Hehe, I think if those big ships had moving turrets they might pose a bit more of a threat.

Thanks for fixing that Gernot 🙂

i'm just wading in with my 2p. Also i'm not talking about any particular game so i can't comment on whichever one you're talking about. I dont care if a game is colourful or bland much of the time, i have no problem with more colourful backgrounds & wouldn't always expect space to look dull in real life.

colour also has a real effect on people, particularly when its overwhelming the scene. and its often exploited in films and games, you'd feel slightly different about flying around with different colours dominating the palette in different systems.

ah, whatever though, i know what it shouldn't look like though, navy blue all the time:D But even that didn't spoil my enjoyment of frontier.

Anyway... this subject of 'night vision'... yes this is essential i think as having a proper darkside that you have no way of seeing makes no sense. i'm sure these advanced spacecraft would have a way for a pilot to navigate a planet at night, perform landings and so on, actual lights might be silly considering the coverage that would be required (actually, the crazy powerful engines would put out tons and tons of light as well as thrust anyway, which would be brighter than any lamps you could install on it).

what might look pretty cool, would be a wireframe view of the darkside terrain, which is self lit... so the lit side of the planet will be rendered normally, but with this glowing electronic 'overlay' which provides visual information on the dark side.. it would be essentially a shader effect. the explanation would be that its a holographic projection inside the cockpit generated from radar, existing topographical data or something.

another way would be to have ambient lighting at a low level on the darkside and have a 'night vision' mode that ups the exposure a lot, but this causes problems like it would in real life - what happens if theres some sun peeking over the planet, it would throw the exposure right off.. it would probably only work properly and give you a good view of the darkside when the sun is fully occulted by the planet.

I'd like Pioneer's space to look like the night sky in particularly excellent viewing conditions. This is the view of the galaxy that left me in awe when I was a wee lad.

Close-up pictures of nebulae with 10 hour exposures look dandy, but they just aren't the night sky.

thx brother.

and please leave it dark on the unlit side.

like i said before, it might be that space travel will be reality at all in 33th century, like in Pioneer, then in would be clear to have all the technical wonders we know from sci-fi.

but it kills some of the fun to me, yes some slight info when you look at the unlit side of a object but no light from which i have to explain myself that it is a holo projection in my helmet (or directly to the brain? there are no limits if you don't make some).

no i like it that way, and when you put some glowing stuff around the starport, then it's still enough to land safely, even on the really dark black atmosphereless moons.

it's maybe not realistic in sci-fi dimensions, but plausible, nice, fun, good too look at. and near reality.

and colors do play a big role certainly, but the absence of color is to weight equal.

if music was no pause and repetition then it would be only noise (some sounds really that way, loud but lack of dynamic and i don't mean only contemporary music by that the same faults have been made before to)

if color is everywhere there is no color or only noise, there is no difference no dynamic in it.

to emerge dynamic a difference is needed.

try this experiment (only for those who don't believe or know allready)

make a screenshot of your favorit planet in pioneer

cut that thing out in a paintprogram

lay one on a plain black color background

the other on one of the above posted nebulae

now tell me seriously which looks better?

how instead of vast nebula we might have in random solar systems pockets of gas ( argon, hydorgen) perhaps in the ort cloud area u could fly through woould be coloured specifically and could be mineable in some way

like i said you won't notice it, when close or inside.

check somewhere, how dense the materia is in a nebula...

...not much more as the rest of the universe.

now start guessing.

actually we could be inside a huge nebula, and wouldn't see that, space would be black as it is now.

compare

imagine you have a glass filled with air (stupid i know), what do you see?

nothing

now look at the sky on a sunny day, what do you see?

azure blue

only because you see the whole (or enough) thikness it's blue, else it's a transparent gas (more or less, i don't like to go the detail why it's blue, but as a fact sky is blue).

we see nebulae only because we are far away from them and can see the (reflected, emmited or even obscured light) the whole object, if you are close or inside, not much, to less density.

---

yesterday i was watching a physical explanation to skimming hydrogene from space, you would have to travel a long time a very long time/way before you've skimmed enough... (8 light months, or such, for one travel, even with a antimatter reactor such as in star-trek. this for impulse speed, how much energy a warp drive needs i explained somewhere else)

but who cares?

