The reflections are cool, but it's a matter of realism.
They reflect the stars so perfectly, nebula's are clear in them too. It's like every ship was spit shined before sent into battle. As well if they're painted, I wouldn't think they'd reflect so well.
Thanks for the reply about motion debris, I'll try it on and off.
What do you think the pilots do between missions?
Anyway, the problem is this. The textures in ships have a component called "shine map". This layer (actually it's a separate file but handles in the game like a layer anyway) is a grayscale texture that was originally used for specular lighting, ie. direct sunlight reflections. The brighter the shinemap, the more that region of model will reflect. Cockpit glass is completely white on shinemaps, while non-reflective parts like matt black, smoketrailed engine cowlings would be completely black. Cool.
Later, environmental mapping was released, and even later, alpha environmental mapping. Alpha env mapping means that the environmental reflection's intensity is defined by
alpha channel in textures, not just how bright the shinemap is at that point. This has many advantages, the main one being that alpha channel is basically equal to transparency. If I've understood correctly, it enables the reflections and the actual texture to be seen more clearly.
But, there's a hitch. The shinemaps were made for specular lighting, and they were not made originally to handle alpha env mapping at all. That's why the makers didn't pay any attention to alpha channel values, or if the texture even had alpha channel. Retail used completely green textures for transparency. I'm not completely clear on this subject - either the game interprets textures with no alpha channel to have completely black alpha channel, or they interpret it as completely bright 100% intensity alpha channel. I don't remember which one it was, but the main thing is that some of older textures are incompatible with new features. They will eventually be fixed.
You could try ticking off the Use Alpha for env mapping -box in launcher. Or if it's not satisfactory, untick the env mapping entirely.
One last question... Are you using OpenGL renderer? I'm asking because OGL env mapping works much better than DirectX version of it. You should use OpenGL anyway. It works better, usually.
