I'm making a simple top-down view 3d space game and I want to render a distant starfield in the background.
I don't want it to be glued to the player like a skybox - I want the starfield to appear to move slowly relative to my ship movement.
(I'm not going for realism, I'm going for fun.)
I also want depth - ie: stars moving at different speeds due to their distance.
Currently I draw the stars as billboards placed randomly between 10 and 50km away. This gives a nice smooth speed when the ship is moving and a good feeling of depth to the scene.
The problem though is that I have to set the camera's farplane to 50km for these stars to be rendered at all. As you can imagine, that means I lose lots of Z-resolution and my ship models start flickering.
If I was using straight OpenGL I'd draw the stars in a seperate pass with a further far plane, before reducing it and then drawing my ships with a closer far plane.
Can I do this in Irrlicht? If not, are there any other solutions?