StarField generates a field of stars through which the viewer moves, reminiscent of the Star Trek TV series. It can generate a series of PNG images or a QuickTime movie (on MacOS). Its stars are antialiased white circles which move with subpixel accuracy.
For StarField to compile you'll need to have libpng installed, even if you use QuickTime output. libpng comes with pretty much every Linux distribution. If you use MacOS you can get it with Homebrew.
First check out the comments in Makefile and make the required changes
if necessary. Then type
make
It should compile to an executable starfield.
If you start it with
./starfield
it should either produce a sequence of images called out0000.png to
some outxxxx.png, or a movie called out.mov, depending on whether
you enabled QuickTime in the Makefile.
If you want to change the parameters of the animation, like its
length, size, the number of stars, the speed, etc, take a look at the
comments in the top part of starfield.c, change the values accordingly
and compile and start again.
StarField is free software distributed under the terms of the GNU
General Public License. The file COPYING contains the text of the
license.
The source of StarField is available on GitHub.
-- Mark Probst mark.probst@gmail.com