How does Starmade generate its Skyboxes?

[Jim_Clonk]

I've been wondering how Starmade generates its procedural skyboxes, and if there is any way of replicating it by overlaying various noise shaders.
There are some tools to generate space skyboxes but I don't really want to rely on third-party stuff.

Alternatively, is there a way of extracting the skyboxes from the games save data?

 

[Ratchet Hundreda]

I think it is just 7 or 8 pre composed alpha images with different color tints applied randomly to each star system. I don't think the skybox texture itself is actually procedurally generated. Not sure on this but this is what i would guess from what I've observed. I don't think the actual true procedural generation of the background using noise generators are an implemented thing. Or at least if it perhaps is they are doing a really bad job at giving strong enough distinguishable features to each skybox hence the reason i assume it is a much more simple thing.

Personally i really don't like how the current skybox system works. It is repetitive ugly and sometimes straight up annoying. Hopefully with the universe update they will make it so that skybox generation won't even be necessary and galactic features like nebulae galactic matter and other huge celestial objects will have a proper LOD system and will be visible from far away. Perhaps even galaxies could have it as well. Not only would it make more sense for it to work like that but would bring a ton of immersion to the game and i think it would look much better.