FreeOrion

This thread has spawned a discussion about improving nebulae and background stars. Here are a couple of mockups to illustrate this.



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:

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.

You really can't have big non-gameplay nebulae and small gameplay nebulae— especially if you make them the same color.
Obviously if nebulae have gameplay effects the player will need to know where those effects start/end. That will sometimes be impossible with this setup.




The background noise concerns me. It's a lot harder to pick out the gameplay stars from the fake ones.




This method seems problematic to me. Any sort of fill or hazy texture will get highly warped by the stretching of the texture, and matching the edges would be tricky graphically.



This is IMHO the most promising technique, but rather than place tiny star dots on the texture, a more hazy approach would be better... closer to this:


... though actually i think my texture should probably be blurred a bit more. At close zooms a fuzzier edged texture will hold up better to the magnification than a sharp texture of tiny dots.

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Yes you can. The dense nebulae are still as good visible as without the faint nebulae. There will have to be another way to present the player what stars are in a nebula and which are not anyway, because all nebula fade out to the border. This applies just as well to your mockup. I assume there could be an overlay with a "posterized" map, which has just full colors and no fade outs.


I'm not a friend of the dark blue, but besides this I think maybe a mix of both could work best. My pixel sized stars would we invisible when zoomed out, but the gaseous resounding is still visible.
And as mentioned previously(edited), the fully zoomed out view is merely there to get an overview. I'm hoping that there will be some kind of empire border representation that will further help this, besides just coloring starlanes, which have to be reworked anyway..

My mock-up is not a "gameplay nebula" mock up.
But If we give nebula some gameplay function, the problem of "where is the edge of the nebula" can be dealt with in a better way than making the player toggle an ugly posterized overlay. Sure if we really needed to we could make an overlay for this, but there's no need to go that route, since we have other options it's more KISS to control where the edges of the nebulae are.

That's why i mentioned procedurally generated nebulae... it's doesn't matter if the edge is fuzzy as long as the part beneath the star is obviously neither "nebula" or "not-nebula". It might also be possible to assemble nebulae out of lots of little sprites centered on the star... as long as the radius of the nebula-graphic is less than the length of the shortest starlane.


An empire border representation is not really relevant to my objections. You also need to see where gameplay stars are before empires have expanded. While it's true that you can't fit as much detail into the full zoom-out... i've carefully done the relevant graphics so you can distinguish the game stars from the fake, and you can tell the color of every star. This is obviously desirable for those that are playing the game, and i see no reason not to preserve that clarity. The galaxy display should not be devised to look pretty in ways that make it harder to use.

Edit by Geoff: Fixed quote

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Such an overlay is just a suggestion by me. Assuming that we will have some kind of overlays/filter systems it makes sense to include the effects of nebulae in one of them. I don't know why a posterized overlay should be ugly btw. It can be designed like everything else to be functional and appealing at the same time. If you know of better ways - now is the time to share them.



I'm open for such an approach, as long as it is still possible to change and tweak those nebulae using spreadsheets or something.
The beauty of using images is the simplicity to change them. Till now I haven't seen what would be possible using procedurally generated nebulae and I can't decide, if it is worth the effort, considering all the other more important coding tasks.


Obviously, whenever I try "to make something look pretty" I consider gameplay and usability and I don't sacrifice usability for beauty. On the other side, one shouldn't underrate beauty. Information should be presented in a pleasant way.
I think I might have replaced your "redone" background stars some time ago, because people have been complaining that the parallax effect is no longer visible. You might want to consider recalibrating your screen.

You also have to realize, that when zooming out there will be a loss of some information and a gain of other. If you look at a galaxy from distance(in reality), you can't make out individual stars, but you get a picture of the whole. Of course there are ways to work around this. We could for instance keep the star images at a fixed size, but this would become a mess at extreme zoom levels besides just looking weird. It's not always just about pure usability, it's often about a good balance of usability <-> beauty.

The question is, what information does the player really need when fully zoomed out? It's mainly the shape of the empire and the relative positions of other empires or locations of areas worth to explore(like nebulae?). You might want to target certain colored stars and I - at least - can clearly see the different colors even on my last fully-zoomed-out-nebula-including-mockup. And I mentioned previously, that those pixel stars will probably not be visible as much as in the mockup when mapped in-game, so there will even be an improvement in this area. However, I think it's unusual to do the actual exploring(sending ships around) at this zoom level, right? This is done zoomed-in, either fully or just partly, when the stars are more distant from each other and clicking doesn't become finger exercise.(I'm not talking about being able to click smallish fleet icons, which is another issue. I'm just talking about the distances between stars which are sometimes just a couple of millimeters.)

