Just one more from me today.
Larger versions of previous screenshots I’ve uploaded can be found in this Imgur album:
http://imgur.com/a/4Kmet
9 Likes
Is that light reflecting off the rings? 
Planet shadow on the rings.
No, I meant that the side of the moon facing away from the sun is still being lit.
Oh yeah, thats ambient light.
2 Likes
Some shots taken during a playtest / footage capture with a lot of the devs tonight.
Notice the 4 trails way in the distance of the players ahead of me.
13 Likes
So… like… how big is the current prototype “Game world???”
I don’t know, I haven’t hit the edge of space yet… O_O
100 Million km out… it didn’t take too long to get way out here, I got up to lightspeed after about 5 minutes… then left it fly for a while, maybe another 5-10 mintues or so and then took this picture.
500 Million km out… I turned about again, engaged the warp drives, then let it sit at maximum speed for a while so I could get some food… some time later I took this screenshot.
You might ask… wait, which star is it? Well if you look closely, it’s the one with the subltle haze just around it, center, just a little up from the bottom of the main window, above the console.
Space… is big… really really big… and so is battlescape.
So let’s think about this for a moment. I’m 500Million km from the gas giant, let’s draw a giant sphere around the gas giant now, with a radius of 500Million km… are you starting to see the picture? How much further could I have let myself travel? I’ve been seeing this stuff for a while now, and it still blows my mind…
26 Likes
Awesome…
Keep in mind, Hutch, that 500 million km is still less than the distance between Earth and Jupiter, even at their closest! And 100 million km isn’t even 1 AU! So space may br big, but you haven’t even left the inner solar system yet.
5 Likes
If you take Pluto as the start of our backyard, that’s about 6 light hours from the sun.
Looks like the star in the Battlescape system is a little bit smaller than ours then…
2 Likes
@INovaeAndre I can’t tell you how awesome that first shot is - because there are no hexagons or floating icons! I see space ships for the first time!
I would imagine that even the sunlit side of starships and planets at that distance would be in perpetual darkness so far from the star.
What did the ship look like from 3rd person view? Completely dark only lit when the RCS are firing?
Nope. There’s nothing stopping the sunlight… it’s just quite diffuse.
1 Like
I don’t think you mean diffused. Perhaps just dimmed (inverse square law applied to intensity/irradiance/luminance/whatever.) The picture on the linked page shows light that is diffused by clouds, but it’s just an analogue for Pluto’s surface, where sunlight is less intense because of the great distance to the Sun. On Pluto, we’d still see sharp shadows and specular reflections.
I found a bunch more stuff about how to calculate the brightness of the sun at various distances, but I think these concept images of Pluto’s surface should suffice. This is at 40AU, while Hutchings was at a paltry 3.3AU. Oh, and I think it’s worth mentioning that somebody figured that the sun on Pluto would look as intense as 450 full moons on Earth. Just far smaller, of course, per @hrobertson’s image above.
And
Note that you can give Google Images a query like “view of the sun from [planet]” and get all sorts of hits. There are many images trying to communicate the view from Pluto. I’m sure Battlescape will clear up any misconceptions of distance and brightness once we’ve all had a chance to jump around the final system.
2 Likes
I do. You know all of this of course but…
Individual photons don’t get dimmer, the apparent intensity of the source decreases as the photons are spread over a larger area.
Clouds diffuse (verb) light that that passes through them. Light gets more diffuse (adjective) as it gets further from it’s source.
Maybe I am wrong to stick the ‘d’ on the end of the adjective form? I don’t think so but I’ve edited it out for clarity.
Could it just be that the battlescape sun is smaller and dimmer than ours?
I won’t get into a Word War over it. I’d just suggest not using the term “diffuse” when referring to scenarios ruled by the inverse square law.
It may be far less luminous. We don’t get to see an outside view of the ship at that distance to hazard a guess. Also, the apparent diameter of objects has to be understood with the field of view in mind. If you want an accurate view out of the cockpit, and the game shows a 90 degree field of view, then your eyes should be as close to the screen as half the width of the image. I have no idea what field of view the prototype uses.
In scott manleys demo, have you increased the size of the trees on the planet a little bit or are they same size? because they seem a bit bigger then before, looks cool though.
1 Like
They are the same size they’ve always been.
2 Likes