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Skybox dimming when landed or nearby planets/moons.


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Just like the DistantObject mod. I can't live without that mod. Being on the surface of The Mun or any other non-atmospheric celestial body without it doesn't feel right. Seeing nothing but a blank void in the sky is both beautiful and scary at the same time, then when night comes, nothing but stars. I haven't seen any of this in surface screenshots of KSP2 which makes me sad. I don't know anything about programming but I hope this is an easy thing to just add in even if major development might be over.

Maybe make is dynamic too? I'd imagine not every celestial body gets enough sunlight to fully dim the sky.

Edited by GrapeInvaders
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There was a huge discussion in terms of both the objective and subjective side of this suggestion. I'm linking it below:

The gist of it is that stars are very dim compared to the sun or even the light of the sun reflecting off of planets, and very bright compared to objects in the shadow of planets (or in interstellar space, but that was discussed in another thread). Regardless of opinion, if you want realism you shouldn't be able to see stars if anything is reflecting the star that you are orbiting. 

That being said, I think that lots of people want it both ways, but so far it seems that the developers have not decided to implement it. Worst case scenario, it could be modded in like in KSP 1, which would add maybe a few weeks of wait at most. Overall, I think that it shouldn't matter what the developers decide to do since all players will be accommodated for relatively quickly. 

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Just about any opinion on this could be supported as we don't know how Kerbal eyes work nor what image processing and AR tech may be incorporated into more advanced ship and helmet view screens and HUDs.  So once mods fill the gaps in expectations it becomes a non-issue

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18 hours ago, darthgently said:

Just about any opinion on this could be supported as we don't know how Kerbal eyes work nor what image processing and AR tech may be incorporated into more advanced ship and helmet view screens and HUDs.  So once mods fill the gaps in expectations it becomes a non-issue

This isn’t really a debate on realism but more on preference. To many people (including myself), a pitch black sky just looks better. It reminds you that the universe is an empty, cold, terrifying place, and that your kerbals could die at any moment. If you’ve watched either First Man or Interstellar you’ll know what I’m talking about.

I feel that this community focuses to much on the facts and doesn’t consider artistic interpretation. Sometimes things just look or play better when their less realistic. Like, imagine if you were dictated by some Kerbin government which parts you had to use or had to scrub a launch because your rocket wasn’t approved by the FAA.

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8 minutes ago, BowlerHatGuy3 said:
18 hours ago, darthgently said:

Just about any opinion on this could be supported as we don't know how Kerbal eyes work nor what image processing and AR tech may be incorporated into more advanced ship and helmet view screens and HUDs.  So once mods fill the gaps in expectations it becomes a non-issue

This isn’t really a debate on realism but more on preference. To many people (including myself), a pitch black sky just looks better. It reminds you that the universe is an empty, cold, terrifying place, and that your kerbals could die at any moment. If you’ve watched either First Man or Interstellar you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Telescopes, having receivers well beyond the pathetic organic cameras humans possess, they don't see an empty cold terrifying place :)

web_first_images_release.png

Point being a skybox full of stars with a clearly visible galactic band is no more realistic than a pitch black one. Both are possible, it just depends on what's receiving the light. That being said, surely the imaginary eye/camera orbiting the selected vessel is capable of high dynamic range. Surely the devs can't just implement an option to enable and disable human eye limitations, instead of having it only one way or the other.

Edited by Bej Kerman
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2 hours ago, BowlerHatGuy3 said:

You literally just proved my point… :confused:

But yeah, an option to turn it on or off would be nice (though I am starting to get a little tired of “Just make it an option.”.

What else do you do when people want different things?  Making it an option is the only real option.   I'm not sure how you see it being stuck in one form or another, when it could be an option, as a good solution.  Unless you mean that it would be stuck the way you like it, lol

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2 hours ago, darthgently said:

What else do you do when people want different things?  Making it an option is the only real option.   I'm not sure how you see it being stuck in one form or another, when it could be an option, as a good solution.  Unless you mean that it would be stuck the way you like it, lol

I meant for that to be more of a blanket statement. Now that I think about it I’ve been posting a lot of my personal opinions on this thread. Sry ‘bout that :)

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 9/20/2022 at 2:57 PM, Bej Kerman said:

Telescopes, having receivers well beyond the pathetic organic cameras humans possess, they don't see an empty cold terrifying place :)

 

Point being a skybox full of stars with a clearly visible galactic band is no more realistic than a pitch black one. Both are possible, it just depends on what's receiving the light. That being said, surely the imaginary eye/camera orbiting the selected vessel is capable of high dynamic range. Surely the devs can't just implement an option to enable and disable human eye limitations, instead of having it only one way or the other.

