Community Input: Freelancer HD Starspheres

[Sombs]

I'd strongly prefer to keep these things optional. We can easily advertise using them instead of forcing them onto people. I'm still sad we added the overly busy starsphere_dsy_starfield.cmp to all systems, which looks cool on the first look but takes away a lot from the actual starspheres. Liberty doesn't look like it's in the center of a dark matter cluster anymore since you can see stars in every direction, making it look like the dark matter storms are actually just little gas fields in the far distance.

Another big issue I have with the HD stuff is that they really rub in those repeating patterns, especially if you look at the Walker, the Edge and the smog horizon line of Bretonia. And whatever the hell is going on in Omega-41, where the asteroid belt got replaced by a ring of... something. The vanilla starspheres are painfully accurate with what they display, and those HD ones stray away from that.

Last but not least, the overly detailed nebulae in the starsphere cause the actual reachable nebulae clouds to no longer blend in with the background, unless you want to change the puff textures in all txm files to adjust it. To me personally, that's a lot more of a downgrade. The only acceptable compromise to me would be custom adjustments for every single starsphere in the game to be a 100% upgrade without side effects, which is a colossal task and requires many hours working on textures and the 3d meshes of the starspheres. Otherwise, I have to vote with a firm no.

---

---

Uncharted System Stories: 18 | 32 | 34 | 37 | 38 | 85

Templates: Character | Transmissions

---