Gas clouds / nebula effects in Rebirth?

[greypanther]

Indeed.
Just to add, I am in no way attacking anyone, everyone is entitled to their opinion. I too just wish for some things in the game to be optional, from the start before a modder gets involved. Then they could please the great majority.

[amtie]

Hardly amtie, neither heard of him or his book.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Through-Struggl ... +the+stars

If you're interested in hard sci-fi and KSP, you'll like this.

After realizing the reality of it I'm wondering why no one does it. Making a real dark space with only slight colors and huge dark nebula fog that you can get lost in would make a pretty cool cold ominous experience. In a X universe game that would be pretty cool. It would have an ancient and alone feeling that chills.

Because such a game wouldn't be fun enough to attract enough buyers to possibly make a profit. We've got funsies sci-fi here at Egosoft and the genre the games cater for are already considered to be niches.

If you're interested in real space facts etc, read ALL of this site: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php Mouse over the Topic List (top right) to choose from many different topics you may find of interest.

[Zloth]

Of course it isn't realistic! That'd be dull beyond belief. Move yourself 500 light years away and the result is... those random dots moved around a bit! Well... some of them. Wee haw. A new sun - which is pretty much the same as the last one but a bit smaller and a different color. Or maybe there's two now. The only interesting stuff would happen when you got close enough to a planet to make out the features.

I suppose we could call it the outer atmosphere of a big gas giant. Then we could justify Mutara-nebula style lightning!

P.S. When a nebula starts out, it's the expanding shell of a star. You could see it just fine as it all goes flying by! And isn't there a supernova that's rather central to this story? How good are our shields in this game, I wonder?

[elexis]

Well either you are in the system with the supernova, and you are dead. Or you are in a different system and you won't notice any effects thanks to the exponential expansion reducing the shell to nothing.

[greypanther]

Amtie et el, Please try to understand the following sentance. Because you seem to be missing the point still!

I DO NOT LIKE THE EFFECT OF EITHER THE FOG OR THE COCKPIT, THEY ARE TO ME VERY, VERY ANNOYING!

Nothing to do with hard or soft sci fi, just annoying nonsence, IN MY OPIION! Whats more I am not the only one with this opinion. I really do not care if I am in a minority or not. I will not play a game that I know is going to annoy me. Simples.

Underdstand now?


Edited now three times in a vain attempt to avoid offence.

<Calm down! Amtie was trying to be helpful and tell you about something you might have liked, and the others were saying the X3 in-game nebula effect was unrealistic anyway. This thread is not just about yourself. Alan Phipps>

[BGrey]

So did you not play the other X games?

[greypanther]

Yes from X2. ( Though skipped Reunion. )
The first and for a long time the only, mod I downloaded was the no fog mod. ( There are several versions. ) I then added the No Tubes mod to remove another annoying thing from X3.
I never did finish X2, mainly I suspect because of the annoying cockpit. ( In fact hardly put any hours at all into it. )

The problem now is I rarely get more than an hour, two at the most to play, so I have perhaps got more picky.

[theeclownbroze]

Noooooooo i love the volumetric nebulas in rebirth they look so epic! I dont care about realism, thats what real life is for!. Dam i am going to kill my eyes when this game comes out!

[Night Nord]

Actually, "physics" nebulas are easy to make, cause it's just a surface effect - you may do it with shader + particles effect of "nose wave", which is also quite cheap if LODed away for far ships and has no collision detection.

"Volumetric" nebulas also don't need to be "particles" or in either way simulated - it's just a fog, which is very easy and cheap on modern GPUs. In the previous X-series it just didn't affect/overlap the skybox for some reason.

From perspective of realim - well, yes, it has nothing common with reality (if you are moving though something so thick that it creates a "fog", then you are probably not in vacuum anymore), but probably this is the least concern in game with weirdly shaped submarines raiding on space rails.

[g1i1ch]

Amtie isn't being helpful at all. No offense meant Amtie, sincerely.

But Amtie, that's your opinion. This just happens to be mine and greypanther's opinion. To me it would be fun and exciting to have a more realistic depiction of space. But that's just me. You may think it wouldn't be fun and that's fine. It's not as if the egosoft will read my post and completely remove everything.

