4Game

Introduction:

– Nebulae are huge clouds of dust and gas in space and some of them look truly beautiful and that's kind of the case in Elite dangerous as well. So why do I think they should get a rework.

– While there's a lot of pretty nebulae in game especially planetary nebulae a lot of them are unfortunatelly completely off compared to their real life couterparts or copy paste of a different nebula just with different size and rotation. I'll post all examples I made in a last 2 hours.

Nebulae in Elite dangerous were made to look good, not realistic.

– Few times I heard an argument defending nebulae in Elite dangerous that they look different in game because Hubble photos are long exposures and Hubble can see wavelenghts that are not visible to human eye. Also that would mainly effect color, not shape.

^

This is correct. Our humans eyes would barely see any color if any, but nebulae are also not dense at all so if we were inside one we wouldn't see anything at all unlike we see in game. We actually are inside a small dim nebula in real life. It's called Local interstellar cloud/LocalCloud-1024×512-5991c6a922fa3a00104567ce.jpg).

After explaining this I'd like to point out the post of Reddit user u/JMAgr1 and his similar post to this with more easily accessible pictures: Here

– Another reason why I believe they were made to look pretty and not realistic is that some handcrafted nebulae in game heavily resemble their real life counterpart just with less detail which is fair for performance reasons.

Nebulae of Elite dangerous vs their real life counterparts:

I'll start with nebulae that look like their real life counterparts to prove my point further.

– Pleiades nebula (not 100% copy, but there's a lot of resemblance)

– Messier 78 (very well made nebulae just with less detail for performance reasons likely)

– Veil west nebula (beautiful masterpiece in both real life and game);

– Cat's eye nebula

– Bubble nebula (Different color, but shape is on point and It's not too far off)

– Barnard's loop

– Elephant's trunk (worse but still not bad)

– Cave nebula (worse but still not bad)

There are possibly a few that I missed but it should be enough. Now we're getting into a off or completely off territory with a lot of copy pastes.

– Cat's paw nebula (Color is ok, but the shape is completely off. It's also copy paste of soul nebula)

– Soul and heart nebulae (Heart nebulae is copy paste of Jellyfish, Statue of liberty, NGC 7822, North America and Pelican nebula only with different sizes and angles)

– Jellyfish nebula

– NGC 7822

– Helix nebula (beautiful nebula in real life, butchered in game)

– IC 4604

– North America and Pelican nebula (both are literally the same just slightly different in size and angle + copy pastes of Jellyfish, Statue of liberty, NGC 7822)

– Statue of liberty

– Seagull nebula

– Rosette nebula (this one also has insane amount of copy pastes in game)

worst copy pastes that are completely off as well:

– Eagle nebula (completely off with 0 resemblance)

– Iris nebula

– NGC 7538

– Omega nebula

– Monkey head nebula

– Running man nebula

– Thor's helmet (this one would be such an eye candy)

– Trifid nebula

– Witch head nebula

Alright I think that's all I have now.

Here's an entire list of all posted nebulae: https://imgur.com/a/WGFs5k7

Summary

As you can see there are actually just a few stellar nebulae in the game that are unique. They look pretty but the rest seems to be just randomly generated or quickly lazily done. With this post I'm hoping to raise an awareness of this issue and kind of hoping we could get nebulae rework sometime in the future. I think Fdev already changed one nebulae. It's called Dr. Kay's soul which looks very different in Oddysey compared to Horizons.

I was looking a lot to exploring all nebulae when I started out it Elite only to be disappointed later when I realized how so many of them look the same.

I think It's a real shame that instead of unique nebulae we have so many copy pastes and I feel like a lot of people including me are missing on so many potentionally beautiful sights. I'd really love to see more variety than seeing the same ones all over this vast and beautiful galaxy.

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o7 commanders