Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I disagree, stars is a more accurate designation and I think the issue is that people need to learn that our sun is one of those stars. The problem isn't that the OP failed to designate near stars differently from far stars, but rather that everyone else does. They aren't different, they aren't even functionally different simply due to you being more than a certain distance away from them. Calling them suns when you're near them is an autocentric viewpoint.

Actually, as Chance Ravinne recently discovered, it's a matter of field of view. If you check Advanced Camera Menu in the ESC menu, then hold down CTRL and both mouse buttons, you can move the mouse up and down to narrow and broaden your field of view. At the narrowest, planets look like planets, stars look like (polyhedral) stars, customs offices and stations look absolutely immense, and ships are clearly visible kilometers away. It's deeply immersive. But then, of course, your field of view is narrow, so you can't see very much and you can't fling your POV around nearly as quickly as you can with a wide field of view, so its tactical utility is considerably reduced.
Also, there are issues with camera shake at the narrowest FOV.

If CCP could polish that up and introduce a better tactical UI [edit: and update some really bad texturing on certain in-space assets that become really obvious at large scales], they could make EVE look stunning and cinematic right out of the box.

It's an interesting point, but there's not a lot to polish up when it comes to field of view. The default field of view is reasonably accurate assuming it's supposed to depict a 90º viewing angle which is an industry standard for flat screens. Without having a concave screen, a viewing angle significantly higher than 90º causes more distortion than most of us are prepared to deal with. Truth be told, a truly flat screen causes some distortion at any view angle, but most people don't notice it much until around 105º, whereas by 120º most people feel it's already gaining a significant "fisheye" effect, and by 150º virtually everyone will agree it is highly distorted.

There are some artful ways to implement non-standard view angles. One excellent example is in the game Final Fantasy VIII, which presents a persistant view angle of perhaps 45º. This both leads to and is used to explain/handwave some really dramatic eye candy, such as the gigantic moon, which Ellone seems to think looks small from home. There are multiple effects told in the story leading to the moon's large size, which is further amplified by your default Sci-fi moon which is always way bigger than the real thing, followed by the viewing angle magnifying it further. When you add all that together, it's almost reasonable to display it like so, and you have to admit it looks pretty great.

But there are drawbacks associated with this view angle, and they can verge on game-breaking at times. Probably the worst is getting lost or turned around on the world map due to watching so much horizon spin past you while turning before you've fully turned around. I wonder if my early exposure to this game for so many hours has anything to do with why my navigational skills are so out of tune? Here is an example of what that looks like. (scene occurs from 6:01 to 6:07)

Lastly, you can see what it looks like to be up close to a planet by warping to a district if you can find a system with DUST activity, or just use a fast frigate with MWD to get there from the warp beacon.

So I just keep title"suns/stars" to avoid confusion.

I would like to see some really graphically interesting binary stars (actually quite common) that are too close to each other, where one is siphoning the plasma from the other. It sure would be neat to have some reason to get closer to stars like a new type of solar harvesting...... Didn't someone suggest that once?

I believe they are called Wolf-Rayet stars and you can find them in unknown space.

You make a good point: we often dwell in the outer regions of star systems, where the star ought to look far smaller than it does. It varies a lot by the luminosity of the star as well. Some stars are thousands of times as bright as Sol, while some are thousands of times less bright. A star 4000x Sol's luminosity would look like our Sun at 64 AU. Our Sun at 64 AU would be merely a glowing dot in the sky, the brightest star among a sea of stars.

I performed a test in-game to check the view angle, and I came up with an estimate that the angle is slightly less than 90º. (this is done with a 5x4 shaped screen, most are 4x3 or 16x9)

Planets and moons look correct, as do other objects like customs offices. A customs office may look small because you're zoomed out from your ship, but also small in comparison to your ship because you're still far away from it and your camera is closer to your ship. We think of 10km being a small distance in EVE, because most of our ships can travel a lot faster than 100m/s. It seems a lot more important on the ground when we can't even drive much over 50m/s.

Zooming in the view creates a false illusion that may look correct to you, but it really just looks like an image viewed through telescopic binoculars.

The stars render too small most of the time which IIRC I discovered was due to all stars rendering the same size.

OK, so the actual distances represented by '0' are such that you can never get a sense of the true scale of anything.

The narrow perspective still gives you the sense of scale that you'd get from, say, the International Space Station, as opposed to a satellite hundreds of thousands of km away from a planet.

That still seems to me like a problem. It doesn't convey the vastness of space or the true size of anything, it just makes gas giants look like Christmas ornaments. It's something I've never liked.

What Dersen said.

The point is, the vastness of space is not really portrayed through the graphics of the system. I can look past having an omnipresent light source to show the ships, and the lack of different looking suns. But having a planet that I can literally fly through and a sun that takes me an hour to navigate from one side to the other is immersion breaking.