So first of all, to be clear before someone jumps in and says "I personally hate this idea thus it should never even be considered" what I am proposing is absolutely a thing that should be optional. In fact, besides preferences, it could be an accessibility issue if it was not optional, so I would not suggest for a moment it shouldn't be 100% optional. I don't even know if ideas of this sort of level are even being considered anymore, but one thing I think could be really neat is if stars had more realistic lighting on various worlds and the surrounding space. For example, a class M star has very low output, mostly at the bottom of the spectrum, so would have a sort of pinkish visible light (and a lot more infrared.) Conversely, a class B star has an even higher output at the top end of the spectrum, so would have a sort of blueish visible light (and a lot more UV.) Similarly, worlds that are further and colder should be darker while worlds that are closer and hotter would probably be brighter (though bonus points if atmosphere could factor in.) This is not just for the sake of realism alone, but the difference in how everything looks would drive home that much more the feeling of "I'm really on an alien world" for the player I think. I think this could be relatively simple to implement. Just an adjustment of the light source itself based on the star's type, brightness, and distance. One important detail is that artificial lights (such as the player's flashlight or base lights) should not be affected and would remain whatever they are set to unchanged. With the help of ReShade + a bit of five minute editing in GIMP I made a sort of mockup of how it might appear. (I recently started a new save and didn't have a lot of good worlds to choose from, so I had to pick a desert world, but the system I'm in actually does happen to have a class M star.) I have attached both a before and a mockup of the after (sorry for the fuzziness in the middle, it was hard to get two perfectly still images to combine to approximate the flashlight effect.) As a bonus, I think it would be cool if the star types and distances also affected plant and animal life. For example, around a class M star, plants would likely be a much darker color (nearly black probably) to absorb a larger frequency range including infrared, but animal life would likely tend towards albinism where applicable because there would be very little to no UV actually making it through the atmosphere. I think this likely might apply even to colder worlds around more massive stars due to receiving far less (but I'm not sure.) Conversely you'd have the opposite effect on worlds around more massive stars or closer where animals would tend to be darker in defense against greater UV and plants likely lighter to reflect more of the spectrum to avoid excess. I'm thinking the plant/animal life effects could likely be done via shaders applied to their textures, so probably very simple to implement.
I agree, it is something that should be looked at, but like all (most) realism/imersive things it takes a great deal of thought and consideration as well as research before implementation, however we are looking at considerably scaled down distances in many cases and others seem to be to a (scientifically assumed) scale... it's a tricky one, for instance I don't ignite when I hop out of my ship next to a bright sun, in fact its hundreds below freezing and my lil fella is cold in the wave of a hand in the wrong suit. So yeah, I'd like it to be more realistic but, what are the devs working on that could be put to one side for it?
Who says anything needs to be put aside? I don't claim to be an expert by any means and maybe I'm wrong, but I legitimately believe that at the scale of the game's design itself this is relatively easy to implement. Especially since I only discussed cosmetic changes, not realism of the level you're discussing. The "sun" is a light source and that light source can be adjusted. The plants/animals are a lower priority, but even they can probably be adjusted via one of the shaders on their textures. I would certainly agree to the better realism changes you discussed, but I'm just talking a really simple cosmetic change right now.
For the light color the color of the star's light is already used on planets that don't have an atmosphere (such as barren moons) and in space. It would probably be a simple thing to implement it on planets that have an atmosphere too. The easiest way to do this would be to simply make it an optional flag in the playfield files that is something like UseSunLightColor: true/false. This will allow it to be set on a planet by planet basis by the planet's creator. The reason this should be set in the playfield files is that some planets and moons are specifically created around a certain color of light. Additionally the atmosphere of a planet will affect what color the sun appears. For a good example in real life here on Earth the sun appears yellow to us even though it is actually white because of the scattering of light from our atmosphere. As for it affecting the colors of plants, that would be a lot more complicated. But it's already possible to define what planets can appear around what kinds of stars, so you could already do this but it would take a lot of work. Applying it automatically could ruin the looks of certain planets, so again it would need to be an optional playfield setting.
