Star Lighting

Technically you are right. A red star still releases prodiminatly white light. The stars color itself is caused by heat (red,yellow,blue,white etc.), though the ambient light is usually white, infact we havent found evidence of a star with ambient light that isn`t white to my knowledge. The planets color might change like in the picture if it is hot enough to generate red light from heat, this could be caused by being close to the star but it is unlikely. Still a cool addition though. I`m such a nerd.

 

Ugly.

Sure it's a cute addition, and it makes some sense that entities from different planets might find the color palette disturbing, but it is unnecessary and -in it's current iteration- disgusting. It completely overrides all art assets, how is that a good idea?

As long as I can disable it I'm neutral. As long as there's a graphics option I can untick to remove the color from the overworld light, I'm perfectly happy. I might even use it with less saturation. Heck, an intensity slider would be perfect in this case, but they seem to shy away from sliders in this game's options...

 

"Our eyes have light-sensitive cells in them called rods and cones. Rods are basically the brightness detectors, and are blind to color. Cones see color, and there are three kinds: ones sensitive to red, others to blue, and the third to green. When light hits them, each gets triggered by a different amount; red light (say, from a strawberry) really gets the red cones juiced, but the blue and green cones are rather blasé about it.

Most objects don’t emit (or reflect) one color, so the cones are triggered by varying amounts. An orange, for example, gets the red cones going about twice as much as the green ones, but leaves the blue ones alone. When the brain receives the signal from the three cones, it says "This must be an object that is orange." If the green cones are seeing just as much light as the red, with the blue ones not seeing anything, we interpret that as yellow. And so on.

So the only way to see a star as being green is for it to be only emitting green light."

Link

The light from the other parts of the spectrum drown out the green, basically. The fault lies mainly within the way our eyes see the light, as is explained above.

The sun's blackbody curve peaks in the blue-green area, but all the other colors mix together to what our eyes perceive as white. The atmosphere does influence the lighting, as we can see with our red sunsets and blue skies.

 

I actually think that is an awesome idea! Come across a dying solar system with several planets with rich resources, but you have XX days(game time) since its discovery until they become uninhabitable without a Varia or Gravity suit(high level tech).

That's probably asking too much, but I still like the idea..

 

That is not at all right.
The star's colour is the colour of the star. The light is caused by the heat of the star yes and the colour due to the mix of the wavelengths emited.
However, the vast majority of the stars in the universe are NOT white.
To be exact there is no pure white light. What we call white is a mix of wavelengths, aka colours, of light.
A star would be red if it was COOL enough to not produce much of the shorter wavelengths (yellow through violet).
Being closer to or father away from doesn't change the colour of the light, just the quantity. Close to a red star, bright red light. Farther from the same star, dim red light.

 

Looks great as it is now. Because yeah, universe hates you and your eyes in particular sometimes.

 

There are no green stars for the same reason you don't see green in your average fire (some chemicals will burn green). Objects that emit photons due to heating only emit colours in a narrow slice of visible light. Look up the Wikipedia entry for "Color Temperature" for more info.

 

I really think there can only be one way that the planet would be red, and it would have nothing to do with the star's color: if the planet's atmosphere contained the proper gases/particles to cause the light to be altered by the time it reached the surface.

 

I also do believe the lighting spectrum should be toned down.

On a side note, maybe the planet's atmosphere could effect light as well to a varying degree.

 

The opposite actually. So called black-body radiators emit a very wide spectrum of wavelengths, the peak dependent on the temperature. At cool temperatures this peak is in the red part and and the rest in infrared and longer "invisible" wavelengths. As the temperature increases the peak shifts towards and through the blue end of the spectrum. However, when the peak is in the green part of the spectrum, as it is with our own star, there is enough emission in the red and blue parts of the spectrum that it looks white to our eyes. Honestly we should call stars of our temperature "green" stars.

So the colour a sheet of paper looks under red light is unrelated to the colour of that light? I'm not saying the paper is red, but it sure appears red.

 

I don't mind it like Tiy said could use some more polishing. I think it's quite silly to meticulously argue science in a game with space-faring fishmen and humanoid birds but to each their own.

 

Yeah I think that the background doesn't fit the lighting, maybe more like a mixture of what these people have said:

With that kind of mixture I think it might look better.

Or maybe if you had one red star and one blue star reflecting on the same planet, then it would at some point give a purple lighting effect? Just something that came to mind, not sure if it would actually turn out that way.

 

It is silly, but it's what we have that we can argue about at this point. That and I like my technobable to have some grounding in real science as apposed to "that plant (not in any way related to Florans) eats people because of quantum".

 

I think its a great idea but I sooooo agree with Tiy that it needs to be toned down. If there is a planet that I want to spend a lot of time on and call my home I don't want it to be that red it would be really annoying. But if I was just going to that planet to steal some resources and then fly away it would be cool. But yeah.. tone it down.

 

Relax guys, he did say there "I think we may need to tone it down a bit", so it'll probably be made to be a more subtle effect.

But environmental tints are indeed a pretty cool development. Would be useful for modding stuff like eyewear that confers certain effects (IR vision, low-light vision etc).

 

That seems highly irrelevant to me. The argument is over whether or not a red star would give off red light. Why does it matter how an object would look under a red light, if we're trying to discern whether or not that red light even exists in the first place?

The post you're responding to is correct. If the atmosphere absorbs all light but the red light (or lets much more red light through comparatively), then the planet would indeed look more red.

Your physics are right, but your application is completely false. Stars emit all sorts of electromagnetic radiation. All stars will emit in the range of infrared to ultraviolet. The range of EM radiation we call visible light is such an infinitesimally small portion that, seriously, it's almost pointless to argue the idea that a star's very upper limit on the wavelengths of EM radiation it produces just happens to cut through the visible light spectrum. And that happens to a large percentage of stars, apparently? No, it makes no sense that every single red dwarf's upper limit would be precisely within the visible light spectrum. That's simply not the answer.

 

Stars of various colors do not emit their color, they just emit light.

 

Yeah but there is a plant person so why are worried about unreal lighting this is cool tho

 

Yeah I kinda see it this way too, but to me the red light does not look good with the background light and the light in the sky. I think it would look better if they shared the same red color.

Other than that I don't really have much problem with the lighting from how I look at it.

 

Science and reality inform but do not dictate fiction. It helps give a created universe unity with rules and laws we can understand and ultimately accept.