If you watch carefully, a system has the same brightness no matter where you are. According to the Inverse Square Forumla, a star’s brightness should follow along the equation: B = L/(4πd^2) where B is brightness, L is the luminosity in Watts, and d is the distance.
So if the distance of d is doubled, then brightness should be reduced by 1/4th. However, the light is the same brightness no matter how far in the system you are from it.
CCP, this is not a hard thing to change. It adds dynamics to the game. And it saves people a from having to look for objects to stick between stars and your camera cause they’re really bright all the time.
These are no stars, Its just a visual representation of a system in 3D grid.
For it to look like a star, there would have to be implemented whole system of visual star brightness representation and the textured starfield cube changed to something more believable. Definitely that would take away precious development time from creating new SKINs for New Eden Store.
Stars always looked to me like a lamp in the middle of a room. While warping you’re just walking around them no matter what the distance and velocity gauges say. 57 AU feel just like n seconds to traverse the room at a glacial pace.
It’s one of those annoying immersion-breaking things you just learn to ignore.
But then, this is EVE and CCP. I bet that they know they could add dymanic lighting, but that would totally break their shaders and ships would be pitch black 90% of the time. Not even Elite uses actual lighting conditions, rather a simulated dynamic lighting and dynamic star graphics, form bright speck to massive fireball. Adding that to EVE might be possible, but then, again it’s the company and art team who created PINK stars… (They call them G3. G3 stars are orange-yellow. Pink stars are physically impossible)
While I agree that the lighting of the game needs to be presented in a way so the game remains playable and we’re not just looking at a black screen with a few coloured tags, would it be nice if we did have a bit more black in some of the backgrounds and a few darker suns, too.
Also all the stars in the background image shouldn’t be big, fat, squishy dots. Many of them currently have sizes greater than planets, but give off less light than real planets reflect. It’s as if all those background stars were specks of glowing dust. Most of the background stars really should only occupy a single pixel.
A bit more finesse in the graphics would go a long way.
Funny - despite all the “Stars are too bright, fix it CCP !” genre of posts that appear from time to time, I don’t ever recall seeing a post complaining “Warp drives don’t really exist, fix it CCP !”
They are working just fine, Do you blame night vision goggles for making a dark room to bright? Not unless your a silly fool. Making the dark room bright is the damn purpose of night vision goggles after all.
Oh no, nobody is saying this, but since you’re making an analogy to night-vision there are certainly differences in quality of night vision systems. This is what you need to think about.
People don’t want washed out, low dynamic range graphics. You can certainly have the impression of the sun being fainter at a distance without a scene being fully realistic and completely dark.
Right now, when you fly to the sun, does one get some post-processing effect, which illuminates the background somewhat, and that’s about it.
Regarding the background stars is this the best I could find right now in game:
But there are far worse backgrounds with stars as big as a teenager’s pimples. (Possibly a fault with the post-processing, too, which seems to add a glowing disc around brighter stars).
Those background stars may seem realistic enough when compared to the images you get from a cheap and badly focused telescope on the ground and when looking through our atmosphere.
So if you want to include here what it would look like from space and with equipment developed in a sci-fi future, then please, I’m all for it.
I’m starting to think the artists at CCP are trying to make it more “realistic” by copying astronomy images. However, the sharper and more precise a star is being captured the better the optical instrument is. The same can be said about the artifacts around a star (i.e. little pointy tips), which also stem from the optical system as well as the sensor. Stars don’t actually have pointy tips…
Probably the matter is that current stars are textured skyboxes, whereas old one might have been (I am speculating here) postprocessal effects (aka “render white pixels at this percentual coordinates of the skybox”.
At one point, CCP moved from every system having a random skybox picked from a pool of skybox nebula textures, to all skyboxes be in a 3D structure that spans the whole New Eden, so traveling in the general direction of a feature like a large nebula actually makes the player enter a system where that nebula is closer.
This allows for a realistic 3D geography, but since stars are part of the skybox texture, they are stretched, antialiased and postprocessed as all the texture, becoming blurry and unrealistic.
