ScottT here, messing with quick ways to make the Space in GalCiv2 more sexy . 

One of the main hurdles has been to replicate Alex's fancy 2d sprite-stars in a 3d environment.  The code team got the stars rendering, textured, and rotating pretty easily, and the addition of a 'halo' to each star has brought us even closer to our goal.  However, the one thing GC2's missing that its 2d counterpart had was surface animation of the star.  There are several ways to do this, but since I'm a lazy, lazy human I went the route of fading 2 textures to simulate the pulsing effect we had in GC1.  By stacking two identical textures (where the 2nd is the original rotated 180deg.) and fading between one and the other, I got the following effect....

Pretty cool, I though!  Subtle, yet attractive. And Joe says it should be pretty straightforward to get that into the game, so that's an added bonus!

Anyhoo, back to work.  Post any comment/suggestions as you see fit!