by the team” thread to me. It really is sad CCP has such low interest in these matters.
EVE is supposedly set in a star cluster. The centers of globular clusters can actually have stars separated by distances similar to EVE. However globular clusters don’t often contain much gas or nebulae. ‘Open’ clusters generally have stars separated somewhat further than in EVE, but contain a lot of bright nebulae. So EVE is a sort of hybrid.