[Suggestion] HD Planets and Space Skybox

[kamov23]

With every patch the game gets better and prettier. One glaring difference however is some planets look low res, and the space backdrop looks blurry, with the size of stars in the background being unrealistically large and blurry. I'm not asking to be totally realistic (as most space with the naked eye is black) but something more believable and high fidelity to match the rest of the game would be appreciated. Maybe even different star backdrops depending on where you are in the universe. It would do wonders for immersion.

The Void is a good example of what I'm thinking of in terms of assets needing updating.

Possible inspiration could be Endless Space 2 or Sins of a solar empire 2. Even Space-engine could provide ideas.

I feel like this game could better showcase the wonder of our universe.

[raUlo]

I totally agree, the skybox nebulas seemed more detailed in X3 by comparison. And when it comes to planets I feel like rocky moons are rather the ones that are lacking in the visual department (i.e. Getsu Fune, Grand Exchange or The Void)

[alt3rn1ty]

Wouldn't this also bring back the old problem of the game having to load the next sector in before you jump through a gate .. and not quite managing it because of the higher res textures?
The games planets after jumping used to look like white Polo Mints for about 5-8 seconds after jumping, until the game engine caught up with loading all the assets.
It still happens very briefly sometimes.

So maybe it needs to be a Hi-Res DLC?, then some of us can avoid that happening again by not using it.

[BitByte]

Sounds like too little thimgs to do if you have time to look backgrounds.
Personally couldn't care less from HD planets or space because I have my eye on target not on planet.

[PersonyPerson]

I mean... Pluto looks good.


Some planets might need an update. Neptune needs to have it's colour changed. In reality it's a very pale blue/green like Uranus.


(Neptune wikipedia page).

Other planets that were made in the base game (Argon Prime, Unholy Retribution + I agree with The Void since the Gas Giant there looks static), might need a face lift. Antigone Memorial especially does. But other than that, most of the gate network looks good as it is.

You don't want to enhance the skybox too much otherwise you're going to substantially increase the size of the game in GB. A fully HD Earth in Space Engine is 11.22GB. And as alt3rn1ty said, it might cause issues with the instant loading of a sector through gate transit.

[Nerwesta]

Sounds like too little thimgs to do if you have time to look backgrounds.
Personally couldn't care less from HD planets or space because I have my eye on target not on planet.

Are you suggesting during your entire hundreds of hours your eyes don't come across the various environement that makes a sector .. unique ? Sounds a bit streteched.
Plus there are some planets that takes +50% of your field of view, give or take.

I couldn't agree more with OP, this is why one of the first mods I installed was a better skybox and higher res planets. Vanilla sectors in particular suffers a lot on this. I assume this could be much easier to do by Egosoft than say, redoing the explosion system or lightning engine we've had.

[kamov23]

I think there is a happy middle here. Some sectors do look good, and some assets (pluto) look fine, while the older ones do look dated. And I'm certainly not requesting GB's of data to bring people's pc's to their knees.

For me the game that really made me go "WOW" and really captured the feeling of exoplanets was IXION. For anyone not familiar I highly recommend checking it out as it creates imo the perfect atmosphere for a grand space game.

And regarding the performance impact, some games get around this by offering a free HD DLC with updated system requirements, or hiding the HD assets behind settings.

There is just so much material to work with for inspiration and one of the things that really sets the mood for the universe.

[Realspace]

If you don't mind having the **modified** tag in yout game, just use this: https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/507

[Daemonjax]

I think this is a prime candidate for a mod because texture swaps are the easiest mods to make.

That being said, egosoft does probably already have higher res uncompressed source textures for all of these textures because it makes sense to make the originals way larger than you plan on using. Because, otherwise, down the road you may end up having to either redo them completely from scratch or rely on upscaling (with artifacts).

[Realspace]

I think this is a prime candidate for a mod because texture swaps are the easiest mods to make.