A bit why I have this opinion. I make games. And I've played many many games. So many in fact that 90% of everything is really boring and generic now. Not to mention that I see behind everything and know how just about everything is done.

Fantasy space is overdone. I'm tired of it and I'm tired of seeing it in games I play. As a developer it's also too easy a design now. Any designer can generate nebula for concept art quickly. Everyone already knows how it'll work and feel. There's no challenge to it.

Try taking a realistic depiction of space without all the pizazz and making that fun to play. Now there's a challenge. How would you do it? Atmosphere probably. Darkness. Maybe cultivating a feeling of being on the edge of adventure and a cold death trapped in a ship that has now become your coffin drifting in space for eternity. Then I would focus on the simple rugged beauty of space for how it is. A cold luminous, alien, and dark hell for a human that is strikingly beautiful at the same time. That would be a design I'd like to see. Maybe I could tackle that as a project someday.

[greypanther]

All I did was try to get my point accross when it appeared to be getting missed, I tried hard by using emoticons, to get accross I was not angry or having a go at anyone, yet there you go. I give in.

I too was not asking for anything to be removed, just for the OPTION to remove or keep certain features. It can be done so why not? There have been many arguments about the pro's and con's of the fog and cockpits, Egosoft are well aware that they split opinion fairly evenly, from what I have seen. There have been many, many downloads of the no fog mod, as well of the mod that returns cockpits to TC/AP.

Is it really asking too much for the option; for choice?

Obviously so.

100% agree with you g1i1ch.

[CBJ]

Is it really asking too much for the option; for choice?

Actually yes, it may be. I've explained this before, but I'll do it again with this particular context in mind.

Every time there is a discussion about a particular feature, you have three camps. There's the "I want this" camp, the "I want that" camp, and then you have the people who think they have a magic solution that will make everyone happy, the "make it optional" camp. The trouble is that it's not the magic solution those people think it is.

Creating a game that is fun and enjoyable is about making game design decisions, not dithering about it and ending up leaving the player to decide. While some players have strong opinions about a feature, most will just go with the default setting, and if you have dithered and not designed your game firmly around a core set of solid design decisions, then everyone's experience will be almost certainly be the poorer for it. Of course there are exceptions, particular features such as graphics settings, where giving people options doesn't detract from the game's core design, but for something fundamental like the cockpit it is almost always better to make a decision and accept that it won't please everyone than to dither and give people two different options, neither of which can be fully followed through because you have to take into account the possibility that people may choose the other option.

And that brings me to the second point, which is that making something optional costs more than making a design choice even in the case where one of the options is simply not having that feature. Why? Well, because not only do you have to develop the feature (or in the worst case two different versions of the feature) but you also have to set up the option (additional menus, translations, etc.), and then you have to test the whole game with both options. The more things you make optional, the more different combinations you have to test; up to twice as many combinations, in fact, for each thing you make optional.

It gets even worse if the option is as fundamental as something like the cockpit. Even if the cockpit were just eye-candy, you'd have to make sure that all aspects of the game worked and performed correctly with both a full-screen view of space and a partial view. But of course in this case the cockpit isn't just eye-candy, it's an integral part of the game, with the parts of the UI built into it. Making that optional would require the game to function with two separate interface paradigms, significantly increasing the cost for design, development and testing.

Why should you care about making things optional being an expensive way of doing things? Well, cost and time are pretty much the same thing in development tems, both of which are finite, so those resources would, by definition, be prevented from being used on other game features. Worse still, for any given player, at least some of those resources would be wasted, because they would be spent on an option that they wouldn't be using; in fact in practice for most players, all the effort put into the non-default option would be wasted. In essence you are shooting yourself in the foot somewhat by suggesting that a feature you want should be made optional; you are asking for the available resources to be spent on a feature you don't want, only for you to then switch it off, instead of on features you do want!

And this of course brings us back to the first point, which is that it is almost always better to make design decisions than to try to please everyone by making everything optional.

[AkrionXxarr]

Words.

Not to mention that you're inheriting "optional features" by spending the time developing a game with strong modding support instead. A much better place, I feel, to be spending your time as opposed to spending it on specifically designing optional features.

