Standoff Jazzing Up Starfields

The Standoff team is experimenting with new sharper starfield backgrounds for the Episode 4 release. These shots below are just preliminary, but they already look great. Eder explains the technical aspects of it below.

We are experimenting with the high-res cube-mapped nebula feature that Pedro showed in his video as a way to display better starfields. It lets us have thousands of stars, of varying sizes and brightness, that scale better between different resolutions... instead of a handful of tiny grey or orange blocky pixel-stars like in original WCP.

While the original starfields were single pixels (or small blocks) randomly scattered over space that we had no control on, the new starfields are texture maps, so we can do anything we want to them - the only limit now is the talent of this humble modder.

If you look very closely at the new shots, there are very subtle glows around the brighter stars, as well as a very subtle color variation between them. I did try to keep it as generic as possible so that we could make the same starfield fit all the different nebula / lighting colors in every system, that's why these features are barely noticeable.