Sorry for the necro but this has been omitted in the discussion:

Those images are not even close to raw sensor data.

What you can get from light is entirely limited by physics, just like most things in our universe. This image is a combination of two instruments: NIRCam and MIRI. They take hundreds of images at multiple levels of exposures, some to get the highlights, others to get the detail in shadows. Those are then processed with super advanced masking techniques, by teams of dozens of people, and they're converted via software from infrared to color. No matter how advanced your technology, getting that to a real time hud/magic eye is impossible simply because:

  1. You need multiple exposures, and some need to be long to allow detail from shadows to come up. An HDR image is composed of at least 3 different exposures.
  2. You aperture is limited, so unless you consider a lens the size of Earth, dimmer objects will always need multi-second exposures.
  3. Even if you had lenses the size of Earth, you can only configure them to a certain exposure per image, so you still need multiple exposures.
  4. You could overcome part of this with a multiple-lens system, but you'd still need to correct parallax artifacts, and have a system to integrate everything in real time.
  5. You'll need to constantly adjust the exposure for either multiple images, or multiple lenses, as lighting changes say from interstellar space to being in orbit of a star, or just night to day.
  6. If your low light sensors are too sensitive, you get noise, if they aren't, you still lose detail to darkness.
  7. Low light images still need to be masked/protected from brighter light sources.

You can't realistically handwave away the limitations of how we capture light, and it's not like there are other ways out there to capture light. Magic eyes/HUDs are not even sci-fi, that's why it's an artistic choice, and not a realism one if you decide to portray your media like that, because you can't achieve that result in real time with any real life method.

Edited by PDCWolf
typos, typos.
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1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

Sorry for the necro but this has been omitted in the discussion:

Those images are not even close to raw sensor data.

What you can get from light is entirely limited by physics, just like most things in our universe. This image is a combination of two instruments: NIRCam and MIRI. They take hundreds of images at multiple levels of exposures, some to get the highlights, others to get the detail in shadows. Those are then processed with super advanced masking techniques, by teams of dozens of people, and they're converted via software from infrared to color. No matter how advanced your technology, getting that to a real time hud/magic eye is impossible simply because:

  1. You need multiple exposures, and some need to be long to allow detail from shadows to come up. An HDR image is composed of at least 3 different exposures.
  2. You aperture is limited, so unless you consider a lens the size of Earth, dimmer objects will always need multi-second exposures.
  3. Even if you had lenses the size of Earth, you can only configure them to a certain exposure per image, so you still need multiple exposures.
  4. You could overcome part of this with a multiple-lens system, but you'd still need to correct parallax artifacts, and have a system to integrate everything in real time.
  5. You'll need to constantly adjust the exposure for either multiple images, or multiple lenses, as lighting changes say from interstellar space to being in orbit of a star, or just night to day.
  6. If your low light sensors are too sensitive, you get noise, if they aren't, you still lose detail to darkness.
  7. Low light images still need to be masked/protected from brighter light sources.

You can't realistically handwave away the limitations of how we capture light, and it's not like there are other ways out there to capture light. Magic eyes/HUDs are not even sci-fi, that's why it's an artistic choice, and not a realism one if you decide to portray your media like that, because you can't achieve that result in real time with any real life method.

Doesn't matter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As long as the player remains oriented, the realism doesn't matter

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2 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

You can't realistically handwave away the limitations of how we capture light, and it's not like there are other ways out there to capture light. Magic eyes/HUDs are not even sci-fi, that's why it's an artistic choice, and not a realism one if you decide to portray your media like that, because you can't achieve that result in real time with any real life method.

