yea, too much light makes it feel non-empty, thus breaking the immersion, since space is actually very, very dark (in terms of visual wavelengths) any source of light will eventually hit a dust cloud, or dissipate through the non-absolute vacuum, yea it’s vacuum, with ~ 1 atom per cubic meter, but the distances are high so that actually is something. But in terms of local light, that means nothing, you won’t see light dissipating in space unless you leave some gas spread around you, wich won’t last long anyway. Giving some light to things that should be in dark, for me, kills immersion, in a game that even being battle oriented, its bigger feature IS immersion.
Rings aren’t black. The question is how dark they really are.
Example:
Rings of saturn eclipsed by the sun. Wikipedia says the brightness is exaggerated, by how much (x10, x1000, x100000) is anyone’s guess. The point is, rings aren’t pure black, there’s definitely some ambient lighting on them due to light scattering.
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we know they are not “black”, but this is the same as you get into a forest in a moonless night, the eye will try to adapt to the darkness and you will be able to see a little, but even the eye has it’s limits, and you will just see some details around you, and as the game is made for humans, our eyes are not made to see in the night, or in this case, in enviroments where light sources are not enough for our naked eye, in other words, in the “shadow” part of the ring, we shouldn’t be able to see our sorroundings clearly, yes there is light scattering, yet there are also rocks blocking light as well, stopping the light scattering, bes thing we can do to judge is to see the actual pictures and compare them to the night side of the earth, for references.
i love to camp at forests far away from any town/city, and in the dark nights, you can’t walk into a forest expecting to see anything, you just simply can’t, even with the light scattering on the athmosphere from the daytime part of the earth, you will barely see whats around you as far as your arms can reach, with a lot of eye effort and adapting time, but i bet a cat would be able to see several meters away
Yes, the ring’s disc can reflect light and scatter it, but it doesn’t work horizontally, not enough at least to make the same effect of having a moon, ie.
Another example, is what you can experience in the moon, in the shadow parts (behind a rock, ie), i read somewhere (gotta find that) you can’t see anything without reflecting the sun light directly from your suit, or using a lantern, if both, you and the object hide from the sunlight behind a rock, you won’t be able to see anything on the object, not because there is no absolute light, but because the human eye just can’t do it with the small light amount reaching you.
i might be wrong in many things about this, but for me, being able to see the ring’s particles in the shadow side, won’t feel right, not just because i think so, but my own experiences and the non-so-big knowledge i have about open space, and every time i read about stuff about light and heat in space, shadow zones, radiation and heat are always an issue.
Then again, the best we can do is to contrast pictures of earth and saturn, and try to judge with that, and data, of course
Also, i’m honored to get to chat with you Flavien!
See, the problem with this mantra is that, until the gameplay of a realistic system is actually user tested, it assumes a priori that realism doesn’t make for good gameplay. There are cases where this is obviously true (travel times in literal years clearly aren’t acceptable), but the opportunity for emergent gameplay from so many realistic scenarios is largely unknown. Because no one has bothered to test it, or if they have they haven’t reported on it.
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i totaly agree that some realism has to be bypassed, in order to have gameplay, if not we would be stuck in one planet for thousand years! i mean, we barely visited the moon, we can’t stick to realism for this, but in the case of lightning/shadows, this is not giving more gameplay, it’s extending one kind of gameplay sacrificing another, the oportunity to hide in the shadows as your escape route, no, you can’t there’s no shadow zone, just a not-so-shiny zone where things are the same as they are on the light zone … just like GTA where you can drive with the lights off and see everything clearly, unless you use contrast to the max and adjust bright, but then daylight happens and you have to adjust everything back…
This is true. IMO a large user base must used to completely test any “controversial” aspect of gameplay.
However, in this particular instance, Flavien said it ‘looked strange’, and it was invisible, because it was so dark. So in that regard, realism was ‘tested’, if only by one, possible two or three persons.
The mechanics simply aren’t in place yet to allow for player interaction in a completely dark area. If mechanics such as active sensors (see my mega sensor thread, having possibly the biggest single post on the forums 
) were implemented, then a type of RADAR/LIDAR would allow for the players to navigate through that area.
Otherwise I’d side with Flavien’s decision, because not being able to see where you are going in a certain area pretty much eliminates that area from ever being traversed by players. Not that an entire planetary system isn’t enough, though. 
EDIT: Or a huge buff to ships’ spotlights.
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well someone finally remembers that ships have spotlights, which would work wonderfully outside athmospheres, the element to go into dark zones is there, there’s no need to kill immersion in sake of gameplay, we have SC for that
How many times did I support both sides? /shrugs
(would make a terebel [spelling] juror)
Based on the way those textures on the ship blur, I think this game needs some Anisotropic Filtering.