Matrix Games Forums

Question bout these. Does the game pick a random backdrop or do I have to rename the one I want?

Astax, the game will use only the backdrop named, "galaxy_backdrop.jpg". I have a whole bunch of backdrops in my ...environment/galaxybackdrops folder. To select one, you have to backup the one being used and rename the one you want to, "galaxy_backdrop.jpg".

Here is my edited version of my favorite backdrop.

I remove the bright stars and cleaned up the jaggies. Looks super smooth in game now.

I like it for all galaxy types.

Thank you, tornnight.

I think it would look best in a ring galaxy.[:)]

Added a different version of Eta Carinae now

Looking very nice. I may need to snag it, but before I use it I'd be strongly inclined to do one or two things to it first...

I'd cut the brightness by 50% so I can spot stars on top of the bright (white) spots.
And if that's not enough to keep me from confusing backdrop from stars, I may blur the image some (a nebula generally being one big blur, adding blur to it should affect mainly the stars, but it would be a shame to lose the detail...).
//Torrenal

Yeah i know, though i already blurred them as much as i could (since i hate losing detail, personal preference). Its amazing how much details are in real nebulae, as can be seen in the original nasa eta carinae picture.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0805/ca ... st_big.jpg [X(]

These are amazing, but I keep getting my stars confused, I don't have a clue where the fake ones are lol

After playing some more, i pretty much consider the "which star is real" issue to be irrelevant
I mean, when I choose a planet to colonize, I always use the expansion planner, and when you did colonize a system it turns your color anyway, and the same for other empires.
So for me personally, I have no problem with it anymore (and might add more elaborate backdrops, even if they have lots of stars), since the only stars that end up being confusing are the ones nobody wants to colonize anyway, and if you have a mining station or some such built there, again an icon with your empire color gets plopped there

So in my mind I just think, any stars that dont have any empire color around it is either worthless or part of the backdrop [:D]

I overlapped the vanilla backdrops over these ones and then set the opacity low enough for the stars to not be super bright. So I see everything and can very easily tell the difference between the stars.

download link updated

ORIGINAL: Baleur

download link updated

I wish it was [:(]

I was always swapping these images in and out, since I upgraded my PC I cant access some of my old data on some drives, sadly this was file set was one of the casualties. Any chance of another update on the link please?

Darkspire

You can probably find a lot of these images on the internet pretty easily and convert them to the size you want...
Most of those images are pretty standard.