I'm not sure who's agreeing or disagreeing with whom at this point, or about what, but the extra "noise" stars in pd's starry-filler mockup seem to obscure the galaxy shape (spiral) more than they "sculpt" it... eleazar's burry filler mockup does a much better job of outlining the galaxy shape, with cloudy speckle, than a spattering of discrete stars that are indistinguishable from the actual gameplay stars. I'm not sure how much this is due to specific mockups vs. actual method limitations, but I dislike adding extra non-gamplay stars regardless...

...I already dislike the background layers, which are hard to tell apart from real stars when zoomed out, and adding even more would make it worse. Is it suggested to keep these or to replace them with one of these new methods? With the starry filler, it's not even possible to "orientate oneself and get an overview", because you can't tell what's actual stars and what's filler or disern the shape of the galaxy arms, really. If these were invisible when zoomed out, then there'd need to be something else to show the galaxy shape, and even when zoomed in, IMO the oft-cited "immersion" would be better with no stars in the UI except the gameplay ones. This eliminates questions of why there are extra stars you can't get to, and why they look different, etc... So overall, I'd rather have gassy / blurry filler than pointlike stars filler.

Whether the cloudy (or starry) sprites are centred on individual stars, or centred on the space between stars probably doesn't matter that much. Either way they'll outline the galaxy shape reasonably well.

Using even less bumpy textures than eleazar's mockups (more blurring, as he suggests) might make things look more like pd's mockups with the galaxy-sized nebula texture, but still following the shape of the galaxy well. This would also be better for ensuring that the filler doesn't obsure the actual gameplay interface details and information with high spatial-frequency noise at any zoom levels; lower-frequency blurry colour is much easier to distinguish visually.

We might also consider using different textures depending on how many starlane jumps (actual starlanes, or potential ones from the Delauney tesselation) a star is away from an "edge" star. This would allow the centre of arms and the centre of the galaxy to have denser / differently coloured textures.

Regarding performance, we'd have to test, but consider that we already render 500*2 semitransparent textures (for the stars) plus ~10 for the nebula. I don't imagine another 500 will make a huge difference.

My intention is not so much to clearly show where which arm of the galaxy is, but more to show where the galaxy is and where background/intergalacic space is. A galaxy is much more than just some spiral made of crystal clear, about equally sized stars. There is dust, smaller stars in the background and so one.
My pixel star mockup seems a bit confusing to everyone, which is why I've toned them down this time. I really want some pixel sized stars in there. They might however not be visible at the fully zoomed out stage.


I like those, which is why I'd like to keep them. We probably have to revisited and tweak them, if we go for the solution suggested here though. But basically they have nothing to do with this, because they resemble the very far background.



This sounds good. The new mockups use about 300 instances of the same texuture, there is some repitition, which could easily be avoided by using more than one.

just gaseous substance:


gaseous slightly toned down + toned down pixel stars


gaseous slightly toned down + toned down pixel stars + nebulae
Notice how the large nebulae nicely brings out and adds color the underlying gaseous textures?


just for fun: putting it ALL together


Some more ideas:
When zooming in the gaseous textures could be faded out and the pixel stars could be faded in more. And no - you won't confuse them with gameplay stars, because those will be much larger.

Ultimately, I just would like to have some textures placed like in one of my previous mockups shown. What we put into those textures can be fiddled with later. An option to either turn this feature off completely or toggle the "density" makes sense. Especially for everyone who thinks some colored dots on a plain black background help immersion. But there might as well be people who like to play in a beautiful galaxy and think this is immersion. I count one.

sorry, i'm going to ignore the rest since my previous post, since i have an idea i can actually work on rather than just make mock-ups.



It's certainly easier to tell apart the fake and gameplay stars, since i did the new star graphics, and geoff coded in the halos... but i agree, it's not sufficiently easy.

The solution is to make a set of star images to be displayed at max zoom out. These will be designed from the ground-up to be displayed without being resized. This way the stars won't get smudged by the resize process. This should give us a little more latitude with whatever kind of texture we use for the galaxy.

The saturation may be excessive... but that's easy to dial back if necessary.

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So, how would those act when zooming in? Could you perhaps create a fast mockup, including the halo when zoomed in and zoomed out?

And hey, creating mockups is work too

Zooming happens in steps. These only show up when the screen is zoomed out to the max amount.
At the next zoom step from there, the normal stars take over.

