Hello xbladex4. As you've likely already found out, there are a lot of stars in that skybox indeed, and that's normal.
Whether or not it looks the same to you as it looks to me and others in this thread is not as simple a question to answer, however. Due to the nature of the skybox - lots and lots of dim stars - the display gamma settings can make a
vast difference on how it actually looks when you see it on the monitor.
And I don't know if you guys forgot about this, but screenshots show the game as it's rendered, not how the display shows it. How the game looks on display is how a screenshot looks like - on the same display. In fact, looking at screenshots will always look the same as the game on your monitor. If xbladex4's display calibration is not set up right, there is no way at all that we could see that from screenshots. In fact if you have a good camera, you could go into the game, stop so that you only see immobile starfield (Shift+O disables the HUD, alt+pause lets you pause without the "pause" text shown on the display), then put your camera on a pedestal, adjust exposure time, take a "screenshot" without the flash, and post that to show how you actually see the monitor... however, you really need a pretty good camera and a dark room for this to be of any use.
The way I attempt to minimize the effects of gamma distortion on the graphics I make is that I calibrate my desktop gamma settings using
these pages (most important ones are Contrast, Gamma calibration, Black level and White saturation images) so that the images rendered on the screen match the description on how they're supposed to look like.
Then, I always use -no_set_gamma option ("Disable setting of gamma" in "Troubleshooting" flag list on the Launcher) with FS2_Open. This means the game will use my desktop gamma settings instead of manipulating display gamma by itself.
Unfortunately, my display is by far not the most accurate thing as far as reproduction of low intensity colours is concerned. Ideally, I would have a CRT monitor for this sort of graphics editing, but I cannot do that because I don't have room for a CRT, so the closest I can get is to calibrate my LCD display as well as possible, make graphics that look good on that monitor, and then hope that the calibration is good enough that the stuff I make looks good on most well-calibrated monitors.
The unfortunate fact is that most LCD monitors don't reproduce colours accurately on default settings, and almost all of them require some degree of gamma calibration to reach optimal performance. CRT monitors are by far better for graphics editing as far as colour accuracy goes, but they're huge, bulky and almost extinct...
And finally, as with all art, not everyone can be pleased by the same work. You're not the only one to note that the starfield appears a little bit too "busy" or cluttered with stars for comfort... I hope the display calibration helps.
