Beetle, while the new textures are moving the art style in a good direction and some of them are fantastic, they suffer from a problem of being too dark and restricting color. Brightly decorated spaceships are present in all different kinds of science fiction universes, and desaturated or dark colors make that more difficult to create. The pictures above of the Saladin demonstrate what is lost by using these textures.
To be honest, as a game developer, I think the issue is more in the lighting engine than the textures. It is good common practice to have bright, vibrant textures and have them be darkened and desaturated by the lighting engine. Looks far more realistic. While the edits to a lot of the blocks are wonderful, many blocks are too dark, especially the hulls.
I\'ve been playing mostly with the color table of the textures for the last few days. I realized, much like in real life, objects don\'t cast light, light casts onto objects, thus making them have light value in their colors.
Strictly speaking, light casts onto objects and the light which is not absorbed bounces off of them. This means that a diffuse texture like the blocks in StarMade, if we\'re aiming for more realistic lighting, are ways of describing what kinds of light (R,G,B) and how much of it a surface or object reflects. Which, speaking of, anyone creating a space vessel would almost certainly use very bright, if not white, plating in order to reflect away heat/radiation. Regulating heat within a space vessel is very difficult as there is nothing outside the vessel, like air, for heat to diffuse out to. So unless you have a means of recycling the energy collected, dark plating would soak up the star\'s light/radiation continuously and the interior would turn into an oven.
(The following is as if it\'s an explanation to someone who doesn\'t understand diffuse textures
If you\'ve seen textures extracted from most 3D games before, they tend to look fully bright, as if the sun was shining on them or they were clearly illuminated by many nearby white lights. This is because the texture itself is purely a map of how the surface reacts to lighting, specifically R,G,B values representing the percentage of each wavelength of light that will be reflected. In games that use normal maps, the normal map is very similar in that it determines how light reacts to the surface, but instead gives a vector (normal) of the angle off which the light is reflecting. Many diffuse (color) maps, however, do have some shading to help the lighting look right. (Often to mimic ambient occlusion or normal mapping)
So my personal opinion, as a game developer/artist, to improve the art and increase realism, darkening the textures is not the answer. Instead, the lighting system needs to be altered or redesigned. (Which would need to be done for the darkened textures anyway.) I know altering textures has the benefit of certified no performance impact, but I believe the textures need to remain bright, as the cons of changing it would outweigh the benefits.
I took the light value of all textures to 0 and now we are getting DARK nights on planets and overall the game looks more dark and
spacelike.
Unless you\'re talking about when you\'re very distant from any stars, space isn\'t dark. For example, a picture of the International Space Station:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/ISS_after_STS-124_06_2008.jpg
It\'s actually extremely bright. I suppose it\'s blindingly bright on one side and extremely dark on the other. Without any atmosphere to affect the light, the full light of the star shines on everything. As for the dark side, to acheive that kind of darkness you\'d generally reduce the ambient lighting, though that creates other possible issues. Unlit interiors might be too dark. Then again... unlit interiors ARE dark.
