It is bland and I find the finite field of stars followed by unending black to be... bleak. Simple solution: Put a flat image plane, one that's a bit bigger than 1080x1920 so it can move a bit as you do, with a picture of the Milky Way. Currently the scenery in Sol looks like the night sky near a city, let's make it look like the night sky out in the desert far from development.

In fact, I made such a background from a high-res panoramic photo of the galaxy and am mailing it off to Jeff now.

Oh, and Earth is rotating on it's side last I saw. That's a nice thing to know we can do with Uranus, but I don't think the Antarctic will do so good tidally locked to the sun...

Thats funny.

Ain't I a riot?

Also, your avatar has been a broken jpeg or something for over a month now.

I think it's because I set it to not show avatars for me.

Ontopic: Should be more backgrounds for galaxies. The default white stars gets boring fast.

Shoo Dev!

Shoo Church!

god damn, just give him a C2 key, its starting to get sad...

Backgrounds are generated using a new fancy algorithm which is generating them at uni generation time and saving the params in the galaxy so they will stay the same over time. Custom galaxies (like Sol) need to have the new style background added to their XML file since they aren't randomly generated.

I was originally thinking to maybe not give Sol a background in order to speed it up, but I guess we should give it a little something, because all black and white is too stark.

Indeed. Even if it's not a lag-nightmare like the pic I emailed you ( ) It still needs something like a galactic band of stars and some light interstellar dust and scattered nebulae. Nothing heavy, just a bit here and there.

Also, one thing that could be done is even out the misxure of bright stars and dim stars while also giving them slight coloration, as the stars' colors in real life are more visible in space than on the surface of Earth. Just no wacky colors in Sol, like purple or green, since human eyes cannot perceive those wavelengths when they are given off by stars. (Yes, I've seen green and purple elsewhere in C2, but it'd be neat to make Sol look like the night sky we actually see around here.)

in C2, it needs to look like this



funny thing is, nebulas should actually be part of the nonmoving background instead of part of the playable area, they're closer to galaxy size than they are to star/planet size

(it would also look better, and current nebulas can just be renamed "interstellar gas clouds" or something)


you could probably even make "nebula galaxies" that could have completely different planet/star/commodity distributions than normal galaxies, along with different effects on weapons and engines

That is one awesome picture ;p

the video is better