First Space Background

Thinking about improving the Artwork in Vega Strike, or making your own Mod? Submit your question and ideas in this forum.

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rivalin
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First Space Background

Post by rivalin »

Well I've been hard at work setting up and testing the basic system I'm gonna use for making backgrounds, but before I start rendering them into full skyboxes in high res I wanted to get a heads up on what people thought of the basic effects I'm using.

This is just a test and there's no composition, the nebula coverage obscures most of the starfield and it isn't balanced right or anything, I just want some opnions on whether the general effect style is right, as some of the backgrounds in Vegastrike make it look more like you're flying in front of a photo or a painting rather than something rendered in CG like I'm trying.

Image


Image

Obviously the final images will go a bit less OT and show mainly empty space. :)
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Post by Phlogios »

Looks nice (except that they are a bit overkill with the nebulae), but I would say that the pictures would need a few more layers of clouds to give the nebulae volume.
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Post by pyramid »

The first background looks a bit thick and saucy, though I find the structure interesting.
The second one is almost there, though I would add more depth to it and try slightly less, thinner, or smaller nebulae.
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Post by Erk »

I've never understood why everything in space besides our system is apparently set inside a nebula :-/

These look pretty neat as far as nebulae go though.
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Post by pyramid »

Erk wrote:I've never understood why everything in space besides our system is apparently set inside a nebula
The best reason I can come up with is to make the visual game aspects more appealing to the eye (encountered in almost all space games). Though this is neither realistic, nor believable, it's certainly better than just a black background with white pixels for stars (still, there are systems with black backgrounds). Actually, when you look into a starry sky or see images of our galaxy without any nebulae, you can see thousands if not millions of more or less glowing stars. I have seen only one game so far that actually did backgrounds with many stars and no nebulae and it looked very impressive. This kind of representation would be my idea for future enhancements. It's on my task list for coordination, but will not happen before 0.6 without contribution from community members.
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Post by Moe479 »

indeed these colors arent even there in an ralistic nebula, this false imagination come from those colorful pictures publisched by observatories but often forget to say that these colors arent visible to human eyes, they come from analyzing the materials of the dust around supanovas, those regions r also very dangerous cause the nebulas we are able to 'observate' in this stage r still expanding with enourmous speeds, they r the birthplace for new stars, spacetravel in our imagionation would be verrrrrry risky there ... i prefer the black scene with white pixels ... space is could, dark and dangerous for the most.

i like to see the scene filled with more minor and smaller bodys, just take a look at the jupiter-system ...
http://www.dtm.ciw.edu/sheppard/satelli ... tdata.html
... or the saturn ...
http://www.dtm.ciw.edu/sheppard/satelli ... tdata.html
... or uranus ...
http://www.dtm.ciw.edu/sheppard/satelli ... tdata.html
... even for neptune 13 resonable objects r counted (for now) ...
http://www.dtm.ciw.edu/sheppard/satelli ... tdata.html

as u see space isnt that empty especaly when u go closer to the major bodys of a system u will find dozends of smaller objects more or less orbiting these at still enourmous distances ...

also the Lagrangian points of the major bodys may hold numbers of small objects cause the pull of the larger masses and the force and syncronous rotation with the smaller body can keep them there ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point

also having realistic asteroid-belts would be nice ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt (here u also see the massive objectcount around L4 and L5 of jupiter)

at least the most complete and impressive visual form ive found:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Oute ... tions2.png
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Post by Xit »

@Moe479 - those are some pretty good points, I too would like to see more minor bodies in game... As for darkness though, when I go into a really black system, it's my reaction to feel like someone just turned out the lights - suddenly it's got late, it's quiet and we should be in bed by now... It's really like sensory deprivation and makes me feel like I'm wrapped up in cotton wool, rather than floating in an infinite sea...

@pyramid - that sounds wonderful, what kind of help would be needed? Would it be modelled on real star charts?

@rivalin - nice feautures, the green one looks very familiar somehow but the blue looks quite interesting, you can almost imagine things forming out there in the gases... I think the transparency/noise should be a little more varied though, giving thick and thin patches here and there :D
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Post by loki1950 »

Would it be modelled on real star charts?
have a look at the universe.xml file or use the 3d map utility our stars match our own galaxy 8) after all Cepheid 17 is only 14 jumps from earth.