Yes and no.  A HUD could be AR based in that it leveraged a database of body positions and overlays them on the HUD if only to provide 3D situational awareness to a kerb on EVA and not strictly based upon actual light gathering, but yeah, excellent points on your part 

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On 10/18/2022 at 10:32 PM, Bej Kerman said:

Doesn't matter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As long as the player remains oriented, the realism doesn't matter

"Point being a skybox full of stars with a clearly visible galactic band is no more realistic than a pitch black one". Your words not mine. Only one of those is realistic, the other is videogame/movie magic. That's what I wanted to clear up.

On 10/18/2022 at 11:32 PM, darthgently said:

Yes and no.  A HUD could be AR based in that it leveraged a database of body positions and overlays them on the HUD if only to provide 3D situational awareness to a kerb on EVA and not strictly based upon actual light gathering, but yeah, excellent points on your part 

Remember that the HUD example was originally brought up by you to justify the magic starry sky. From that viewpoint, keeping a database of every celestial body just to get a view oversaturated by stars, which you somehow still have to justify displaying arbitrary brightness values for, makes 0 sense. Again, we're back to magic.

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5 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:
On 10/19/2022 at 2:32 AM, Bej Kerman said:

Doesn't matter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As long as the player remains oriented, the realism doesn't matter

"Point being a skybox full of stars with a clearly visible galactic band is no more realistic than a pitch black one". Your words not mine. Only one of those is realistic, the other is videogame/movie magic. That's what I wanted to clear up.

Really doesn't matter in the end, that's my conclusion.

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11 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

"Point being a skybox full of stars with a clearly visible galactic band is no more realistic than a pitch black one". Your words not mine. Only one of those is realistic, the other is videogame/movie magic. That's what I wanted to clear up.

Remember that the HUD example was originally brought up by you to justify the magic starry sky. From that viewpoint, keeping a database of every celestial body just to get a view oversaturated by stars, which you somehow still have to justify displaying arbitrary brightness values for, makes 0 sense. Again, we're back to magic.

I disagree. Is your smartphone magic?   Keeping orientation perspective on EVA could very much be enhanced by a star map.  No need to go to the mat on this.  It's just a game

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17 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Really doesn't matter in the end, that's my conclusion.

17 hours ago, darthgently said:

I disagree. Is your smartphone magic?   Keeping orientation perspective on EVA could very much be enhanced by a star map.  No need to go to the mat on this.  It's just a game

No one mentioned anything about the point you're both getting defensive about. You tried to justify something with realism, when reality is incapable of justifying either of your approaches. Whether it helps or doesn't, or you like one way or another, was never part of my point, I only wanted to clear up that realism can't be a justification for that stuff, because reality doesn't allow it, neither does near/far future sci-fi.

My smartphone isn't magic, neither will my smartphone waste decades rendering a super-post-processed true color condensation of weeks of data just to "orient me", not how it works, that's why maps is a simplification of flat images, or even better, just roads on a white background, for example.

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3 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

No one mentioned anything about the point you're both getting defensive about. You tried to justify something with realism, when reality is incapable of justifying either of your approaches. Whether it helps or doesn't, or you like one way or another, was never part of my point, I only wanted to clear up that realism can't be a justification for that stuff, because reality doesn't allow it, neither does near/far future sci-fi.

My smartphone isn't magic, neither will my smartphone waste decades rendering a super-post-processed true color condensation of weeks of data just to "orient me", not how it works, that's why maps is a simplification of flat images, or even better, just roads on a white background, for example.

It isn't far flung sci fi tech. It is a simple bitmap mapped to the inside of a partial sphere

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.stardroid

Sailors have been orienting visually by the stars for millennia, Apollo missions relied on visual star shots and all astronauts can visually identify various constellations, the milky way, planets etc and would naturally benefit from an AR projection of such on EVA.  But most importantly, *it doesn't matter, it is just a game*

Edited by darthgently
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23 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Yes it will if you got a starmap app. And not in decades, but pretty much instantly.

Great way to prove you have no idea how a Starmap app works. Download stellarium, then download all star catalogues for it, watch as it becomes unusable and anything that is not a star is still just a png, if it doesn't outright crash at all. Even if you get it to run, all star catalogues amount to about 120 million stars... bit short of the 100 to 400 Billion in the galaxy. That's the problem with magic sky arguments: You can't base them in reality, you first have to constrain them. Do you want a HUD? realistically you'd have spaceship-centered orientation aids, not a sextant with stars. Do you want AR windows for a pretty view on your spaceship? realistically you'd have a non zoomable png with a constrained magnitude limit, useless for orientation but it'd maybe look pretty. 

