I know this is a bit of a teaser, but I'm at work right now and will post the script as well as a link to a zip file with a single room demo level with all (hehe... all 3...) resources when I get home. Posting this now because I've been meaning to do so for a while, and never got a round to it.

A little background: For a while, I've been working on a kind of Ultima virtues tutorial... something for my kids to walk through and learn about the Ultima system of virtues as they go. One of the rooms was to be an Ethereal realm type of thing from the later Ultimas... with twinkling stars and such.

I tried to dig up a simple star cube that fit what I was looking for, to no avail. So I created a simple starfield texture with Photoshop and tried applying that to first a block cube in WED, then to a model cube in MED. The only problem with these solution, is that it all looked so flat, and the black just didn't seem black enough.

So, I created a few small, simple star textures, and then a script that randomly placed them in a specific area. The result was something that seemed to have a bit more depth than either of the previous static attempts. The drawback is that it's particle based, and would probably need a trigger to activate it when it is about to come in sight, and shut it down when the player couldn't possible view it to keep it from hogging system resources.

Like I said, I'll upload this later on tonight, but I am posting this to (a.) prompt me to overcome my procrastinating tendency, (b.) gauge the desire/need/etc for something like this and get tips/critiques on it, and (c.) just share something on the off chance that someone was floundering around like me and save them some time.

Some other ideas that came to mind would be to widen the random number range a bit and make it so that it placed a much greater proportion of very small stars, followed by a small percentage (~10% maybe) of medium stars, and then a much smaller percentage of starbursts (~3%) and possibly animate them so they grew in size, spun, and shrunk and faded out, and then a very small percentage of the time (~ .5-1%), generate a shooting star.

Feel free to post on this idea and I'll put it up later.