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Message Edited by JakinIrali on 12-14-2004 08:07 AM

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ephon wrote:
The same reason why every system is within a rainbow of brightly colored nebula, with an asteroid field to boot. I feel Im playing Jimmy Neutron sometimes, not star wars. Nebula would not look like that to the human eye anyway. Cameras are much more sensitive to color than the eye. most of the spectacular Hubble images the devs must have looked at while making the game, would be mostly the void of color If you were actually in one.

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BishopCow wrote:

I would have to agree with what Jarkin about the realism of the game. If you folks are so into realism, then the whole Star Wars franchise is NOT for you. Heck, even the Star Trek franchise wouldNOT be for you.

Um, as for black holes... aren't they supposed to be invisible? Light gets sucked in and doesn't bounce back. I could be wrong. I still love the visuals in kessel though, and you won't see me splitting peas on the realism of it (or of the nebulae and asteroids). I love eye-candy.

And they should put the suns in. More eye-candy.

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Yeah, since black holes are generallysmall (only a few to a few tens of kilometers in size), and light that would allow us to see them cannot escape, a black hole floating alone in space would be hard, if not impossible, to see.

However, if a black hole passes through a cloud of interstellar matter, or is close to another "normal" star, the black hole can accrete matter into itself. As the matter falls or is pulled towards the black hole, it gains kinetic energy, heats up and is squeezed by tidal forces. The heating ionizes the atoms, and when the atoms reach a few million degrees Kelvin, they emit X-rays that can be seen.

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Zanholo wrote:

I am thinking if they were there, we'd be bitching about how bright they are and we want 'em removed. I know just the brightness of the spinning galaxy in kessel is enough to make me want to do all my dogfighting with that bright mass to my back...

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Mordoc wrote:
Speaking of missing stuff, where's Centerpoint Station in the Corellia system?

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Insidius wrote:
2 pages of complaints about a small cosmetic detail.

Incredible.

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Ratjin wrote:
One of the more profound mysteries to me is where the suns are in all these systems to which we travel. I can see the light of the suns reflecting off the planets, moons, and so forth. And yet there's no sign of the suns. Are they hidden behind the nebulae? Yet they're visible from the ground, so one would think that they'd be visible from space?

Was it some sort of practical decision on the part of the devs? Were the suns too blinding in actual play? Did it mess with the UI transparency too much and make everything unreadable/unseeable?

I miss the suns.

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Excellent point.

I've played other games (mentioning no names so I don't get deleted, again!), which have stars, and even have planets which you can 'touch'. The difference I think is that in JTL planets (and stars if they were present) are scenery (textures of the bounding box), rather than actual objects within the game space. The game I'm thinking of had planets as objects in space, which meant you could actually orbit a planet if you wanted to. Given that such ideas are quite old, I'm unsure & disapointed the JTL programmers didn't take this (what must be a relatively simple) step.

Edit:

Now I come to think of it, I even played a space game on my ZX Spectrum (same era as C64), which allowed you to fly in space and fly around stars and planets, and you could even do atmospheric flight.

Message Edited by DaveG on 12-15-2004 06:34 PM

Message Edited by JakinIrali on 12-15-2004 10:45 AM

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Insidius wrote:
2 pages of complaints about a small cosmetic detail.

Incredible.

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JakinIrali wrote:

Well the planets aren't just bounding box textures, I'm certain of that. They ARE being rendered in realtime. The amount of animation files required to do the same thing at such a high resolutionwould cripple the game. The planets probably aren't interactive for the same reason we can't crash into asteroids, they didn't want to see pilots burning themselves up in re-entry. I must admit the first time somethinggot me heading in the direction of Tatooine, I was very afraid I was going to accidentally kill myself.

Another reason is how ridiculously large the sectors would be if we could navigate around the planets. Travel between waypoints might take a terribly long time so they'd probably just choose not to make you travel around a planet to get somewhere - meaning ultimately that making the planets interactive really wouldn't add anything to the game other than making it look aLITTLE better, but at the expensive of A LOT MORE system resources.

Plus, if you think finding PvP in space is hard now, imagine if the sectors were 100x larger.

Message Edited by JakinIrali on 12-15-2004 10:45 AM

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But they don't have to make the planets to scale either. Look at the ground game, a planet's surface is just 16^2 km. That is about as big as most cities here on Earth, but despite the major underscaling it still works out well. If they had done the same in JTL we would have fully navigable space sectors and still would be able to travel from point A to point B in a realistic time span.

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