System Starspheres

[jammi]

I thought the starscape was just a texture painted over the edges of the system to give the impression it's alot bigger than it really is. What else can you actually do with a starsphere other than put a different texture on?

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[ioha]

I thought the starscape was just a texture painted over the edges of the system to give the impression it's alot bigger than it really is. What else can you actually do with a starsphere other than put a different texture on?

Actually, in a system, you are set inside of huge models, mostly orbs, which are inside-coated with the starscapes themselves. Special 'starmarks', as the Barrier or Nebulae are added on plain surfaces that fade to transparency (see above: Treewyrm explained it a bit)

This is how it looks in UTFEditor; a model for the starsphere.
This is the whole thing with textures enabled. However, black areas are transparent, as are the edges of the textures. See Treewyrms post above for the way how to do that.

Starscapes can take special forms to achieve interesting effects though.
For example, there is the tunnel form you have in Omicron Kappa (don't know if that's the name; the one with the robots and monkeys...) or a very flat form in that one Nomad system (pink, with a glow at the edge).

Edit: I think I should let Treewyrm do the explaining part... he understands way more of all this than I - sorry of my post was misleading.

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[Treewyrm]

Not much, other than making a custom model. Starspheres do not support material animation unfortunately, I tried that hoping to archive dynamic sky effect, alas the game stubbornly disregarded any of that.

Jammi, it is in a sense of way. However it's not a sphere at the actual edges, because that would cause problems with Z-buffer at such distances (a buffer that does sorting of objects by their distance, telling which overlap which on the 2D projecting that is your screen, a very rough explanation), so instead starspheres are attached to your camera position, always remaining at it no matter how or where you are, essentially making you indefinitely far away from it's edges, which works pretty well for space simulation games and many others as well. So it's not really big, it's just that you can never reach it's edge, your camera stuck projecting it from the origin point disregarding your position in space. It's a very old technique from the first 2,5D/3D FPS games. Doom and similar games had parallax background, Quake had planar animated skybox, Quake II had actual box with pre-rendered textures on it's surface giving you panoramic illusion of depth, Unreal used a separate area on the map projecting it onto surfaces allowing dynamic free-form skyboxes, et cetera. Almost every game where you can look at the sky, one way or another, uses that with slight alterations, however the concept remains the same pretty much.

Also despite being called starspheres (or skyboxes, terminology remains the same) they aren't necessarily spheres at all, you can put anything you want in there, leaving quite some area to experiment with visual illusions and forms.

[tazuras]

I fully support this if the new spheres are consistent in look with the old ones and they include the same features as the others. For instance I want to be able to see the walker nebula in the proper place in the star sphere in languedoc and any other system it would be visible from.

Ideally I would also like to be able to see stars of nearby systems as bigger and brighter than other stars in the sky. They should also be visible through the jumpgates to those systems if they are linked. The best example of this that I know is the gate from Manchester to NL. You can see the NL star right through it. I always thought this was incredibly awesome.

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[Xing]

does that mean... if you fly fast enough, after a while... there, wont be a starsphere?...
I didnt knew it worked this way o_O

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[dr lameos]

If you read Treewyrm's last post

starspheres are attached to your camera position, always remaining at it no matter how or where you are, essentially making you indefinitely far away from it's edges, which works pretty well for space simulation games and many others as well. So it's not really big, it's just that you can never reach it's edge, your camera stuck projecting it from the origin point disregarding your position in space.

No, you can never reach the edge, so there will always continue to be a starsphere indefinately

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[VincentFerrex]

Looks great. Would be a great addition, really.

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[tansytansey]

The blue one looks a bit too bright, in my opinion. It looks like you just took the awesome pink background you did and ran a "Change to Target" brush over the top of it. And that last one is so bright indeed, its' beautiful and I think if I stare at it any longer I'll give myself a headache.

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[teschy]

does that mean... if you fly fast enough, after a while... there, wont be a starsphere?...
I didnt knew it worked this way o_O

Yuri already said that the starsphere is locked on the player's camera, pay more attention next time:P

[sean24]

YES!! :)I have been thinking this would be good but too hard to do but seeing your starshperes I think its possible. I hereby agree to new starspheres 100%