Howdy Howdy!
I am just asking for different suggestions for building a starfield effect .. much like the windows screensaver.

I will also be using the new sky sphere in the background for nebulas and such, so the sky sphere needs to be visible between the stars.

I have played with placing the camera inside a horizontal cone and simply move the texture inside the cone. It seems to work fine but am wondering what else can be used, and this method is fairly slow woth the software renderer.

What about particle effects?

What suggestions do people have for the "best" way of doing this .. performance wise.

I will also have vehicles and enemies moving in front of the "warping" stars.

All suggestions and comments welcome,

Thanks,
Cameron

xagon7,

I just recently added very small randomly positioned stationary particles with a short lifespand around my ship when it's moving.

When the ship moves quickly, they smeer in a most appealing way, and they also server to indicate the direction of travel.

They also appear to twinkle against the regular star field as they go out!

- WildCat

Rock

ST:Bridge Commander sets up a box around your starship and keeps a certain amount of white pixels inside it. When you move, the pixels will move too, thereby leaving the box. When this happens, new pixels are introduced at the other end of the box. It´s cheap but looks okay.
Aquanox uses similar debris for simulating underwater movement.

Thanks for posting guys!
I think I have actually used the particle method. This method suprizingly came in with the best performance and will allow me to place entities in front of it as I had planned.

Thanks for the help!

Cam

Marco,
Can you expound on this method. I have found that using a particle generator does not work as well as I was hoping. The stars go outward and you don't get the effectife Doppler effect.

If you worked on Bridge COmmander.. all I can say is that is is one of the best games I have played in a long time. FINALLY a Trek game that is what everyone has been wanting for years

I took a Windows screensaver lightspeed effect and drew it on a panel every 60ms. It's at layer 10 (it might be better if I drew it before entities are draw). Anyway, it kills the framerate (6 FPS) so is pretty much a dead end. It also looks strange because the "stars" only move straight at the viewer and don't curve when moving sharply up/down/left/right.

I think I'm still a 2D programmer in a 3D world.

You can see some of the lightspeed effect stars in front of the particle effect. The stars in the background are a skysphere and the "streaky" stars are the lightspeed effect.

Yeah, that was my first attempt Noah.. it kills the framerate, I am thinking of using multiple particle generators (maybe 3, and moving (jumping) them about randomly way in front of the player -- emitting stars toward and past the player at each jump),OR using sprites for the same effect. I hope this will not kill the framerate, anyone have any idea on the performace impact of say 50 randomly generated sprites?