Lighting

All righty. I went ahead and made the appropriate tweaks to the LWS files to include the starfields -- just a direct copy-and-paste from the Hoffer's Wake system, really -- and have a package available if anyone would like them. Some tweaking may be necessary of the star counts depending on the complexity of certain systems -- I certainly haven't tested the starfield in every system and performance may vary.

My PC is getting below average, but still handles the starfield decently well enough in Alcuin. I get stuttering when the contact list really starts to fill, but otherwise I like it. I also think that it looks just fine superimposed on the nebulae, even when it's superimposed on the white nebula in the imperial seat of the Jeung Empire, but to each his and/or her own, I guess. ("And/or" because hey, transgendered people are people too.)

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"The art of flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss." --Douglas Adams

First off:
What kind of performance hit are we looking at if we put floodlights on ships? That would give a seriously realistic and Alien-ish feel.

Then a sidenote rambling on nebulae and being inside or close to one:

When inside or close to a nebula, you would hardly be aware of it in your local proximity. The average density of a typically bright nebula is 10 atoms per cubic centimetre (which is about 10^4 times less than the best vacuum achieved on earth). A nebula might occlude light from distant stars when the relative density per visible area is large enough (say at several parsecs distance), but since the gasses within the nebula are incredibly sparse when viewed from the microscale of humans the nebula would be invisible, more or less, from inside the nebula. Stars without the nebula might be diffuse, but certainly not occluded unless you are deep inside a neutral (HI) nebula or a dark nebula (which has lots and lots of particulate matter). Most scifi renderings of nebula are completely shot, stormy clouds of gas which block sensors and so forth. It's not dense enough to have any local impact on those scales. Also note that solar wind would clear out the gas or ioinize all of it within a stellar heliopause (possibly creating a local aggregate, but this would be truly extreme cases). I could calculate a more exact density per visible degree for a standard nebula to give an indication on how far away the nebula would appear glowing and so forth from within, but ... it wouldn't be of much use if someone doesn't go overboard and codes LOD resolution for backgrounds over astronomical distances and some nebula is actually close enough to make a difference.

Generally, for our purposes, we can differentiate three types of nebula with respect to light propagation. Dark nebulas are really dark, light propagation is about one thousandth in the inner parts of the nebula. Hence, they are also cold (in astrophysical terms, meaning REALLY cold; about 10K). They aren't emission nebulae and we aren't really interested in non-emission nebulae as they're just dark splotches in the sky that occludes anything behind or within them.

The other two are neutral and ionized nebulae. Neutral nebulae are relatively opaque but also hot, having the same radiation field as a star (about 15000K). They are highly absorbent and could occlude stars outside the nebula and diffuse stars within the nebula as long as the viewer is deep enough into the region (so that enough of the incoming light is absorbed before reaching the target).

Ionized nebulae also have high temperatures, thus giving off light, but they are transparent. They do not absorb radiation, meaning that light from within or without the nebula can pass through. They occlude and diffuse like any bright object does, through interference and saturation. If the radiation field is dense enough, it would be difficult seeing distant stars that have similar surface temperatures as the radiation field equivalent but other than that the nebula would likely seem like a distant haze or glow. Typical nebulae are after all about 30 LY across, so placement within or near the nebula would produce some quite diverse optical phenomenon depending on exactly where you are and in what direction you are looking; glows, hazes, bright regions, seemingly translucent regions, dark regions and so forth.

| Raphael aka pr0fez
| Observe the Power of Syntactic Sugar!

I suppose then the 'Da Tianmen' nebula, of which all the 'colorful' nebula in TS are a part of, is of the 'ionized' variety. In any case they are meant to be occluding most stars, save those that are bright enough and/or within the MS cluster itself. Providence is an example of a system that I placed at the periphery of the nebula, and thus much fewer stars are occluded, and the nebula itself is faint. Xu Xuan, Li Po, and Epitaph are all systems that we can regard as being deep within the nebula, and thus most stars are occluded, and we have lots of interesting optical phenomenon....glows, hazes, bright areas etc.

Of course artistic license was taken, as we can only theorize what the view from within a nebula would actually look like. I did try and give more 'sense' to the nebula of the Middle States, in contrast to the typical space game fair, where every system simply must have a nebula of some kind. There identity, placement and reality is left un-discussed usually.

Just in case no one knew (which I doubt, since I never wrote anything down or explained anything like GrandpaTrout urged me to), this is the 'Da Tianmen' (Chinese for 'Gate of the Sky'):

All of the systems with 'nebular' backgrounds, are supposed to be within this nebula itself. I even went to pains to 'cluster' those systems together on the star map.

Cool! So there is actually "realism", or rather credibility, in that area. I hadn't made the connection that the nebular backgrounds where actually representations of parts of the same nebula, from within so to speak. I've been busy trying not to collide with things in the dark [|)]

And without artistic license, flying around in space would be REALLY dull ...



| Raphael aka pr0fez
| Observe the Power of Syntactic Sugar!

I may be a little dense, but I cannot figure this out.

My first attempt was the Providence system. I found this file:
..\mods\MS_Mod_Geog\geog\middle\providence.lws

Inside it, among a lot of other stuff, I found this...:
AmbientColor 221 37 4
AmbIntensity 0.63
EnableLensFlare 0
EnableShadowMaps 0
EnableVolumetricLights 0

...which I changed into:
AmbientColor 1 255 4
AmbIntensity 99.9963
EnableLensFlare 0
EnableShadowMaps 0
EnableVolumetricLights 0

According to some .lws-documentation I found on the internet, the AmbIntensity should be a percentage, or perhaps a fraction, so I have tried 10.63, 63, 99.9963 and 0.9963. All to no avail.

Further, according to above mentioned documentation, my Ambientcolor should produce a very green light. It doesn't.

What am I doing wrong?

Look for the light named <fill> and change it's properties. I think the Ambient light effect does very little or nothing in flux.