21 hours ago, darthgently said:

It isn't far flung sci fi tech. It is a simple bitmap mapped to the inside of a partial sphere

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.stardroid

Sailors have been orienting visually by the stars for millennia, Apollo missions relied on visual star shots and all astronauts can visually identify various constellations, the milky way, planets etc and would naturally benefit from an AR projection of such on EVA.  But most importantly, *it doesn't matter, it is just a game*

If it's a geosphere with a png, you lose dynamic range, quality, etc. Just look at the OG skybox on KSP1, this also goes against what the OP asked for, and what you were trying to justify as well. We've moved the goalposts from justifying magic eyes with realism, to justify magic eyes at all. In fact, what originally mattered to me entering this conversation is misrepresenting reality to justify magic eyes.

You want magic eyes? Great, that's your subjective taste, but reality can't possibly justify magic eyes.

Considering the circles this discussion is going into, I'm out, at least we've left realism where it should be: not justifying magic starry skies.

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8 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Great way to prove you have no idea how a Starmap app works. Download stellarium, then download all star catalogues for it, watch as it becomes unusable and anything that is not a star is still just a png, if it doesn't outright crash at all.

Implying you absolutely need all those stars and not just the few dozen thousand needed? :confused:

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3 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Implying you absolutely need all those stars and not just the few dozen thousand needed? :confused:

There was a whole thing were PDCWolf said that if you have a HUD or AR orientation system, you only need an abstraction or simplification instead of a brightness-boosted image of reality. 

On 10/21/2022 at 12:19 PM, PDCWolf said:

neither will my smartphone waste decades rendering a super-post-processed true color condensation of weeks of data just to "orient me", not how it works, that's why maps is a simplification of flat images, or even better, just roads on a white background, for example

In other words, why would you render millions, billions, or trillions of points of light when you can just render RA/Dec. lines and maybe a few key stars, like Kerbol. Even rendering a couple dozen thousand stars (which would be a pretty sparse sky by the way) is just another simplified representation of the sky. If you want the stars for orientation, such as for recognizing sky-marks

21 hours ago, darthgently said:

Sailors have been orienting visually by the stars for millennia, Apollo missions relied on visual star shots and all astronauts can visually identify various constellations, the milky way, planets etc and would naturally benefit from an AR projection of such on EVA.  But most importantly, *it doesn't matter, it is just a game*

You can accomplish that by rendering just the stars important to those constellations, or even drawing constellation representations on that sphere. They are pretty much equivalent, just different aesthetically. Either way, neither one is an actual image of the sheer amount of stars out there. 
 

Luckily, it doesn’t matter if rendering every star is realistic, HUD or not. The game can make an aesthetic choice or present a few choices about what the sky looks like, and it is fine because nothing is holding KSP to the utmost standard of absolute realism. 

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10 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Great way to prove you have no idea how a Starmap app works. Download stellarium, then download all star catalogues for it, watch as it becomes unusable and anything that is not a star is still just a png, if it doesn't outright crash at all. Even if you get it to run, all star catalogues amount to about 120 million stars... bit short of the 100 to 400 Billion in the galaxy. That's the problem with magic sky arguments: You can't base them in reality, you first have to constrain them. Do you want a HUD? realistically you'd have spaceship-centered orientation aids, not a sextant with stars. Do you want AR windows for a pretty view on your spaceship? realistically you'd have a non zoomable png with a constrained magnitude limit, useless for orientation but it'd maybe look pretty. 

If it's a geosphere with a png, you lose dynamic range, quality, etc. Just look at the OG skybox on KSP1, this also goes against what the OP asked for, and what you were trying to justify as well. We've moved the goalposts from justifying magic eyes with realism, to justify magic eyes at all. In fact, what originally mattered to me entering this conversation is misrepresenting reality to justify magic eyes.

You want magic eyes? Great, that's your subjective taste, but reality can't possibly justify magic eyes.

Considering the circles this discussion is going into, I'm out, at least we've left realism where it should be: not justifying magic starry skies.

Lol

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