The trouble is that the night sky as it appears in a city with lights environment is much different than what it truly is:

The view of the stars without city lights so so incredibly spectacular and filled with nebulas, and star clusers. So the majoirty sci fi space backgrounds are actually more realistic than not. IMHO

True, but even in a spacecraft it's often hard to see stars, let alone nebulae.

See for example the log from Apollo 8: http://history.nasa.gov/ap08fj/12day3_lunar_encounter.htm , time 06947.

To see nebulae and stars clearly, you would probably have to turn off all your bridge/cockpit lights/screens/indicators, turn away from any bright objects, and even then you might need a longer exposure time and higher sensitivity than the human eye can provide, to really see the colours in the galactic plane. I think that even the light from another ship's engine exhaust could blind you enough that you wouldn't be able to see many stars. Similarly if you looked at the day side of a close planet or moon. I don't recall nebulae in any NASA videos that I've seen. I for one am convinced that space games vastly exaggerate what it really looks like.

you have a point, but here is a counter:

space ships won't have cockpits, hell they will probably rarely have crews

look at predator drones, where is the crew? where is the cockpit?

look at submarines (I'm no scientist, but for some reason submarines strike me as what space ships may end up line, swimming in the seas of space), no cockpits either.

so if you compromise realism by having a cockpit, you can also compromise and have pretty nebulas.

It's good that it's not us who have to make the ultimate decision 😉 No, personally I don't mind artistic license, be it in nebulae, visible lasers or sounds in space. But I think overly colourful or overly big nebulae would be out of place for a simulator which strives to be realistic in many aspects, such as a believable galaxy, realistic star systems and Newtonian physics.

lucky me, i grew up and live in a part of the world with no BIG cities, actually i live in a small town.

you won't have to go far, just have to climb a mountain to get rid of the artificial light.

yes sky looks different, but not that spectacular. milky way is bright yes but i can't remember such intense colours, sorry.

i do must say and said that before, some points in the sky of a game like pioneer that will give you a idea where you are would be fine.

on the other hand, i like to explore pioneer, but formost Frontier and also Pioneer are a special sort of combat flight sim to me.

yes it's not to realistic at all to travel space in little fighters like in pioneer, but that's the game.

if all would be realistic no game, no combat in (with other) fighters.

apart from that i didn't know if something like that is to realize at all, i guess it goes a bit to far, it would be a wish (not only to have changing colourful space like in i.e. X, i don't know newer releases but first was a very small cube of space and ugly seals of the backround was to see everywhere) to have a reference point, but not very important to me at all.

to me would be more important to have better AI pilots, something i can fight with, not only shoot them down, i had some troubles in the beginning, but soon as i changed my way of combat like i used it in FE2/FFE no real danger from them and i didn't get beat often (that's why i changed the pirates script a bit for me).

to have maybe once the possibility to dogfight via web, would be more interesting, no full Multiplayer game, just a possibility to meet (e.g. here) and have a battle or two. the stardreamer problem could be solved with disabling it and just to put the fighters in a acute battle situation in a maybe randomly selected system.

other things have a higher priority i guess and to get back to what i said once before, to much colours would kill the beauty of the planets or even the models. they look only that superartificial cool BECAUSE of the black inked linnen behind.

yeah, the lack of stars is one of the stupid arguments for a fake moon landing, beeing not aware that it didn't looks like what we expect. moons albedo (ability to reflect light) is close to 100, almost like snow and very very bright when lit by the sun (and if grew up in a corner of the world where you have lot's of snowpeaked mountains, you knew in a clear fullmoon night at a snowy mountain it's almost bright as day).

photographic backgrounds of nebulae are out of the question fo pioneer and to make a halfways realistic background would cost to much power of the engine, some like to play pioneer maybe on somewhat aged notebook, we should respect that.

further, if i like to see the beauty of the nightly sky, i go outside and take a little walk, but won't play a videogame.

I'm basically happy with the way things are now. I'd only add more of a glow to the suns and a slight color variance to the stars, comparable to what one actually sees in the sky. I'd also replace the Milky Way ribbon with something like the image that Gudadantza posted, only darkened a bit. However, in FE2 and FFE we had the option to select stars, spacedust, etc. to suit our personal preferences. That should make everyone happy except tomm and the others who'd have to code it.