[olegp]

I couldn't agree more. Also, thanks for making Homeworld, it was great!

I was building a 3D space game engine myself as a kid around the time Homeworld came out and realized that rather than using a skybox with texture maps, you had it created out of a bunch of triangles with color interpolation.

IIRC, I had problems reverse engineering your data format in order to incorporate them in my engine. I emailed someone on your team and was very surprised to get a reply with an explanation, which helped me finish that feature.

[alexgarden]

The skybox with texture maps was our original plan too. The problem was that GPUs didn't have enough RAM to hold anything high-res, so the universe looked like pixel-soup.

Rob Cunningham (lead artist) had the idea of "painting with light" using giant polygons and spicing them up with pixels to create a convincing distant galaxy that you got closer to with each mission. Genius.