Skyboxes

[Nyankosensei]

This box is nice but have a big problem, too many stars and when you rotate ship stars in side of the visual are always more big then what you have in front, with less stars and a background to mimetize them a bit this bug is not noticed

[bszlrd]

That's a FOV thing, I don't like it either. It's present with current star rendering too, just less noticeable. But on 16:9 the horizontal FOV is 98° by default (65° vertical).

[FluffyFreak]

Do you mean that stars appear bigger in some areas than others?

[bszlrd]

@Fluffyfreak: Yes, they are bigger on the edges/side of the screen. It's more visible with a flashy skybox though.

1920*1080 (16:9), default vertical FOV setting (65°).

[FluffyFreak]

Ah, well, one easy fix might be to turn the sky "box" into a sphere. The texture mapping should still be the same but the geometry will be warped.

[baobobafet]

What "vibrant" skyboxes are you referring to?

The skyboxes in Walterar's excellent scout mod come to mind - beautiful and compelling, but at times I wish I could drop the chroma level down a bit - or even just toggle such backgrounds to black and white if they become to much of a distraction during gameplay.

[Nyankosensei]

Ah, well, one easy fix might be to turn the sky "box" into a sphere. The texture mapping should still be the same but the geometry will be warped.

i don't think the problem is related to cube sphere, but most probably related to fov becouse you can see those streches always in the side of the view and in center is always correct.

[robn]

The skyboxes in Walterar's excellent scout mod come to mind - beautiful and compelling,

Ahh. Those are from Paragon, I believe. We can't use them. Not that I'd want to, I don't really think they fit with our style. But that's what mods are for.

[Luomu]

Just for the record, I think doing stars with textures is a bad idea when you can just do individual points. Points are immune to stretching, zooming and filtering artifacts, and you can adjust them individually (fading, twinkling, per-sector variation). See X3 for a game where the starfield illusion breaks down as soon as you press the zoom key.

[walterar]

The skyboxes were created "automagically" with this tool: http://alexcpeterson.com/spacescape

It is very easy to use and you can create fantastic things, but I had to boot with the Win7 partition to use. Apparently does not work with Wine.