[Night Nord]

Fantasy space is overdone. I'm tired of it and I'm tired of seeing it in games I play. As a developer it's also too easy a design now. Any designer can generate nebula for concept art quickly. Everyone already knows how it'll work and feel. There's no challenge to it.

Actually, "fantasy space" has an explanation (but not for X:R though). Space is black and to make a ship visibly invisible you just need to color it black too - it will be really hard to notice him.

On other side, your ship has a dozen sensors, including spectrometers, radars, cameras for various ranges and other stuff. It's quite reasonable to color otherwise black stuff using this data, just to make it visibly recognizable for pilot.

But as computer can't actually understand if that is a black ship or just space blackness, it will color everything, including nebulas from afar.

It may also color sparse nebula particles creating the "fog" effect.

But as X:R will feature this weird cockpit with glass window, that could not be applied to it. So it's just magic, as always =)

[greypanther]

A good answer CBJ and I am sure all good points, especially considering how far behind schedule, things already are. Thank you for the explanation.

Which only brings me back to my previous point in a previous post, which was ecoed by AkrionXxarr: I do not feel I can buy your game until the modders get a good hold of it. Yes, I know I am in a very small minority, I know Egosoft will live with it.

There is no further discussion to be had here is there, at least for me, so I will leave you to it. I will make my descision about buying the game; when and if; as I see more details. This patricularly in the context of so many space games on the way.

You companies forum remains one of the best, your support too, which is why I still post way too much here. Thank you for a great forum and great games, even if I am considering the next one will need modding, before I am willing to spend precious time on it.

[amtie]

To me it would be fun and exciting to have a more realistic depiction of space. But that's just me. You may think it wouldn't be fun and that's fine. It's not as if the egosoft will read my post and completely remove everything.

I don't disagree with you. I just said the reason for most unrealism is because the greater desire for fun > realism. If we have both, then awesome. But not many people can do that (otherwise we'd have a lot more KSPs out there).

I think having a realistic depiction of space, as you say, would be fun, if it's done right. As I suggested in my previous post, KSP with guns. KSP is realistic, with no nebulae or submarines on space rails, etc. So it'd be a pretty good realistic space sim when it comes to combat.

You might be able to make a mod for KSP, adding some form of cannons which can be added to your KSP ships to make them shoot (and, given KSP's physics engine, the mass you shoot should push you back, adding more realism).

Problem is, I have trouble just managing to make a KSP ship just get to Luna, so maneuvering ships to intercept other ships that may be maneuvering to avoid me would be extremely difficult without aids. And, as a result, 'casual' user accessibility will be lower. Still awesome though.

[g1i1ch]

Good answer CBJ it's a time vs reward thing. Spend a few weeks on a feature that only a select niche wants when time could be spent on the gameplay more or AI.

I'm a bit confused though, X3 had multiple camera viewpoints like 3rd or nose outside the cockpit. Shouldn't X Rebirth?

I'll be buying XR regardless of the my points because of the gameplay, aesthetics are only skin deep.

@amtie
Ah yeah, pure realism as it is can't be a goal. I remember a good game design quote from someone who's name escapes me. "If gamers wanted realism they'd go outside."

But it could be also argued that at this point in time, realistic space is not something the average person can or will ever experience. The difference is gamers can't just walk outside for this. So in this concept it would be about achieving the experience of space, an experience that you cannot actually have anywhere else.

What would be nice is a middle ground between how much reality makes it annoying and how much makes it feel real. Aesthetics and atmosphere alone can't carry a game, and you shouldn't sacrifice gameplay for them.

It would be nice to have a futuristic space trading/fighting/pirating sim like the X series but with these goals. I'd actually probably use CryEngine. I've got really close to it this last project.

[amtie]

CryEngine can handle space (non-gravity) stuff?

[g1i1ch]

CryEngine can handle space (non-gravity) stuff?

Of course, just turn off gravity. It has cool gravity objects that can change gravity only within a certain area. So I could play around with centrifugal forced based gravity. Also worth noting, it's the engine used in Star Citizen.

[amtie]

Oh okay. Cool. I remember now the zero-G portions in the first Crysis game.