[Aardwolf]

That would require changes to the engine itself, at least until fullscreen postprocessing gets in.

[blowfish]

I wish modders would be creative enough to implement replacement light trails, not necessarily the 1-pixel ones used in retail, but perhaps create a form of alpha-blurring that would only apply to the starfield.

This has to do with code, not modding, and it isn't really a question of creativity  Motion blur, which would make a lot of things look better, as well as making backgrounds blur when you moved, may be added at some point, but the truth is, the SCP is a little short on talented graphics programmers, not to mention the current code freeze.

[Mobius]

I wish modders would be creative enough to implement replacement light trails, not necessarily the 1-pixel ones used in retail, but perhaps create a form of alpha-blurring that would only apply to the starfield.

No.

[Grizzly]

In other words, there are nearly invisible stars.

There are nearly invisible stars down here too...

[sfried]

I still wish light trails could return. Nothing really fancy, but just enough to give the Star Wars woozy effect.

[blowfish]

It's just not as simple as "making them return"

Retail stars are just white points stuck on the background.  As you may imagine, it's pretty easy to generate trails from points.  The mediavp starfield is an actual image mapped onto a sphere which makes up the background of the sky.  This looks much better, but it really requires some sort of motion blur if light trails are to appear.

[sfried]

It's just not as simple as "making them return"

Retail stars are just white points stuck on the background.  As you may imagine, it's pretty easy to generate trails from points.  The mediavp starfield is an actual image mapped onto a sphere which makes up the background of the sky.  This looks much better, but it really requires some sort of motion blur if light trails are to appear.

Can't they simultaneously generate white points that match the positions of the brighter stars in the image map along with the new starfield? That way it would be natural that bright stars generate trails while fainter stars would generally not be as prominent during motion. They could figure out the algorythm that produces the retail stars and just recode it to predeterminedly match points in an image.

[blowfish]

If you think it's that simple ... go code it yourself

[sfried]

If you think it's that simple ... go code it yourself

I don't know how to code for Freespace 2. Is it C++ or some other language?

[blowfish]

As a general rule, never say something is easy to code unless you are a coder.  And Freespace is C with some C++.

[Grizzly]

As a general rule, never say something is easy to code unless you are a coder.  And Freespace is C with some C++.

One can combine programming codes?

[CaptJosh]

Not inside the same source file, no. But sources using different languages can be combined as long as the compiler knows they are and can handle the different languages.

[blowfish]

Well, yeah, actually, since the C++ compiler understands C...

[Mongoose]

At its core, C++ is just what its name implies: C, plus a bunch of other stuff.  Most (if not all) basic C content is used by C++ as well.

[Aardwolf]

The only thing I know of that C++ can't do which C can is something about kernel something.

[CaptJosh]

Isn't C++ object oriented where C isn't really?

[Mongoose]

Isn't C++ object oriented where C isn't really?

That's right; C++ adds in the elements of what is generally considered object-oriented programming that C did not include.  (Just don't ask me what those elements are, since I don't really remember those classes. ) However, you don't have to use the object-oriented side of C++ to accomplish most relatively simple tasks.  I haven't poked through the FS_Open code myself, but from what I remember hearing, there isn't a massive amount of OOP-ish content as a whole.