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Post by Xit »

hehe I know, :D but I mean does it hold true for very distant stars? Do we have thousands of them in the universe file?
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Post by Moe479 »

to prevent this upcomming depression of the ordanary pilot, there should be more than the space-scene and some indicators in the cockpit going on, a news and trade ticker display, a funny raido chat to listen & more inter-action with npc's and other players (multiplayer), pilot must be bisy all the time that he has no time to notice the 'vacuum' out there, the older scify-space-films give some decent answers on this topic, how the crew on an spaceship gets 'entertained' while on longterm-trips ...
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Post by loki1950 »

There is always interacting with ship's computer a la HAL2000 :lol: there has been some chatter about expanding the functionality of the NAVCOMP to give you something to do in tansit.

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Post by pyramid »

Xit wrote:@pyramid - that sounds wonderful, what kind of help would be needed? Would it be modelled on real star charts?
The actual distant pointy stars are already being modeled after the real stars. Currently there are, i think, 2K stars in the universe file. It has been debated, but not concluded, to have more known stars included (4-40K).

The best thing you can do if you like to contribute, is actually doing the backgrounds in accordance with the wiki artwork development guidelines.
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/ ... ackgrounds

Task list for replacing low quality textures is available. However, you are free to add new backgrounds. The task list is here:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/ ... ackgrounds
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Post by bgaskey »

I think something interesting for backgrounds is to have them interchangeable, so one piece of the system background could be a colored nebula and it could be seamlessly attached to other sections that are just black or possibly have different colored nebulae in them. 8)
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Post by Phlogios »

bgaskey wrote:I think something interesting for backgrounds is to have them interchangeable, so one piece of the system background could be a colored nebula and it could be seamlessly attached to other sections that are just black or possibly have different colored nebulae in them. 8)
Using what technique?
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Post by safemode »

i'd think you'd read in the filenames of the background dir (assuming they were all in this hypothetical format of interchangebility) and use a random number to pick and choose amongst all the up's, down's, left's etc. They'd all display single objects that didn't touch the seams, so they'd all be tileable with eachother.

The only problem i'd have with that is that it wouldn't give you that panoramic view.


What you might do instead of replace all the backgrounds to work like that is to introduce a number modifier and teach the background code how to behave with it.

Like you'd have name_#_left etc Where the number is 0 through however many permutations of that side you want available. You can create sets then where one or any number of faces have multiple possible options. You could make a set for instance that had 3 faces with objects that cross over the seams into all 3 faces, then maybe a face or two of blackness and a 6th face that could have one of 5 different objects viewable... The one that's chosen for a given system would be hardcoded in that system, so return trips yield the same background.


I dont think that would be all too hard to code up. And it may be worthwhile to avoid having umpteen sets of backgrounds for systems. You could see it as a form of compression.

3 systems dynamically generated would require 18 seperate images to make their backgrounds (assuming we didn't just duplicate the use of another system's)

now, replace that with 5 images + 3 separate front faces. That's a saving of 10 images and each system is still unique. Need more variety though? so add another face. But when you add another face, you increase the number of combinations, meaning you can cover more systems. So by adding just 3 images to a second face, we increase our system coverage to 9. That's a savings of 43 images we'd need to individually map those systems so none looked exactly the same.

A simple set of textures with 3 faces having 3 alternate images each is only 11 images, but it can make 27 systems unique. We'd need 243 images the current way we do things to do that.
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Post by Boaal »

For the first one, there is too much noise on it which makes it look a little too cluttered. Reduce the noise and it'll be better.

The second one is really nice. The noise really adds too it rather than takes away.
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Post by Phlogios »

Lol Boaal, "iMac G5 Intel..."

I guess you didn't really think that one through ;)
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Post by bgaskey »

"iMac G5 Intel..."
I saw exactly the same thing in iMacs for Dummies. Got a nice laugh out of that one :wink: But I need an intel mac :?

@The actual topic. some systems with the panoramic view would add nice depth, but most should just be deep space with maybe some little features (far off nebulae) in one or two quadrants 8)
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