I wrote:While using nebulae larger than we have now is ridiculous from a realism point of view, it is ridiculous using a couple of tiny colored blobs(especially in large galaxies) from an artistic point of view. I agree, however that regarding game design it makes sense to have nebulae only effecting a small limited amount of stars.
Visually I'd like to have the galaxies filled with a single or maybe 2 colors at max. Nebulae should span vast areas. This is way better than having 5 or more different colored tiny clouds. This way the player would play a game in a mainly green galaxy one time and the other time in a mainly red one. I believe this helps immersion.
My solution to get the best of both is as follows: We could have huge faint nebulae spanning half the galaxy. those are just eye candy and don't have a game play value. And then we could have some dense core areas. Those occupy only a couple of stars and effect them in a certain way. Visually they might even obscure the stars they occupy partly.
Those are the same galaxies, but they look quite different and the mood is different as well. We can work with complementary colors here to accentuate one or two nebulae, but the overall color scheme should be unichrome.
Notice the giant totally unrealistic but cool looking faint nebula. Also notice the small dense clouds which are supposed to have some gameplay value, like stealth or maybe fuel related things. Nebulae might be rare hard-fought areas and whoever controls them has a great benefit. They might also include a high density of gaia planets or other specials.
The galaxy with and without additional background "noise" to sculpt the galaxy shape.
Geoff describes how this could be done:
To visualize this, here is another mockup:one of the ideas was to use the set of triangles on which starlanes are laid out to generate texturable triangles that fit the shape of the galaxy. These triangles would be fixed in position relative to the stars. This wouldn't add depth, but would let the shape of the sparse colouration (not discrete nebulae like we have now) fit the shape of the galaxy. The triangles could be classified by size, so that denser regions with smaller triangles could be differently textured, which would make this method more galaxy-shape independent.
Notice, those squares are supposed to be randomly flipped and rotated sprites include about 10-30 tiny stars(merly dots) each. We might also introduce some faint gaseous substance, especially for the sprites used in the center of the galaxy.
And here is how this could look all together:
edit:
Now you might say, that this looks confusing but this is just the maximum zoomed out presentation. Nobody plays at this zoom level anyway. It is there to orientate oneself and get an overview.