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Ah right, I misunderstood.

I like it. It's basically an "overlay"(a different mode of the map), but one the game switches to by itself, when zooming out.

edit:
I couldn't resist and test those with my nebulae, clouds and pixel stars. I've desaturated them slightly as well.


Looking good.

Why do you have background big-nebula-like-texture extending well out into intergalactic space? This distorts the gameplay-shape of the galaxy significantly.


I'm arguing there shouldn't be an other stars in the galaxy. FreeOrion gameplay is restricted to ~500 stars in a galaxy. To be internally consistent in the most flexible way, we would want to elminate all other stars on the screen, so that there's no confusion (or story / setting restrictions) about what's different about those eye-candy stars and the ones you can actually fly ships to. This doesn't mean there can't be dust and nebulae and puffy volume-filling clouds... just nothing that's clearly a different class of star.

Incidentally, I'd be a bit happier if the background layers we have now had a few somethings that looked like other galaxies in there. That would at least make astronomical sense. It's a bit worrisome to imply that there's a bigger universe out there than the galaxy you're actually playing in - it diminishes the epic-ness - but we're doing that anyway, so it might as well be realistic.


I want stuff in the galaxy other than stars, just not more non-gampleay stars.

Let's not confuse things. The nebulae have nothing to do with the cloudy things and the pixel stars(let's just call them dust from now on) which shape the galaxy. But, responding to your question, if you are talking about the tail at the bottom left of the green faint nebulae - it's just an artistic choice. It's just some overlap, some variance.


Okay, so when we have a different set of stars as eleazar suggested, which are clearly different from the dust, this is no longer a problem, right?


This could certainly be done. The main problem I see with this is, that tiling will be very obvious, if we add some distinct galaxy shapes. We could however put some tiny galaxies sporadic in the backgrund and on their own non-tiling layers.


It's dust.

I meant the cloudy things, which it appears you've used current nebula textures to create... hence "nebula-like-texture"


I mean the stuff outside the cyan circle and enclosed in magenta in the attached.


The issue is that you want "dust" that looks like stars. Dust does not look like discrete bright points of light on a black background... that looks like stars, and looks like the background starfield. Dust, or generic galaxy-filling interstellar gas, could be smooth or blotchy like the stuff in the second attachment, extracted from eleazar's mockup. It could also look like the cloudy things.


Then why does it look like stars? To clarify, look at third attachment.

...Actually, after more careful tests i think it would work best if the tiny stars were used for the 3 widest zoom setting-- all without rescaling.
Step # 4 is the first one where the normally displayed stars are bigger than the tiny-stars.

These graphics simply represent the smallest size we'll allow the stars to be... once we zoom out to that size, the stars don't shrink any more... but the space between stars contracts as normal. It should feel pretty natural.



I agree that it looks better and is easier to use if the nebula textures stick a lot closer to where the gameplay stars are.



I think actually including other galaxies in the far background layer will much more strongly diminish the epic-ness, and also bring up the annoying questions about "why can't i go there?".

When people think space, they think of blackness & stars... And our scientist's best guess is (unless you are behind some sort of cloud) everywhere in the universe there are stars to see in all directions. As long as the "background" stars are distinctly smaller/dimmer/duller than our gameplay stars, I don't think it will really be a problem for anyone. But placing a full galaxy in the background, or extending nebulas far beyond where the player can go... these appear much more definitely like a "place" where the player might want to go. That's what what we need to avoid... as long as all the interesting-looking stuff is part of our playable galaxy, that limitation will be much less likely to be noticed.



I don't object to them on principle. As long as they don't show up until the playable stars are very much larger (something like 16x16+)... but i'm not sure it's practical. I think single pixel star textures would be enlarged in an ugly way by FO. But if that texture was at 100% at max zoom in, then it would probably have to be very high res to cover enough space.


In regards to your mock-ups, after looking at them for a while, i think you have too many layers. Your "gaseous substance", (which is more or less the same idea i was trying to get at with my mock-up of "blue blobs") is visually about the same thing as your large nebulae with these differences:
1) "gaseous substance" follows the shape of the galaxy
2) "gaseous substance" is a uniform dull grey.

We can get the best of both worlds by using the multitude of small sprites to create the "gaseous substance" but we can include some tasteful color options. Then we code it so that in most cases the "gaseous substance" image chosen is of the same or similar color as any adjacent sprites. Then we can have the good aspects of your giant nebulas without the negatives:
1) excessively over-zoomed textures, and
2) galaxy boundary trespass.

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