alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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.