i notice these in the backdrops, but why not in the actual playing space, would be fun playing hide and seek in area's like that :) clear pockets of space in a mostly gas/dust area, maybe a station, sparesly populated with roids?

Temp.

its been discussed, there are some issues with it however.

1. nebulae are actually only "cloudy" in comparison. realistically the particles per cubic foot of space are still so low that from inside a nebulae you probably wouldnt notice unless you were looking at a distant star through the thickest part of the nebulae.

2. from a gameplay point of view there are some problems with rendering a "foggy" environment. i dont think the engine was really designed for it. the lighting and texture mapping or something.

ohh well :)

There is so much nebula around every environment. it seems that every sector is either bathed in pink. purple, or blue light. No sectors have a "Blackness of Space" feel. perhaps have greater range of backgrounds.

Traveling though a nebula would be cool though. then it would make the FEW sectors with nebula interesting. perhaps all you would need to do is make the visibility less in those areas. and not be able to see stars as well.

I would imagine that it would be very easy to have uniform dust/fog, rather than pockets of it. For example, glFog() in openGL.

But Spellcast's #1 makes sense. A thick fog making ~2km visibility would look nice, though.

The Nebula effect, and the missions centered around them, from Freespace 2 comes to mind. Visibility was minimal to the point of losing your own wingmen if you drifted out of formation. Made for fun hunting though...

Could make for some interesting bot or transport escort type missions.

Anyone remember the dust clouds in Homeworld 2? They hid you from visibility and radar, but caused slight damage to ships as you hid there. Throw some expensive ores in there and you've got a cool gameplay element.

Not sure if this fits into this conversation.. But what about random clouds .. if you go into one by accident, it kills your ships electronics so your free floating untill you exit the cloud? no damage to the ship though unless you bump into a roid :D .. line up your ship to go through it without hitting roids and go for it.. good way to lose pesky Strike force maybe?

As a variation of this how bout dust clouds ala freelancer
scanners works but not well, dust cloud can be seen from some distance but isn't all encompassing like nebula in freespace 2
great place to hide things like derelict ships, stations, rare minerals, etc

the trick possibly being to figure out how to use particles to look like floating dust clouds. something similar to ion storms but with bigger semi-transparent dust particles instead of the little purple ones

Visually the clouds were pretty neat in Freelancer et al. You wouldn't perceive nebulae that way, but perhaps localized dust or gas pockets could look that way...? But unlike what is portrayed in those games, such dense clouds would not be a navigable environment. Your hull would be peeled away unless you went quite slowly (relative to each dust particle -- quite a trick), and if you went too fast it would be like hitting a wall. It could potentially be fun to require pilots to fly very slowly through clouds, but I don't think it's worth the effort putting them in.

On the other hand, radiation zones would be both realistic and fun. A visual effect very similar to an ion storm could be used to let you know you're in a "bad" area, and then slowly leech away the hull of the ship. There are lots of possibilities with radiated sectors.

I agree with roguelazer. Those dust clouds in hw2 were cool. Some of them even drained your hitpoints. It would be cool for when we get E slots. We might have to buy a special radiation shield or something, so that we could be able to mine in the clouds. I think this would be a great gameplay element to add.

/givemoney Devs 2c

wylfing, its a game, we dont have to hold to those annoying laws that govern reality, if its cool and adds entertainment, do it I say!

Oh, you want it to be *entertaining* -- well fine then, have your gas clouds. See if I care.

:-)

Starfleet Academy had a few missions that were inside a really thick nebula: visibility was really poor, your shields malfunctioned, and your radar system did REALLY cool things. (I had no idea my lowly Mach64 was capable of some of those effects.)
-:sigma.SB

/me bumps this because of the ion storm thread.
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/8568

I'd love to see a wider variety of "terrain" - that is, permanent features of a specific region of space, that effect gameplay in a variety of ways. Right now we essentially have two types of terrain - asteroid fields, and not-asteroid-fields.

I'd like Odia to mostly be a dense nebula, with effects like fluctuating radar range. Radar could work normally for a short range, say fluctuating between 500-1000m; and anything further, but less than twice that distance (1000-2000m) would be detected, but not identified, in the sector list it would show "unknown". This would be why it's so popular with pirates.

