At Long Last!!!
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Well, still no stars and there seems to be a bug on the atmosphere on the píc from space, but I hope it really is getting close. 
There are stars, they are quite faint and you can’t see them due to the eye exposure being high from the bright objects in the foreground - just like in real life. For the record we have actual screen shots with stars as the 2nd image in the carousel on the landing page of this website ;). Also which atmosphere bugs are you referring to? As far as I can tell there aren’t any atmosphere bugs in those pictures.
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That’s great news! Can’t wait to see the result!
(I believe I hear the Hallelujah Chorus somewhere…)
I believe he meant that gap in the atmosphere below the ring. I would guess it’s the shadow of the ring? Although you can’t see the rest of the shadow.
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You have no idea how much frustration you’re triggering right now. You realize that this is this is the #1 line of “evidence” from people who don’t believe the Moon landings happened, right?
I encourage you to find a photo of the daytime side of a planet taken from orbit that includes stars in the background.
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This is entertainment @Kichae, there must be stars 
Alright, on the blue planet picture it’s understandable, but what about the 2 Desert Planets pic? My gut is telling me that there should be some visible stars there?
See those bright, brown halves? Is it day time or night time on those? Are they over exposed? No? Then you won’t see any stars.
You have your choice of over-exposing the daytime side of the planets, or under-exposing the stars.
Here’s a picture of Neptune, taken from the night side by Voyager 2. This would have been a crescent view, except that it’s been over-exposed to the point that Neptune was just a bright, fuzzy, pure-white band of light. This is the kind of over-exposure that’s necessary to see a sky full of stars when there’s a bright, planetary body in view.
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I smell a difference between a human eye and a camera @Kichae, would a human eye see stars in those situations?
Short answer: yes.
Neptune has approximately 3 times the albedo of the Moon, and it’s quite a lot larger, but it doesn’t look any larger in that picture (in other words, it’s angular diameter is about the same as the Moon in the night-sky) and at 30 AU Neptune receives… 900 times less light from the Sun than does our Moon.
Since I can see stars in the night-sky even when there’s a full Moon, I either have superpowers or the human eye can see more stars than a 37 year old light-weight camera.
So INS have made a good camera, question now becomes should the human eye be somehow simulated?
Actually, the short answer is “it depends”. It depends on whether you’re looking at the bright object or not. In the case of looking at the Moon, if you’re actually looking at the Moon, you’ll be hard pressed to see anything but the brightest stars, and even those will usually show up in your periphery where your eyes are more sensitive to light. If, on the other hand, the Moon is just in your field of vision, but isn’t what you’re focused on looking at, you won’t have too much trouble seeing stars. The Moon, however, will look considerably brighter, because it’s being over-exposed on your retina (your iris will be more open, so that you can see the fainter stars which you’re concentrating on).
Cameras can do this too. We see this all the time when taking digital photography: Target the bright sky, and the foreground becomes dark and underexposed. Target shadowed regions, and you lose most of the detail in the sky.
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For me, the answer to this question depends primarily on the art style.
In the 2010 tech demo, we saw the galaxy from inside a small, personal spaceship, controlled from a seat protected from the infinite void by a transparent canopy. If the fiction is that I am a human being sitting there looking out of a window on the universe beyond, I’d really rather expect to be able to see it as well as I can IRL - better, in fact, as I suspect a reliable alternative to glasses will be invented before FTL travel.
If the art-style has been modified to the more realistic “who the **** would put a window in a spaceship!??!?!?,” a more limited view would be more acceptable - admittedly, I again suspect that digital monitors will achieve higher aspect ratios than the human eye before FTL travel is invented, but it’ll be easier to suspend my disbelief on this point.
More important than either personal opinion or art styles, however, the real question is: can they make it happen in a reasonable timeframe. If achieving non-linear brightness requires rewriting DirectX from the ground up, I can do without.
I live in the suburbs, I’m hard pressed to see anything but the brightest stars regardless. I’d still be hard pressed to find any significant section of sky without any stars, though, which is why the completely black background just doesn’t seem realistic.
In games, unlike tools, perception is more important than realism.
Oh and I’m not entirely certain if “it depends” as far as Neptune is concerned. With 900 times less light from the Sun and ~3 times the albedo of the Moon a quick estimate is that Neptune would need an angular diameter of 8-9º to rival the apparent magnitude of the Moon, and even then the light from it would be spread out over a 300 times larger area of the retina. I mean it would certainly drown out some of the fainter stars, but bright stars and the atmosphere already do that.
Problem is … games mold perception. Making things because “my gut says it should be like that” only worsens the problem because this fiction is the only experience of space people get …
Most people think asteroid belts look like this for instance:
And that’s because media made them think that. Lets educate people.
But this isn’t realism vs fiction … this is camera vs eye. In the blog post about HDR Keith for instance said:
In practice the I-Novae Engine uses a default minimum aperture size of f/8.3 because our calculations more closely resemble a camera than an eye.
We had the exact same discussion in the past. I-Novae surely noticed it too and they know why they kept with the camera. A reason for that decission would be cool though @INovaeKeith , would be usefull to quote.
I don’t think that is the issue here @Lomsor, the debate is between showing the game through a camera or the eyes of the pilot. If you were there you would see stars, if a probe was there it would not.
Yes that’s what I concluded at the end too. I was just derailed a little by Runiat.
Derailed by @Runiat? You must be joking. 
I would prefer to see some stars than having a realistic camera view though…
And what’s wrong with a little realism in our fiction? Using misrepresentations that are so common they’re awful tropes robs the game of a real, marketable, distinguishing factor from the competition. It produces an aesthetic that isn’t just realistic, but relatively unique in today’s market.
Look at it this way: You’re flying along, and there are tons of stars in view. A minute or so passes, and you reach your destination: A planet. As it comes into view, the background stars fade, and you’re left with a bright, vibrant world on a flat, black, satin background. The planet stands out, because it suddenly appears as if it’s in a void.
Which, really, it is.
When you have a rich star field in the background, the foreground appears muted. In fact, looking at games like EVE, where the backgrounds can get really loud, the planets often end up fading into the background. It becomes a reminder that that’s all planets are in that game: Background dressing.
Now, this may not be the best example for Infinity, but consider this as an example of what I’m talking about in the general case:
The planet, and its ring, are in the foreground, but the subject of the painting would appear to be the background nebula.
Even here, with Mars on a significantly more muted background, the impact of the world is muted. While your eye is initially drawn to the planet, due to decent composition, the band of stars in the background ultimately pull your eyes away from the planet. The one thing the background actually does do here is highlight the night side of the planet, so that it doesn’t just blend into the darkness, but that kind of blending is exactly what we see in real life! It produces the effect of phases, which isn’t something you see in most space games.
Realism as art direction isn’t something you see a lot of. I think it would make the Infinity universe stand out.
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Correct.
And I agree that you shouldn’t be able to see the full nebula while looking at something bright like that, but a completely black background would be weird.
We’ll see how it looks in the video. Lets see what the comments say about it.