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Yeah. That's definitely an issue, but I think it's been said that the art devs are putting some effort in increasing their image quality. Making them more convincing will go a long way in increasing the immersion factor.

This is not a mistake. If the stars are closer than the nebula, you can see them without problems: their light is not passing inside the nebula, and thus it should not be modified by it.

Low-sec/0.0 looks great, nice and dark. But f.e. Jita region is way way waaaay too bright.

But the feeling of moving in space is a bit low. F.e. if you jump a certain gate on your route, you are between 3 or 4 nebulae, the gate before you were close inside a nebulae, so there should be one more step between beeing inside, and beeing completly outside of nebulae.

exactly. if the stars shine through the dense clouds, then u lose all sense of 3d. i hope this is a glitch they can fix easily.

Love them! If everything was like the brighter regions, it would get tiresome, but having the more empty ones in low and null nicely balance it all out, I'd say.

I understand it's probably too much work for this expansion, but I agree that having more fine grained variance would be an excellent next step. My preference: keep each region largely the same, but make the size and brightness of the neighboring regions' nebulae vary as you move around each region. Say, the Heimatar nebula should be large and bright from Teonsude, but barely visible from Aeditide. Similarly the region's OWN nebula could take up the whole sky from a central-to-that-region system, but be mostly on half the sky only from a edge-of-that-region system.

I was about to post the same thing. In some of them the clouds closest to you seem to be see through, while the parts behind it, the blue/reds part are not. Shouldn't there be some less stars within the area of dark clouds?

Correct, but these dark nebula, bok globules, molecular clouds, et al are often too dense for light to penetrate.

It seems like this run of cubemaps uses an alpha channel that is derived from the luminosity on the nebulas. I can't tell if this is from the initial rendering or it it was done by CCP's graphic artists.

The alpha channel of the nebula layers should be retouched to give a better sense of density.

First - the new nebula. HUGE improvement. And IMO, let it be dark. Space >is< dark.

the cube ... funny, didn't know so many other people knew about it or had seen it ... I for a time was having graphics issues and I'd see "other" bitmaps all over the place and it'd make the box fully appearant. Kind of blew the illusion for me.

but I digress ...

Back in the day, programmers had "fields" that they used to place objects on and then scrolled them by the eye of the player at different speeds. The further away, the slower the scroll. This went a LONG way to giving the illusion of depth and movement.

One of the first critical observations I had in Eve was the fact that if you ignore the "warp tunnel" effect, and If you watched the ship in relation to the stars and nebula, you never moved! In my opening paragraph, when that happened .... it made the lack effect all too apparent. It was a real “never mind the man behind the curtain” moment for me. (Oz reference)

My point is, has anyone at CCP considered doing multiple "fields" for the stars and nebula and scrolling them at different rates to simulate depth of view ?

Probably too much of a coding change at this point in the game ... (pun in tended)

Half Life 2 did that in the Citadel level, afaik. The Source engine allows to transform skybox geometry to level geometry. But I doubt that this is possible with the current Trinity engine.

Another problem is, that the stars in the background don't represent the actual stars in the eve universe.
They are just a texture mapped onto the skybox. In order to simulate depth of view you would have to calculate the stars relative position to your ship. Considering the amount of stars visible on the current skyboxes on TQ, that would take a lot of computing power.

Also, the distance the stars would move probably isn't really noticeable, consindering you only move a few dozen AUs in a single starsystem and stars are lightyears apart. (100 Astronomical Units = 0.00158128588 lightyears)

Any parallaxing effect while traveling across a single solar system would be barely perceivable realistically and wouldn't be worth the developer time. What is needed is parallaxing effects when moving between systems and is what increasing the granularity of the skyboxes should accomplish. I think on demand composting of images of the celestial features would be the best solution, but doing it well without getting odd artifacts in situations would not be trivial. It would, however, make it simple to add new features.

Regarding having the EVE stars apparent in the sky box - this was actually done in the Revelations expansion that introduced the now abandoned "Seamless Map Zoom". It used a 3D model of the stars rendered in the background, but each "star" was only a single white pixel, didn't look very good, and caused a bit of graphics lag back then. This could be brought back, better, by rendering the EVE stars into the composited cubemap on demand instead of using a 3D model.

Despite its problems it did look awfully cool when you could identify the star structures of nearby regions.