I was pleasantly surprise after Season One patch to see awesome lens flare and proper bloom effects on local stars. I only noticed it the one day or so then I realized that I hadn't seen the effect for a while now.

I really enjoyed having the local stars bloomed out of view, now they are back to being dull blue or yellow circles. I noticed the planet reflection bloom effects were fixed now too, and the atmospheres look amazing. But what happened to my local star bloom/lens flare?

There's nothing in the patch notes about it being removed again, so is it something locally on my machine?

And here I thought that was how the game's stars were supposed to look: there was only that ONE day where I saw stars as they should be.

My system is running dual nVidia geforce 8800 GT, 4 Gigs of RAM and dual core 2.8 gHz processor (Intel). In game I've got bloom turned on to the regular setting (as opposed to the highest or lowest setting), and it did work once so I know it doens't have to do with my out-of-game nVidia control panel settings (which I've never changed).

My first thought on seeing the space environments was "Wow - these backgrounds are really beautiful, but... why do the stars look like dull globes?" I played Eve Online for a few months & their stars look realistic, but STO's stars only looked how they should that one day. Like a dummy I haven't tried setting my bloom to the highest setting before writing this post (), but I don't want to over-bloom everything else just to see the stars how they should be.

So thanks, Aub, for your post - for making me not think that it was just me.

I don't remember seeing the bloom effect so far. Maybe we need a screenshotn to make sure what the devs expect us to see and what we really see?

I tried to take a screenshot, (print screen button & Alt+print screen) but when pasted into Photoshop it was just a big black rectangle (which is another issue in another thread).

Needless to say, I think the issue has to do with the color/type of stars generated (in space). I saw the lens flare a couple times since my post & it was always on the same map. The map has a mostly black starry background, but there are a lot of stars that have 'fake' bloom (not real effects, just a hazy glow and vertical & horizontal rays, like crosses, simulating many close stars). The map also has 1 or 2 other suns, one being a dull red star, but one of the suns shows up with a glorious, beautiful lens flare (white-yellow in color). The missions I've played on that map involve an asteroid field (you have to blow up agricultural domes).

As far as ground missions go, I never have a problem seeing lens flares. In fact the other night I was on a ground mission where the sun was low in the sky, like at sunset, and the effect was beautiful.

As far as my bloom settings go, turns out they were turned up all the way :p