safemode wrote:chuck_starchaser wrote:
But since I won't be able to convince you about white, may I suggest a compromise? Use the square root. That way there will be a hint of the official color of the star, while keeping some hint of the eye saturation effect. Thus, if the color of a star is 1.0, 0.81, 0.64 (red star) then use that color for the lighting in the system, but use its square root 1.0, 0.9 0.8 for the star itself.
I have no problem with saturation when you're close enough for it to be saturating. You can be far enough from a star in a system where this does not occur. Also, you need the color of the star for reflections off surfaces even nearby as the reflections may not be intense enough to still overwhelm your sensitivity.
Actually, saturation is almost invariant with distance, because although the total light reaching you is 1/4 if you double the distance, the apparent size of the star is also reduced, so that the brightness you see within the star itself is the same. This may not be very intuitive, but it's true. Now, if you're talking about stars at light-year distances, then the picture changes a bit: They are so tiny, at such distances that our eyes don't have enough resolution to see "inside the disk" of the star, plus atmospheric scattering, plus possible dimming by space hydrogen and dust between here and there. But at the distance of a local star, the brightness within its disc does not vary with distance, and saturates equally.
We're not talking about shades difference, that likely wont be noticable, but red giants are most definitely red and higher hot blue stars are definitely giving off blue light. The saturation effect should be a consequence of looking directly the star and be a consequence of intensity, not hard-coding the stars to just be white.
Sorry to contradict, but if you were to look directly at a star, red, blue or whatever, you'd see white. And the differences ARE shades, most of the time. Just look at the sky at night: Do you see any stars that are really red, or really blue? You can barely notice the color differences. So-called "red stars" are merely pinkish. Blue stars aren't even blue at all; the term merely denotes that they are whiter than the average white star. Red giants and brown dwarfs might be exceptionally redder, though. But brown dwarfs aren't too interesting, and red giants are pretty uncommon and short-lived; and in becoming red giants they consume their own planets; --not sure if we have planets around red giants... hope not.
Best way to deal with this would be to not go anywhere near a star. The sun, as seen from Earth, measures about 1 degree in diameter. If you were to get as close to the sun as from where it measures 10 degrees in diameter, you'd be getting 100 times as much heat, light and UV rays. You'd already die of overheating. And if you went as close as from where it measures 30 degrees across you'd literally vaporize.
Then we need to fix things so that happens. I'd agree with that. But remember, not all stars are as hot as the sun, not all stars are the same size of the sun. You may be able to get _much_ closer to a waning red giant (well, maybe not physically as close, but as far as how big the star looks ).
Certainly, but I'm rather skeptical you could get as close to any kind of star as from where it spans your windshield...
Exactly. If you really want lens flares and stuff, be my guest; but at its basic, a star would be a saturatingly emissive disc; nothing more. Anything else is a representation of a visual artifact, and the first step would be to de-confuse the issue by changing the name of it from "corona" to "lens flare", lest we forget its nature and purpose.
The problem is, you can't represent the star like a saturating emissive disc because there's no way to make that visually accurate.
That's true; but the most accurate you can get is with a circle as bright as the maximum intensity your monitor can deliver, which is white, by definition. This is a hard limit that no amount of lens flare, corona, blinding or magic can overcome; it's a limit we have to live with.
There's way too much contrast information between the edge of the star and the surrounding space unless you're using filters, and whether it's the human eye or a camera, you will always get a "coronal effect" (lens flare always seems to connote a bunch of halos) without filters.
Not two cameras will produce the same artifacts. It depends on the optics. The worst lens flare effects I've seen in games is when they try to put more than one effect, like a mixture of coronas, rays and false images. If we want some kind of lens flare we should study the theory of how they are produced, then settle on a particular type, design a shader that does that particular type of flare, --and does it well--, and use it consistently.
That's why i said, either we admit that we are filtering the sun, and thus the idea that it's saturating out color data is moot, or we say there is no saturation, and we get visual artifacts.
Sounds like a plan.
The alternative I was suggesting to a "flare,coronal effect" was to give the star an atmosphere like planets, but make it diffuse and blend much better so that there is no border between the fade and surface of the star. We can still saturate out colors when looking directly at the star, and when very close to it, but we dont need to bother with any complicated flares.
The only problem I see with that is that the atmospheres on planets look like crap. If anything, they've proven themselves NOT to work; so I'd be leery of duplicating them for stars. Atmospheres lose density as an exponential function of altitude, and there's basically nothing you can do to a sphere at an arbitrary distance from the surface to make it look like anything but a sphere at an arbitrary distance from the surface along the periphery of the planet (or star).
The problem with faking stars with flat images or anything like that is that we would have to make absolutely sure that the user or no other ships would ever get near enough to a star for such cheating to be noticable.
True; and I'd say the best solution would be to introduce some simple heat modeling and sound alarms in a ship if you get too close to a star, and to vaporize the player two seconds later.
It also makes eventually having more rarer and interesting types of stars totally impossible.
I'd say, quite the opposite: If we use a shader to compute atmospheric gradient and whatnot onto a billboard, we could go as sophisticated about it as we want; whereas if you have like a sphere overlaying a sphere, the math for texturing the atmo, specially towards the periphery, becomes intractable.
I much prefer we keep stars as "planets" of obscenely massive scale with the proper glow and specular attributes
Stars are perfectly black in diffuse and specular, as far as we are concerned. Hardly any light reaching a star would "bounce back"; it would be absorbed, and perhaps re-radiated; but the emissive intensity is so great that whatever light would be returned is insignificant by comparison. IOW, if you were to look at a binary star, you'd see no mutual illumination effects.
(no textures for most)
Or for any.
and later on when we want to get a little crazy with some fun stars we can have texture ability still available to us. For instance. Making a star than can "flare up" in brightness as it rotates rapidly would be nifty.
We can do this easier with a shader than with a texture, though.
making a star with an accretion disk should be totally doable.
Certainly. That would be interesting.
Who wouldn't want to enter a system with a little neutron star pulsing bright every now and then with a dark disk of matter circling it in the not too far off distance.
Or the other way around: A "dark star" (neutron star or black hole) with a sun-bright accretion disk.
Such a system may only be survivable by ships with heavy shields, but it could make for interesting strategic functions.
Watch out with those accretion disks, though... We detect neutron stars by the X-rays of their accretion disks; and we detect black holes by the Gamma ray emmisions of their accretion disks. Accretion disks are nothing to sneez at