Although what are you doing escort that poor Drakhri home?
Don't look at me - Pete sent me those shots last night.
The patch he sent me didn't seem to work on my nVidia card... I don't think we have tested this on nVidia yet. Still, I was very excited about our new gimmick and decided I just had to post about it anyway... but I still haven't seen it in action, just like the rest of you.
Um, I really appreciate what Pedro did with that, but how much difference is there really, compared with the orignal backgrounds? Is it the extra colour variation and resolution, or was there something else I'm missing?
That's basically it. It lets us have thousands of stars, of varying sizes and brightness, that scale better between different resolutions... instead of a
handful of tiny grey or orange blocky pixel-stars like in original WCP.
While the original starfields were single pixels (or small blocks) randomly scattered over space that we had no control on, the new starfields are texture maps, so we can do anything we want to them - the only limit now is the talent of this humble modder.
If you look very closely at the new shots, there are very subtle glows around the brighter stars, as well as a very subtle color variation between them. I did try to keep it as generic as possible so that we could make the same starfield fit all the different nebula / lighting colors in every system, that's why these features are barely noticeable.
Of course, I don't want them to detract from the actual gameplay as well... the version I've posted here ended up looking too bright in-game, but Pete tells me Pedro has fixed this already, by adjusting contrast on the texture maps used. As I said, I haven't seen this in action yet, so it's hard for me to tweak them right now. What happened is I had sent Pedro a totally untested cube map a few days ago so he could come up with this first test.
I agree with AD those starfields are AMAZING! It really adds a lot to the atmosphere. 
