Since you guys seem to using an old version of my starfield skysphere, you might want to switch to the much improved version I recently made.
Do you want us to? Has there been any changes in the model itself, or is it just the starfield map that has changed?
Personally, I've always thought that the FS2 universe is rather more colourful than the relatively realistic effects in Galactica, and while that starfield is absolutely gorgeous for Galactica environment, I feel that the more colourful current MediaVP starfield might serve it's purpose better in FreeSpace 2 universe.
Also, from technical point of view... what's the field of view in that screenshot? Would I be missing much if I guessed something like -fov 0.55?
@Mobius: I appreciate the answer you gave. Although my opinion is that if you think the older starfield is better compatible with some mod asset, it's obviously more sensible to include the old starfield in that mod if that's what you want it to look like than demand that the mediaVP's revert to the older version... If we start catering to the needs of mods that choose to rely on mediaVP assets, there will never be any sort of advance as we would need to fly through all the mods that use mediaVP assets just to make sure the new version of mediaVPs does not break the mods.
Incidentally, when I was experimenting with starfields while concocting the current mediaVP starfield, I did found out that blurry, noise-rich starfields actually lend some "galaxy-like" features to the nebulas rendered on top of them so I don't think you are wholly wrong in the issue that the older starfield can look very good in certain conditions. However, as a whole my opinion was that more clearly defined stars looked better to my eye, and since the FSU team did not object and some outright expressed their approval of the starfield, it went in, and most people have apparently liked it, which I am glad of. Or at least most people have not had adverse reaction to it. I feel sorry that this is not the case for you.
That said, I don't really agree that the stars are more "prominent" on the older one. The brightest stars might be more prominent
relative to the other stars in it because they have radius of several pixels. Which is something I aimed to avoid, because I wanted the stars to look as much like point sources of light as possible (which is what they were in Retail FS2 and which is what they are in reality). Stars are all the same size - a practically non-dimensional point in the sky. Their varying brightness can make them appear bigger or smaller in film or digital images and if you aim for cinematic look (like I could imagine Diaspora and, say, Fate of the Galaxy doing) that can be perfectly all right. However, when you decrease the field of view, the skybox scales up, and if the stars are bigger than one pixel, they can very easily end up as annoyingly big blobs rather than anything that resembles stars.
By the way, by far the best option regarding starfield would be a procedural one, which would allow mission designers to define some parametres for field depth and average star density or somesuch things, and field of view changes to bring forth a number of previously unseen stars and hide them when zooming out. Amongst other advantages compared to textures starfield (usage of video memory comes to mind first and foremost). However, I have no idea how feasible such an option would be to code... Also, its full usefulness would only be achieved with dynamic, user-adjustable field of view control (aka zoom feature).
Nevertheless, I think this thread has seen enough discussion about the starfields and their differences, and it should be better discussed in-depth in some other thread if there's need for it. There have been some valid points brought forth in the thread and this ridiculousness regarding artistic differences is overshadowing them for no good reason.
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