http://home.attbi.com/~rabid_panda/pastel.jpg

if you look closely at the texture of the bg, it looks almost like it was painted thinly on a coarse canvas. I thought this was just part of the bg, but I went over to a friend's house and it's crystal clear there. I was wondering they it feels like doing this all the time. Are we mac users being ripped? Or is it just my video card?

G4 400mhz
ATI Rage 128 (Pro) 2x AGP 16mb
384mb Physical RAM
1280x1024 16mb and 32mb

What detail settings are you using for the textures?

it's like that on all of them, the texture is on med, casue high kills my comp.

texture: med
bg: it's like that on all settings

(edit) I just tired messing around with the settings even more and it's always like that no matter what I change. Also I can't see the stars that glimmer, I can just barely see them in the corner of my screen. very odd.

(edit) going into 800x600 makes it go away, but I'm not about to switch to such a tiny res. Is the bg ready to be run at 1280x1024? that's what I run at.

What video card does your friend have?

It looks like the texture is being dithered slightly.
Compare 1280x1024x16bit to 1280x1024x32bit and I think you will notice a big difference.
The Rage128 has very poor quality when it comes to dithering. One of our macs has a rage128 and it looks much worse than on anything else.

It's Fox's machine. Tho I have serious doubts that he is running his quite as high res. As a matter of fact, I know he doesn't. There is little to no difference between 16 and 32, as a matter of fact, those screen shots are the 32bit. I was trying both to get them to work. Damn big ass montier, I wouldn't care if it was smaller. It doesn't matter to much, I'm either getting a new machine or a Xbox (Steel Battilion).

mmmmmm... Steel Battalion. taaaasty. Good game...
/me looks about finds and finds out that's not the topic...
S'cuse me!

I have the same exact problem. Except it goes away with 32-bit depth. In 16-bit depth the skybox textures are horrid no matter what texture quality I use. I sure hope there'll be another way of rendering skyboxes without losing that kind of quality. At the moment I'm playing with "background" textures completely off, because I just can't stand the graininess. I didn't have any problems with the old skyboxes. In fact, I'm hoping the devs will provide that as an option in the near future. Highly doubtful though.

Ah, I tired proposing that really low bgs would be taken over by the old BGs since the new ones on low are just... puke-riffic. They said that would take up to much memory. I then proposed that you be able to pick which background type you wanted to download, the old one? or the new one?. Both would be provided with a small preview screen and you could pick before you download it. They never got back to me on that one.

Another note, I'm using 7 becasue it is byfar the uglyest sector out of them all, at least to me, I hate the color orange. That is a huge extreme compared to all the other sectors, with their clam inviting blues and dark colors.