That spiral wouldn't be pretty in the background. Being that close to a galaxy and yet in a dense starfield is just not what I have in mind for "immersion" as there are very select few places in the known universe where you could get that vista that large.
What's the magnification on those images, Kazan? Please, do tell. More to the point, what fraction of the sky (or the starfield) does our nearest neighbor, andromeda, take up? Is it more than three arc-seconds of the night sky? Because unless it is it simply will not be resolvable at maximum resolution in the freespace engine.
Yes, I know they are not stars. Yes, I know only minor magnification can resolve the difference between a star and a galaxy. But you can't tell that when you're looking at the whole sky unless you know what to look for. My question isn't if they are naked-eye visible. My question is are they distinguishable from a star without equipment?
EDIT: And besides, there is absolutely nothing stopping you or anyone else from taking a galaxy image and making it a background bitmap. Support for that has been there since retail. It's painfully unrealistic to have huge galaxies floating around like that, but whatever floats your boat. Putting them in autogenerated starfields would be silly.
I also don't see what you're talking about with the stars all being the same apparent magnitude. There's quite a bit of variance in the brightness of those starfield pixels in both the shots CP and I posted. Sure, there are no extremely dim stars in there, but that's a consequence of computational power rather than art or even the starfield setup itself.
