User-directed enhancement ('I want the night sky to look very good'):
retail's star layer is one small texture stretched over a 10-poly dome
cap, so stars smear regardless of source-image quality. With the
Atmospheric render pack active, sky.frag now renders the star layer
(GfxObj 0x010015EF, identical in all 20 Dereth day groups) as a fully
procedural sky computed from the view direction: hash-derived stars on
a cube-face grid in three density tiers plus sparse diffraction-spiked
standouts, sized in SCREEN pixels via derivatives so they stay crisp at
any resolution and FOV, over the user-approved 0.4-1.3% cool mottle
(gen_starfield2.py seed 11, approved 2026-08-23). The draw is forced
additive; the day/night fade rides the star layer's existing retail
lighting product so the schedule matches the authored keyframes. Pack
inactive = retail look byte-untouched.
EnhancedNightSkyRuleTests pins the uParamA gate, the exact star-layer
id, the forced-additive draw, and the pack-runtime wiring; sky shader
SPIR-V recompiled and re-pinned. Hermetic App suite green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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