Realistic Vs. Aesthetic Outer Space

[Jerry_Brinefield]

Starmade currently has a very sort of unique cartoony look going on. The planets are highlighter colors and every star system has a very vibrant background with fruity, colorful atmospheres. Planets are everywhere and look more like bubblegum then planets.

Planets in starmade are incredibly frequent, and incredibly close together. Space in real life is incredibly vast. With the speeds ship travel in starmade, it would take centuries to travel to and from actual planets in real life, however in starmade you can go to and from planets in a matter of seconds.

The majority of pictures of nebulas and space and such tend to be what are called "False Color Images", images edited to bring out detail and contrast by brightening and recolorizing the picture. While there are actually incredible and extraordinary features in space, they are not nearly as highlighter green and pink as the ones in game (or as common)

My question is, how does the starmade community feel about making the universe more realistic. Do you feel like it'd "Generify" starmade and take away its identity? Do you think it'd make it appear more mature and developed?

How would the community feel about a universe where planets form realistically (to an extent) in relation to each other and the sun.

 

[nightrune]

Real life is hard, and brutal. I want to have fun, explore and use my creative side when I get home from work. That or have great experiences with friends. Too realistic and its no longer fun. Many of the other space sim type games give you the "real" idea of space. You said it best when Starmade is Unique. Let it stay that way.

 

[Jerry_Brinefield]

Real life is hard, and brutal. I want to have fun, explore and use my creative side when I get home from work. That or have great experiences with friends. Too realistic and its no longer fun. Many of the other space sim type games give you the "real" idea of space. You said it best when Starmade is Unique. Let it stay that way.

Yea, I can totally understand that. Having a unique look is what allows games to stand out from the crowd and develop an original identity. Being a space nerd, I'm more for a realistic universe, but I can see the value in a crazy one.

 

[terra mining corp.]

we build with blocks like lego,so where is the realism n that , and that's what sets us apart from sims and makes it fun.

 

[Blaza612]

Pls no, there's no point in being realistic

What has been said. There is nothing wrong with magical nebulae background, there is literally ZERO reason to add more realism.

 

[Reilly Reese]

I prefer the nebulas being so common.

Also Blaza612

There is a point Blaza

When your point becomes

too

common

 

[StormWing0]

Well there are ways to be realistic in a game without sucking all the fun out the nearest airlock but it'd take careful balance of that from the devs to pull it off.

 

[Edymnion]

Real life space is, to be blunt, boring.

Literally all of the incredible pictures we get from Hubble for the various nebuli are false colored to show different gas mixtures. They're stunningly beautiful, but the human eye can't see it unaided.

Realistic means a mostly featureless black void to the unaided human eye. You generally wouldn't even be able to see the stars due to them being so dim compared to working light levels (common conspiracy theory is that you can't see the stars in the moon photographs, its because the bright surface washes them out on the film exposure).

Try it yourself, wait for a nice starry night and turn on all the porch lights and take out lamps until its bright enough to read outside, and see if you can still see the stars.

Realistic space = boring as hell.

 

[TheWurm]

This is exactly the reason mods exist. I mean, not yet for Starmade of course, but still. Prime mod fodder.

 

[jayman38]

I remember playing the demo for the original "X: Beyond The Frontier" like it was yesterday. It was beautiful. It was realistic in that it took you 15 minutes from the starting point to get to the nearest point of interest (a spiffy-looking space station). That was both wonderful and excruciating. 15 minutes to start a game. 15 minutes. 15... minutes....

Such realism will only keep die-hard space-nut players playing.

Additionally, realism is a subjective term. Some people see enhanced, overexposed outer space images and think that's realistic, when it is not. Some detail-nerds would require ever-increasing levels of realistic detail until a game only works on Amazon Web Service on the server side with only the best computers able to run the game in single-digit fps on the client side.

 

[Byamarro]

You misundersteand what realistic universe actualy mean.

That's how our sky looks at complete darkness, without light pollution from city light sources.

Our sky could look even better but Solar System lies in pretty empty area of our galaxy.


If I'd be able to choose, I'd vote for realistic space, so SM background would render galactic dust near distant stars. Thanks that we would always see where we are now in our galaxy.

 

[serge1944]

You misundersteand what realistic universe actualy mean.

That's how our sky looks at complete darkness, without light pollution from city light sources.

Our sky could look even better but Solar System lies in pretty empty area of our galaxy.


If I'd be able to choose, I'd vote for realistic space, so SM background would render galactic dust near distant stars. Thanks that we would always see where we are now in our galaxy.

I already saw this with my own eyes i wanted to cry because it was so beautiful.
But it was 20 percent less glowy
[DOUBLEPOST=1455568572,1455568255][/DOUBLEPOST]Too people ho think space is a dark world get out of your computers and go out of the city at night when there is a clear sky it depends of the months sometimes you can see our galaxy.If you don't understand how can we see our galaxy just go in a galaxy wing in starmade.

 

[Edymnion]

You misundersteand what realistic universe actualy mean.

That's how our sky looks at complete darkness, without light pollution from city light sources.

Not really, no. Thats a long exposure shot. It doesn't look that bright to your naked eyes.

 

[Blaza612]

Also Blaza612

There is a point Blaza

When your point becomes

too

common

Nooo staaahp, I don't need more holes :u

 

[Ithirahad]

I like the aesthetic StarMade has going, but I'd say to tone it down a little. Increase the size of systems some so there's space in between, modify the background generation algorithm so that not every system is full of bright green or pink threads running everywhere (In fact that should be rare; most systems should just show a nebula taking up part of the sky somewhere), maybe add dust cloud effects to the galaxies so that it creates a 'milky way' from far away... etc.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

You know the nebula's are an option that you can turn off so all you see is black sky and the actual colored stars?

 

[Ithirahad]

You know the nebula's are an option that you can turn off so all you see is black sky and the actual colored stars?

Yes but I like the nebulas D:

They're just too bright and too common. If somebody could point me to the file that is used to generate them I might be able to poke at it a bit...

 

[RODLON]

I don't dislike the cartoon graphics of the game, but they can be improbed a lot, specially how the atmosphere looks from inside the planet.
Have you played Elite Dangerous? The generated backgrounds are amazing. You can see the actual environment in the background. You can even see a nebulae getting around you as you get inside... Starmade galaxies are not that big, but the systems could have dust that only turns visible from 2 systems away for example, so it looks better instead just the small points (stars).

Planets being so close should be fixed. Maybe by adding empty systems to the galaxy and increasing the sector size (I always set the sector size to 10 or 15km). The galaxies could also be bigger (good for warpgates)

About traveling and physics realism... Have you played Orbiter? Going anywhere is really boring. Not talking about traveling to the moon, just to align your orbit to the moon's so you can start your travel takes a lot of time and effort.
Even Elite Dangerous, which is set in realistic scale and have some kind of "super speed" can waste you a lot of time when traveling.
And that is not fun.

 

[Master_Artificer]

Well I did some math a long time ago and found we would need minimum 64x64x64 sector systems, instead of the 16x16x16 that we have. Obviously that wouldn't work and plenty of people told me why but starmade will most likely be sticking with arcade style space for now, which I am okay with.

 

[jayman38]

Well I did some math a long time ago and found we would need minimum 64x64x64 sector systems, instead of the 16x16x16 that we have. Obviously that wouldn't work and plenty of people told me why but starmade will most likely be sticking with arcade style space for now, which I am okay with.

64^3 sounds fascinating. Is there a way to change that in the config? And what did people say as far as why we need to stick to 16^3? (First guess: Too hard to find resources and other players? Second guess: Solar system too crowded in the y dimension, above and below the orbital plane?)