That being said, egosoft does probably already have higher res uncompressed source textures for all of these textures because it makes sense to make the originals way larger than you plan on using. Because, otherwise, down the road you may end up having to either redo them completely from scratch or rely on upscaling (with artifacts).

It does work not that way. Materials are made with layers and mapping of several textures. It is not a question of increasing the resolution of textures but doing a totally different mapping, changing shaders, lights etc. And of course replacing some base textures. Indeed my mod is not 16 gb but 1.6 and of these only half are used for vanilla game, the rest is materials used for my other mod changing the galaxy. So with 1gb the aspect of planets and backgrounds can be totally redone. Ships and stations of course are another question.

[Nerwesta]

I mean... Pluto looks good.


Some planets might need an update. Neptune needs to have it's colour changed. In reality it's a very pale blue/green like Uranus.


(Neptune wikipedia page).

Other planets that were made in the base game (Argon Prime, Unholy Retribution + I agree with The Void since the Gas Giant there looks static), might need a face lift. Antigone Memorial especially does. But other than that, most of the gate network looks good as it is.

You don't want to enhance the skybox too much otherwise you're going to substantially increase the size of the game in GB. A fully HD Earth in Space Engine is 11.22GB. And as alt3rn1ty said, it might cause issues with the instant loading of a sector through gate transit.

Sol planets are generally good, despite the lack of a proper skybox around it.
I think this is also helped by the fact it's a DLC.
However, majority of sectors have either blurry, washed out and low res planets, with a highly compressed JPEG looking skybox.
Brennan Triumph, to stay on the CoH's side is a victim of this, you can see how the texture is cutting through near the equator.
It stroke me because I have the Realspace mod, posted above by it's author - incredible stuff and very big props to him, but Brennan's Triumph is one of the few still looking fairly weird.

edit : I'll attach some screenshots later on.

[Realspace]

It stroke me because I have the Realspace mod, posted above by it's author - incredible stuff and very big props to him, but Brennan's Triumph is one of the few still looking fairly weird.

I should take a look at vanilla + STARS because I did not replace the models in STARS, only changed all materials, mapping and textures so even if the result if commonly good sometimes can not be enough. I don't even remember if I added the new planets in STARS, I think not so in my game, where I use STARS+XRSGE, I don't see the vanilla redone anymore but only the new ones. So if you can post what is the thing, maybe with some picture, I can understand what is the problem that I don't see in my game. For instance the planet's position could have a bad lighting after I redo the textures and need a change of position. Of course please do it in the correct mod section not here.

BTW only solar system planets (terran dlc) are made with (mostly but not exclusively) a single texture. Indeed a 4k is enough to make them look good. Also because planets are seen from far. I used the model of earth to redo different planets to replace many of the vanilla planets, but they are available only in XRSGE mod not in STARS alone. This is because earth model still uses an "old" mapping with an overlapping of textures (for land) but also the new engine for clouds which is exceptionally good. The most of the earth-like planets in vanilla are made with a different engine that does not use textures as images but as height-mapping, then adds colors of seas, mountains etc. So texture's size is IRRELEVANT.

You can see for instance that in Boron dlc they added the effect of shorelines because previous models were lacking and the passage see-land was very rush. This addition does not work as intended to me, the shorelines do not look real. I preferred the old mapping of visible textures that much better "trick" the eye.

As told, the problem is in the engine they use (which per se is a cool idea, it reduces the texture usage to minimal...and you can see how good it is with clouds) and also the lazy mapping. For instance the vanilla moons are made of a base texture + mapping of several patches of more detailed textures (diff + normal). The low res effect you see is due to the fact that they used an incorrect base mapping, i.e. a square detail map not a rectangular moon map. Pluto is right because, as told, in solar system they used a correct mapping of base textures taken from the kind of archive you also post here. Instead fictional moons have all a wrong base texture.

So in STARS mod, for redoing the moons, I simply changed the base texture and increased the number of patches of detail textures and the effect is a very high resolution but, in fact, no texture has been increased at all.

Do what you want with the information I gave, only be aware that the problem with skybox and planets is NOT due to low res textures.