Real Stars

Stars, planets and the Sun drawn with their real brightness, colour and position, for Kitten Space Agency. A StarMap mod.

No game files are modified. At launch the mod builds patched copies of the game's star, planet and Sun shaders and loads those instead. If a game update changes one of those shaders, it is left stock until the mod is updated. Works alongside Real Atmospheres.

Download

Borea

GitHub

Features

Stars

• 83,337 stars from the Hipparcos catalogue, to magnitude 9, coloured from their B−V index
• Brightness from magnitude, drawn with a realistic point spread function
• Parallax: stars sit at their real distances and shift as you travel
• Twinkling through atmospheres, stronger and more colourful toward the horizon, following simulation time

Planets

• Brightness from albedo, phase and distance, on the same magnitude scale as the stars
• Saturn's rings add to its brightness
• Planets and moons dim in their parent's shadow
• Twinkling reduced by apparent size

The Sun

• Drawn as a star at every distance, at its real angular size, blending into the 3D sphere up close
• Sphere at its real size and photosphere colour, with limb darkening
• Dims as it fills more of the screen
• Replaces the stock sun sprite and lens flare

Occlusion and starbursts

• Stars, planets and the Sun fade behind planets, atmospheres and vessels
• Starbursts modelled on the human eye, on the Sun and on planets brighter than magnitude −3
• Starbursts fade as their source is covered or leaves the screen
• The Sun's starburst is drawn over everything else
• Starbursts follow the game's lens flare setting

Screenshots

Installation

Requires StarMap. Each release is named with the KSA build it was tested on.

With Borea: install Real Stars from the mod list.

Manually:

1. Install StarMap and run the game once through StarMap.Loader.exe.
2. Extract the release into Documents\My Games\Kitten Space Agency\mods\, giving mods\RealStars\RealStars.dll.
3. Launch the game once and close it. KSA adds new mods to manifest.toml disabled: set this mod's entry to enabled = true.
4. Launch through StarMap.

To uninstall, delete mods\RealStars.

Building

deploy.ps1 builds the mod and installs it into your mods folder. package.ps1 -Version x.y.z -GameBuild vYYYY.M.D.NNNN builds a release archive in dist\. Set StarMapDir to your StarMap folder. make_star_binary.py rebuilds the star catalogue from the Hipparcos main catalogue (hip_main.dat).

Credits

• Star catalogue built from the Hipparcos Catalogue (ESA 1997, ESA SP-1200), retrieved from VizieR (CDS, Strasbourg), catalogue I/239.

The code is MIT. CREDITS.md gives the source and terms of the shipped catalogue.