Nebula systems are one of the major system types and should provide the player with an interesting and novel environment. This spec describes several possible improvements to the implementation.
Visual Enhancements
There are many things we can try to improve the look of nebulae. For Phase I we propose the following:
Tile Size Increase
In 1.5, nebula tiles were reduced to 128 pixels in order to support more complex high-level structure (at the system-map level). Unfortunately, this highlighted the square-nature of the tiles at visual (SRS) level. The solution is to increase the tile size back to 512 pixels and apply the edge mask at system-map level.
Nebula Tile Image
We should improve the current nebula tile image to contrast appropriately with the space background.
Structural Enhancements
This section describes improvements to the large-scale shape and structure of nebulae.
Erosion Parameter
Nebulae currently have smooth shapes: both circular and arc nebulae have smooth edges. We propose adding a parameter (erode=) which drops tiles around the edges to give a nebula a more ragged (and thus natural) appearance.
Performance Improvements
We should paint nebulae on multiple threads to increase performance.
See also:
- https://ministry.kronosaur.com/record.hexm?id=3333
- https://ministry.kronosaur.com/record.hexm?id=1764
See Also
Done in 1.6 Beta 5.