Background Stars

[Moonrat]

I've been digging around in the guts of the cluster/material/texture files and I can't at the moment see where the texture is for the stars which seem to appear in just about all the sectors. Not the various (overlaid) nebula which I believe I can locate but the stars themselves. Does anyone know where this texture is located / defined or if it is stitched together somehow from others...?

I'm aware of the materials...

p1.staratlas_additive
p1.backgroundstars

And these appear to point towards texures called "stars_diffhq" and "stars_mask_diffhq" but when unpacking these (and GIMPing them as DDS files) I cannot get them into a state where they seem to contain anything?

Any clues chaps gratefully received

[Markus]

p1.staratlas_additive is the material that contains most of the individual stars and starclusters used in the backgrounds.

I've quickly tried unpacking them and loading them into photoshop, which worked without a problem. the only advice I can give you at this point is to maybe try some different software to load them and convert them to a format Gimp can handle better.

[Moonrat]

Thanks, not sure why GIMP won't load this correctly when it loads nearly all others without issue? I've managed to load it via another program (DDS Viewer), convert it to PNG and then load it into GIMP...

[Realspace]

stars_diffhq" is all you need, the other is the mask applied to the box to patch different parts of that single texture. I modified it by trial and error to see how the parts were combined. Just by changing the texture diffhq which has a star texture that is a bit unimmersive you can have a profound improvement over the general effect, making stars less intrusive and more globular, instead of random white dots on a black box. Simply keep the parts of the texture where they were from the original, i.e. keep the single stars above that are randomly put over the box, the rest can be changed by using the same new star texture, repeated

[Mr.Freud]

would love to have a mod that gets rid of 50% of those stars or at least makes them less visible

[Realspace]

I'll release it in a day or two. I was still looking for ways to improve planets too so kept it here but I think I'll stop. Still playing X3 LU. I like X4 but will wait for the final state before modding again, hopefully they'll fix some things as the gas giants that look horrible and are terribly immersion-breaking as are the vanilla stars. It would take just a few time for the devs to correct them.