- Missions that may only be taken a limited number of times for a given period will now remain visible, but grayed out, when unavailable. A countdown timer indicates when the mission may be taken again.
- Border Patrol now tells Itani players to go to Deneb and records the final destination sector to the mission log.
- Optimized rendering of individual stars in the background.
- Active mission dialog now says to check the mission log for more information, and the nil 'Location' line was removed.

Newspost

I had absolutely no idea that the background stars were distinct objects. I always assumed that they were just part of a larger image.

Good change on missions, though I'd also like to see something similar for mission lists when a player has an active mission. Very low priority though.

No, they are objects that can actually be reached. This video is not time scaled properly, but have fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHNU69tqeV0

The background stars are individual point sprites if the background detail is set to "Highest" or "Super High". With lower settings it cooks the stars onto the background texture.

So, this optimization only impacts people using the higher detail settings.

Neat! I usually turn the background off out of habit because I used to suffer the delusion that doing so improved my fps enough to actually make me a competent pilot ;) Back when I was more into the combat side of the game anyway. Now it's just a habit.

On a PC, there probably isn't much of a framerate difference between the background on "High" vs "Off". Texture memory, maybe, but not enough to matter much anymore.

I can imagine some advantage for trying to visually spot far-away ships, but game is much less pretty without a background. Ah well.

When I was young the backgrounds were bleeding edge wonders that fried only the best of video cards