I fear you really have to work on those. Beside the fact that the planets have an ugly pixelized bright border, the planet rings (which are around way too many planets, all?) look borinlgy the same in terms of 1. color/texture 2. size 3. orientation. And quite often there are other objects painted above the rings, not only the planet. Now show me a planet with rings around itself AND a moon.

Personally I would prefer a more conservative sky texture, you know with only one sun or at most two (which would have to be very close to each other, we don't want the poor planets to be teared apart or catapulted into open space). With less clouds and at least slighty homogenous in one system. Most of the sky in space IS black unless you're located at some probably annoyingly unfriendly place. But this is just my personal taste.

Yeah, real space looks very boring like you said. Planets would never really be visible except for the sector that the planet is in. It's an artistic taste that there are mutiple planets and rings and moons and stuff. The jagged edges around the planets and rings is a limitation of the render-to-texture hardware feature that we use to dynamically generate the skybox. If you set your background detail to 'Very High' (I think) it should render the planets as 3d objects and they look generally better but at a cost of a slightly more complex scene to render.

Do try it though, in some cases the 3D backgrounds are quicker to render than the 2D stand-ins.

I like to play with the backgrounds off to help improve performance and remove all the clutter. However, I'd also like to see 3D rotating models of the planets in addition to the sun(s) in the background, just as way of having more reference points with your ship's orientation. I'm pretty sure it won't kill performance nearly as much as the background textures do.

So here's what I'd suggest in the graphics menu:

-Background Quality (low, medium, high, extremely high)
-Planets (off, 2D, 3D)
-Constellations (off, on)
-Nebulas (off, on)

Now both low-end and high-end systems can have good looking backgrounds.

Well, all I wanted to say which belongs into the bugs section is that sometimes another planets gets rendered over the ring. This simply looks wrong.

The other stuff just popped up into my mind during writing.

ziggystar: If you find a system or sector where a sun/star is drawn over a planet or some other graphic quirk, write down the system and sector numbers and either send a bug report, or post a message in the bugs forum.

I don't know how you play with the background off Arolte, I get disorientated without em.

I don't like playing with backgrounds off either, but having them on kills my framerates when I have them at a setting other than crayon rendering mode. They're also way too cluttered up for my tastes, which is why I suggested a Homeworld type design a while back. Alas, what's done is done and I have only but one suggestion: to allow the planets be toggleable also.

Sorry for going off topic. Something was brought up and I couldn't resist.

/me hands Forum Moderator his "Get out of Jail" card

[Accepted]