Personally, if they ever put a focus on actual stars, I’d like to see them really nail the fundamentals, rather than develop a menagerie of exotic stellar objects. Granulation, convection cells, star spots, prominences, flares, CMEs, etc. They could tie flares and CMEs into auroral events on the planets. Considering that nobody does this, I think it would be far more interesting than simply littering space with black holes, micro-quasars, or Thorne-Zytkow Objects.
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Hear, hear. I’d be particularly for that if those fundamentals had an impact on gameplay. Do ships need to worry about CMEs? Are surface installations impacted by them, whether the planet has a magnetic field or not? When refueling off a star, do ships look for or avoid spots and prominences? What role does the granularity of convection cells have on refueling - or even sensors or navigation near the star?
I think it would be a kick in the pants if players checked the strength of a magnetic field on a planet versus the intensity of the star’s CMEs (perhaps requiring a monitoring station to be set up for a couple weeks). Or looked for tidally-locked planets with or without a magnetic field so they could set up ground operations somewhere on the dark face.
The short form is that I’d rather see a subtle spectrum of behaviors coming from everyday stars rather than witnessing some bizarre twists from a rare object.
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Well, when you guys put it that way, my suggestion doesn’t seem nearly as far out of reach.
I would also like to see something like this, as well, but I am guessing it is also well out of scope for the current project.
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You’ll likely get multiple stars anyway, but they’ll just be little dots. How about a nearby nebula of some sort to make the playing field more attractive. Out of reach in game terms, but visible nonetheless?
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I’d prefer all that to be computed procedurally rather than hand-painted, making it a programmer task rather than something for the art team to do. Generating a Milkyway-like galaxy, calculating refraction and scattering of interstellar dust and gas, and generating a skybox based on the results is actually quite easy as long as it doesn’t have to happen in real time (and the goal for the engine is that it will be able to do stuff like than in real time).
Even if it is hand-painted, that’s a single high resolution texture that someone on the art team will have to make, and then they’re done. I certainly don’t mean to say it’s a trivial task, merely that I imagine a 3D model might take longer, since those also tend to include high resolution textures (for a given value of “high”).
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I remember seeing images of procedurally generated nebulae on the old forums. I wonder if those bits are still usable/up to standard?
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I love watching these references pop up literally everywhere.
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mmmmuuustt ressssssist :-X
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No, it isn’t. We have new ideas for nebula but it isn’t something we’re investing time in at the moment. Nearly all graphics work aside from fixing issues with our existing rendering stack was halted about 8 months ago.
This is going to be our primary focus. Our core 30 seconds of fun is epic space battles. Everything else is technically a stretch goal because if we can’t make our unique spin on newtonian space combat fun then the rest of the game is probably going to be boring as well.
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For Battlescape nebulas aren’t needed anyway. When traveling throught the galaxy though, they sure are beatiful to include (created by someone in after effects):
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I like star spots. 
Ya, but like INovaeKeith said the game over beauty marks.
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If anything, they can make the star(s) really, really big. On the Betelgeuse/VY Canis Majoris scale. I like big stuff. 
Do you know how many star spots those big stars have?!? Like, tons!
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They’d better be big spots.
That brings up an interesting question, though: what’s the mass of a star spot?
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Like, tons!
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At least 5!..
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This could be a Very good idea. I’d pledge for a planet, for sure.
Maybe to get up to the stretch goals?