System Starspheres

[Treewyrm]

Not much, other than making a custom model. Starspheres do not support material animation unfortunately, I tried that hoping to archive dynamic sky effect, alas the game stubbornly disregarded any of that.

Jammi, it is in a sense of way. However it's not a sphere at the actual edges, because that would cause problems with Z-buffer at such distances (a buffer that does sorting of objects by their distance, telling which overlap which on the 2D projecting that is your screen, a very rough explanation), so instead starspheres are attached to your camera position, always remaining at it no matter how or where you are, essentially making you indefinitely far away from it's edges, which works pretty well for space simulation games and many others as well. So it's not really big, it's just that you can never reach it's edge, your camera stuck projecting it from the origin point disregarding your position in space. It's a very old technique from the first 2,5D/3D FPS games. Doom and similar games had parallax background, Quake had planar animated skybox, Quake II had actual box with pre-rendered textures on it's surface giving you panoramic illusion of depth, Unreal used a separate area on the map projecting it onto surfaces allowing dynamic free-form skyboxes, et cetera. Almost every game where you can look at the sky, one way or another, uses that with slight alterations, however the concept remains the same pretty much.

Also despite being called starspheres (or skyboxes, terminology remains the same) they aren't necessarily spheres at all, you can put anything you want in there, leaving quite some area to experiment with visual illusions and forms.