The other big terrain effect I'd like to see is gravitational force around stars and planets. The big examples here are Helios and Nyrius: we've got these really massive, Red Giant stars, and the only effect they have is blocking a few sectors, so we can't jump there. What I think would be feasible & pretty cool is having the sectors immediately adjacent to the star (or planet) having a certain constant gravitational force in the direction of the star (as drawn on the skybox). In these sectors immediately adjacent to the source of gravity, the force would be between 25kN and 75kN, depending on the mass of the source of gravity. A gravitational force would also be present in sectors two or three sectors away from the source of gravity: in the sectors two away from the source, the gravitational force would be 1/4 the force in sectors immediately adjacent (that is, 6.25kN to 18.75kN); and in sectors three away from the source, the force would be 1/8 the force in the adjacent sectors (3.125kN to 9.375kN).

This would lead to interesting tactics: players using rockets would want to attack in the same direction as the force of gravity, as it would help them accelerate faster, so their rockets would fire at a higher speed; but that has the drawback of meaning they have to be facing into the sun or planet, which makes visibility worse.

Also, Heliocene is said to be formed by "intense heat and tidal forces", so it would make sense for it to be more common in those sectors closest to stars, where there would be the most heat and the highest gravitational force. So miners would congregate in those sectors, and the gravitational force would make mining more interesting, because it would require the miner to continually thrust against the gravity in order to keep close enough to the 'roid to mine it. And if the miner was attacked by a pirate, he would want to thrust in the direction of the star, in order to get the best acceleration, but that direction may not be the shortest way to travel to get into jumping range to escape the pirate.

I'd love to see gravity-like environmental effects for stars, planets, etc. Would open up new weapons and widgets as well (i.e. tractor beams, gravity mines, replusor rays, etc.)

Even better would be to develop simple 3-D structures for planets, moons, stars, etc. But we all know that stuff is way far off. But having real gravity would I think necessitate that eventually if you did nothing with your ship you would crash into whatever thing was pulling you in.

Even better would be a more free-form sector coordinate system that allowed movement between sectors by just going in that direction. That would increase lag, as the game would have to then take into account all objects in a system instead of just a sector. And that's been covered before methinks.

I can see this crashing sectors if a player thrusted in the direction of a star and let the gravity accelerate them to faster and faster speeds, pulling them out of the sector "boundary" quite easily. So if gravity is implemented, other things will probably have to be implemented as well.
(And if we throw away the sector-based system, those devs would have to rebuild the entire navigation system. Which would suck.)

But more to the point of the thread, dust and gas would be cool. There might be a problem with environmental effects, Remember if you get stuck inide a roid, you can see out just fine, which would lead me to believe that you could not build an object like a pink asteroid and make it 90% transparent. Outside observers would get the good view, but your ship inside the "cloud" would be able to see out just fine.

I dunno if this is even possible with the currernt engine.

> But having real gravity would I think necessitate that eventually if you did
> nothing with your ship you would crash into whatever thing was pulling you in.

Eh. I don't see it as being any different from the way it is now, except for more interesting. The stars and planets are already there, drawn on the skybox, we just can never reach them. None of that would have to be changed in order to add a gravitational force in sectors close to stars and planets. I think (only a guess, of course) it's feasible to add a constant gravity in sectors in a much more reasonable amount of time than redesigning the entire navigation system.

> I can see this crashing sectors if a player thrusted in the direction of a star
> and let the gravity accelerate them to faster and faster speeds

Ships would still have the same maximum speed, so it wouldn't be significantly different than it is now, they would just accelerate faster or slower depending on which way they are traveling relative to the gravitational force.

As for particle effects for dust & gas clouds, I think it would probably be simplest & easiest to just use essentially the same effect as in ion storms, but different colors & somewhat more dense.

I think VO should maintain some level of credibility as a science-fiction game, not as a space fantasy. I would like game elements to be somewhat believable, not merely entertaining. You know, immersion and stuff... But that's (hopefully not) just me.

Regarding gravity: yes, a nice thing but one that is really needed only when landing on or taking off from somewhere. You could say that we already have gravity in each and every sector out there. At the speed of 0 you are on a stable orbit around the effective center of gravity, just like all those asteroids. The speeds of up to 300m/s are just minor deviations from that orbit. For reference my quick guesstimate is that Earth travels appr. 30km/s around the Sun.

Well, if we're talking spacial anomalies an gravity, I think someone here needs to mention black holes (haha, I did it first, I win!). Think of something like that present in gray space and the possibilites involved.