[MOD] Black Galaxy Background

[Seelensturm]

Have you ever tried to click on a star only to realise it is actually on the galaxy background image?

Have you ever missed to explore a system on the edge of the galaxy because you didn't notice it right away?

Have you ever tried to clean a non-moving dot on your screen only to realise it is not a dirt smudge?

If you answered any of these questions with yes then the 'Black Galaxy Background' mod is for you! It replaces the background image for the galaxy map with a pure black one. Have a close look at the comparison screenshot below and see for yourself how many of the visible dots are actually not stars in your galaxy:

This mod allows you to focus on your own galaxy without getting distracted by all the others galaxies and stars in the background (they will face conquest soon enough in your future games).

The only thing this mod does is to replace the image Stellaris/gfx/worldgfx/stars.dds. The (much more beautiful) background images in system view are not affected by this mod. This should be compatible with any version of the game. Incompatibilities with other mods are only expected if they modify the background image as well e.g. 'Beautiful Universe v2.0'.

Steam Workshop link:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=812020522

 

[splodgenik]

Thanks for making this. Unfortunately it doesn't work for me, I suspect because I'm using Linux. After some fiddling around I made a version that works for me, which I've attached. Sadly that takes stars.dds back up to 16MB because I had to keep the cubemap and mipmap textures in, but at least it zips up really well.

In summary: the mod gives me a background of blocky green random gunk instead of the intended blackness. After some experimenting, I think this is from the loading of stars.dds failing - because just running with no mod but with gfx/worldgfx/stars.dds deleted produces the same blocky green effect. So the green crud is presumably random uninitialised data as a texture rather than a 3D renderer fault. After some more experimenting with variants of dds files I found I could get it to work (and produce the nice clean black background, hurray) by starting with the game's stars.dds, keeping the same header but replacing all the compressed texture data with repeats of a compressed pixel block that corresponds to all black pixels.

The mod's stars.dds is a flat 2048x2048 texture, the game's shipped one is a cubemap with six 2048x2048 faces, each with mipmaps down to 1x1. So, I think the problem is that the mod version is failing to load on Linux, perhaps because the game tells the load function it's expecting a cubemap so it throws some error on finding a flat texture where it just goes ahead on Windows. Not totally surprising the behaviour might differ, on Windows loading DirectDraw Surfaces will be handled by DirectX, on Linux it's presumably some third-party library.

Anyway, thanks again for making the mod, having finally got to play with a black background it's totally the right thing. Here's the file

 

[Seelensturm]

Thank you for pointing this out and providing a fix. Since your texture also seems to work fine in Windows I made it the new default one. I am sure no one minds a few extra MB. The reduced file size was a result of my poor texture editing skills anyway and not intended.

 

[splodgenik]

Awesome, I confirm the new version of the mod works for me. Cheers!