The sun will just be a texture, hunter tried making a "sun" lightsource and it just lagged everything up horribly.

Well, either way, pitch black ships still sound okay.

But if there's a sun texture, and it looks like it's nearby, it would seem out of place.

He could hide it by making a second sky-domw out of one of the other "suns"

Only the playerships will be pitch black. There are two ways to add a sun, and the first is quite laggy and requires serious CPU power to calculate. And for it to work properly and light everything, it just ends up too bright and things look rather ugly! The second method can look quite good, but it uses so much power that D3 slows down so much, you'd feel like you were playing on a 6 year old PC.

Hey! What're you trying to say!
THe first method, why don't you just use a "sun" texture that has a low lighting value?

Because then only "bits" of the environment will receive that light.

Seems to me we're right back to square one, here.

Which is why I made this "poll". And like I said... Nothing gets past me. I've had a long enough time to explore every possibilty anyone can come up with. That is, unless people want to play with under 20FPS

So i assume you explored the idea of putting various directional lights in a gridlike pattern across the map (excluding shadows) to simulate a sun without actually killing the poor fusion engine with a REAL sun?

Well then you have multiple light sources, which light up all sides of objects, and can be seen when flying past them (invisible or not, the light strength changes as you/objects pass them)

Well it seems fate is forcing my hand anyway. As it turns out, I'm running into memory problems with D3Edit - So it looks like the interior bases will get full lighting treatment, however the outside area will not - Meaning ships will be bright outside (and reflect some of the star/nebula light). This however does mean that all objects will get treated with shaders instead of volume lights, so it won't look *as* good as it can do. I'll keep looking at the memory problems and try to solve it, but it's not likely.