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.
[1] This shows the starfield from the inside, as it will appear in game.
[2] 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 