Modding the background stars out of game

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Numdydar
Posts: 3283
Joined: Fri Feb 13, 2004 9:56 pm

Modding the background stars out of game

Post by Numdydar »

Anyone have any idea on how to do this? I loaded up DWU and they had .jpgs that you could select as a backdrop but everything in DW2 is in XML.

I looked at the GraphicsSettings_Galaxy file but did not see anything obvious to change. They have the following code

</GalaxyBackgroundLayerColors>
-->

Which looks promising but I am not sure what to put here or even if it is the right spot to do so.
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LordMM
Posts: 1179
Joined: Sat May 28, 2016 11:09 pm

Re: Modding the background stars out of game

Post by LordMM »

Numdydar wrote: Mon Mar 14, 2022 10:34 pm Anyone have any idea on how to do this? I loaded up DWU and they had .jpgs that you could select as a backdrop but everything in DW2 is in XML.

I looked at the GraphicsSettings_Galaxy file but did not see anything obvious to change. They have the following code

</GalaxyBackgroundLayerColors>
-->

Which looks promising but I am not sure what to put here or even if it is the right spot to do so.
The background layer colors effects the overall galaxy colors that you see when zoomed out. The BGRA is basically Blue, Green, Red and A stands for transparency. You can change the values to effect the colors.

Its how this mod was made.
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 9&t=380603

Though, I am unsure how to change or remove the background stars. You could use a shader software to change the way the background stars or anything else looks.
It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly, than to live somebody else's life with perfection.
ksnoopy
Posts: 15
Joined: Mon Dec 21, 2020 11:01 am

Re: Modding the background stars out of game

Post by ksnoopy »

Agreed it doesn't look good when rotating as there's too many background stars moving so its distracting.

Annoyed by this as well, I played with it for a bit to see if there's any obvious fix.
The best I found is to do the following:

- Change everything in that GraphicsSettings_System.xml to black like so:
<B>0</B>
<G>0</G>
<R>0</R>
and set the <BaseNebulaCloudAmount>0</BaseNebulaCloudAmount>
this will make the zoomed out galaxy map black (but with stars) which is slightly better.

- Go to game settings, in the galaxy map section change it to 2.0 scale which makes the real stars bigger so they don't blend with the background noise.

- In the game, just stop rotating the view. Just move the view using WASD and when just moving the background stars won't move so it doesn't look as bad. You can optionally hit "T" for a top down camera so you avoid the need to rotate.

- If you get a really bright nebula in the starting system and haven't played at all, try just starting a new game. The background nebula is random for each system it looks like. The first time, I had a large purple nebula and it looked bad. Next time I started a game, it was thin green one so it was better.
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