All aboard the HypePlane for the rings video/kickstarter!

Battlescape
21

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.

6 Likes
22

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.

23

We’ll see how it looks in the video. Lets see what the comments say about it.

24

Realistically I need to write a blog article about this, I’ve been meaning to but blog articles take so much time I just haven’t gotten around to it. Consider this post a rough draft for said blog article that gives an overview of what you’re looking at and why the I-Novae Engine uses realistic quantities of light. As far as I know we are quite literally the only game engine on earth that does that. Everybody else uses sort of realistic ratio’s of light. What this means is that the blue planet in the screen shots I posted (seen below)

is receiving ~1366 W of incident irradiance at the edge of its upper atmoshere - this is the same that earth receives from the sun because that’s what we modeled the star in this solar system after. This radiometric quantity of light then gets turned into lux for our actual lighting calculations. If you look at this page you can see that the sunlight hitting earth’s surface on a clear day is a little over 100k lux after atmospheric attenuation accounting for altitude. That’s pretty darn bright when you consider that an overcast day only receives ~40 lux of light and you can’t see stars under either lighting condition. In fact stars only start becoming visible once you go below ~3 lux.

All other game engines on the market today have this concept of levels. A level is basically a box of 3d space within which the game takes place. Generally the lighting and tonemapping for each individual level is hand tweaked to look picture perfect which is why realistic ratio’s of light work just fine. While I-Novae Engine can also be composed of levels if you want it to be, it isn’t a requirement. With our engine the “level” is an entire universe which is quite large and incredibly diverse in lighting conditions that can’t be hand tweaked to perfection. We want to be able to capture how a planet looks when, like Mercury, it’s near its star just as much as when it’s at the edge of the solar system like Pluto or even light years away. Our goals also included capturing the difference in luminous output from hot, bright blue stars and cooler, dimmer red stars.To do this and have it “just work” we needed to use actual realistic quantities of light - which created some problems.

The human eye is really a beautiful piece of machinery. It handles bright, 100k lux sunlight pretty much just as well as overcast, 40k lux of sunlight. A big part of how your eye does this is by being sensitive to local contrast. In computing terms this means the picture gets broken up into blocks of pixels which are then tonemapped together. This is also known as a local tonemapping operator. Unfortunately, due to performance reasons, game engines typically use a global tonemapping operator - or in other words they calculate the average scene luminance for the entire image and use that to uniformly scale each pixel down into the visible range. For regular games which hand tweak the lighting conditions for a level this works just fine. For us not so much. We’ve put in a tremendous amount of effort to get our global tonemapping operator to work well with most lighting conditions however there are still situations where parts of the image are too over/under exposed. The solution to this is to use a local tonemapping operator like the human eye however there are performance implications so it’s on the todo list for sometime in the future.

We are continually tweaking the stars and other aspects of our lighting for aesthetic reasons however a big part of our aesthetic, at least currently as its subject to change for the final game, is showing what space really looks like =).

13 Likes
25

Oh and I forgot to say the atmosphere is attenuated to black in a band due to shadows from the rings. This effect still needs some work as we’re not accounting for the translucency of the rings atm.

26

(WARNING: OFF TOPIC POST INCOMING)

I just wanted to say that this is another thread with a generic title and topic evolve into a heated debate over some technical aspect that has almost nothing to do with the actual original topic.

I love this forum. :smile:

3 Likes
27

It makes sense. It looks weird because you cant really see the shadow on the planet itself, so it seems like something is missing.

28

Actually you can see the shadow on the planet itself, just not at that angle:

6 Likes
29

What kind of angle is the first image taken at? Because it looks like the atmosphere is being affected by the shadow in a place where the shadow isn’t actually falling on the planet’s surface. I’m assuming that’s an illusion, but it looks to me like the atmosphere is being shadowed directly below the rings in the first image (I’ll assume that’s the equator), while the shadow is falling on the southern hemisphere in the second image.

30

The angle is such that the atmosphere is being shadowed due to its altitude whereas the shadowed ground isn’t visible. Keep in mind that atmosphere is very expensive so we do a fairly basic “is this section of atmosphere shadowed by the rings” calculation.

2 Likes
31

Ahh, I see. Yes, the wonderful effects of 3D spherical geometry at irregular angles can get downright Cthulhuian when you can’t see the whole sphere.

1 Like
32

you should implement some basic geographical zones for earth like planets that have low axial tilt. planets without poles looks weird.

33

You are joking right?

34

I assure you I have no idea what you’re on about.

1 Like
35

Socrates: What is your understanding about day and night on a planer?
Sarcastic: Yes when the sun comes up it’s up all over the planet, half the planet means it’s dawn.

This statement is all Kichae’s fault. I played no part.

2 Likes
36

Were you ever into astronomy before joining Flavien to work on Infinity and what we know today as I-Novae Studios? Also, when you say “we” in this post are you more or less meaning Flavien and yourself? I pretty much know you are but I want to clarify because there are others in the group that aren’t as greatly involved in the making of the engine but are no less a part.

37

I enjoyed studying it in school however outside of school I didn’t pursue it much other than reading sci-fi and playing sci-fi related video games. You could probably say my interest has increased significantly due to working on the I-Novae Engine. When I say “we” I’m referring to the entire dev team though of course there are differing opinions at times. Some of our artists want us to pursue a slightly less realistic aesthetic so it’s an ongoing debate. For example we had a big discussion about whether or not red stars should actually emit red light. If you look at most other space games, including E:D, their red stars actually emit white or a slightly red light :stuck_out_tongue:. Some of our artists didn’t like the fact that red light more or less makes everything, well, red and presumably neither did the artists for those other games.

38

Yeah I’d say so! You are either a really smart person or can absorb knowledge rather quickly with the ability to remember most of what is read. The persona I get of you is both along with an extraordinary kind of interest in computer technology.

I forget if you told us or not; how old are you? For fun, I guess 29.

39

inb4 “The Man from Earth” scene

40

Oh man, there’s a discussion that you can’t even have until you’ve defined “red star”! Since most stars that we’d call “red” in astronomy have surface temperatures somewhere in the neighbourhood of 2000K - 3500K, they actually give off light that’s similar in colour to a “soft” or “warm” light bulb. On the low end, the light actually resembles that coming from a sodium street lamp.

Brown dwarfs, especially young ones, can have temperatures between 1000K and 2000K, and so actually would appear to give off red light, but even that wouldn’t look the same as having a red lightbulb or something. It’s still full spectrum light, just with a heavier emphasis on the red end of the spectrum.

Obviously, if you’re making “red” stars appear red in colour, they should give off red light. That has always bothered me about space games: Stars that are vividly blue, or vividly red, giving off pure white light. It’s OK to make vividly coloured stars – they don’t actually exist in nature, but artistic licenses allow for a lot of leeway – but if you’re going to have a vividly coloured light source, it should give off vividly coloured light!

4 Likes