Make the background static with regard to zoom.

If you zoom in to view a station or far away ship, the stars in the background zoom as well and blur. If you were in space, you wouldn't notice an increased size of objects so far, far away. Only near objects would be magnified. Unless you were looking through something like a Hubble telescope, in which case you wouldn't be able to make out the near objects.

Or am I the only one that makes use of magnification / zoom?

I have vzoom bound to my mousewheel in case anyone was wondering.

-1

Zooming in changes the field of view. So if normally the view shows 50 stars from left to right (or 150 degrees of view), zoomed in might only have 6 of those stars visible (or 15 degrees of view). So realistically, the apparent distance between the stars should increase without the apparent size of the stars themselves increasing very much. When static images are used for the background, this becomes tricky to pull off.

There's also the problem that if the background image were to stay static when zoomed as you propose, you wouldn't be able to tell that you're zoomed in unless there is some non-background object in view. You also wouldn't be able to tell the extent of the zoom (a little vs a lot).

I would say that the current method is a good balance between ease of implementation and practicality of function.

I was actually curious about zoom implementations and did a little digging through the google. One alternative implementation of zoom I ran across was moving the point of view closer to the object to be viewed. I don't know what the technical limitations of this might be, but it might be better suited to VO where we aren't restricted to zooming things by looking through a tube.

So, on the highest background detail (currently "High"), most of the major stars are actually Point Sprites, ie they are individually sized and rendered graphical components. We could probably just find a way to keep them consistently sized, regardless of how much you zoom in.

But, that would only impact those who use the highest detail settings. Lower detail backgrounds the sprites are cooked out to the skybox, and dynamic scaling would not be possible.

Honestly though, this is a pretty low priority for me, given the huge laundry-list of important stuff we're trying to make happen in the near future.

+1

Hey, I thought I'd ask on the off chance it was something super easy to fix or change. :-)

Or if you happen across that section of code while doing some other feature's implementation.