It's been a while since I updated this dev blog. Since then I've been working on a few things, I have a shiny new error reporting system, so all exceptions should get reported automatically online with debugging information. Secondly, I've been working on a procedurally generated starfield. I uploaded some new backgrounds. To get a good resolution they were coming in at around 30meg each, so I decided it was time to generate my own.

I've done a lot of reading, on starfields, coordinate systems, noise generators, randomness and pixel/vertex/geometry shaders.

I've got an early prototype up and running, currently it just has some background stars and a few brighter ones, next I'm on to generating nebula and masks to give some more interesting looks.

This shows the starfield zoomed out so the whole thing is visible

One key thing is to make sure each sector has a different starfield generated for it, but that each visit to the same sector gets the same starfield generated.

We'll see how it goes.