Suns use SPH files and I don't think you can actually replace those SPH files with CMPs. You could put a planet on top of the star, but you'd then loose the lens effects and much of the luminosity. Plus, the planet would pop out when coming inside a nebula.

What would be your goal by doing this? Are you going for a certain look? The only way you could even come close to replicating a sun's 'glow' or it's transparency is with alpha layers (I know nothing about texturing).

What about a giant light? UberLargeYellow

I was just thinking of this, not that I am actually going to implement something. But I thought it would be cool to take an actual image of the sun and use it as a texture for a sun so when you were close, you could actually see the texture. But I know that creating new SPX files right now is not possible. At least from what I have read or tried.

Requiem: A Total FL Conversion Mod .

I've been messing around with this as well, you can def resize them and have them show up on you're navmap at their new size as per the tutorial i wrote some time ago but i've had no joy with retexturing them either. Must be a way though...

@ Gibbon...

You can make brand new textures for the suns... And it's actually quite easy!
All you have to do is open up sun.txm, where the other textures are stored, with UTF editor! Then you can either alter old ones or add brand new textures. All you have to do is make the new texture (of course :-p) and add the proper nodes in the file and after that open up StarArch.ini and add the new line i.e.

tex_shape = sunglow2
tex_shape = sunglow3

I read this post 10 mins ago and after that I experimented with this a bit! The results are not pretty since it was just to see if it could be done and if it was easy or hard, but here are the "quick and nasty results"

http://img253.imageshack.us/img253/166/ ... jpgte2.jpg
http://img253.imageshack.us/img253/8193 ... jpgxn0.jpg

Suns are nothing more than colored lights shining through alpha channel textures, the SPH is used as an anchor point for them and as a solid surface to bounce off of.

nickname = Sun_Li01
ids_name = 261008
pos = 0, 0, 0
ambient_color = 255, 255, 255
Archetype = sun_2000
ids_info = 66162
star = med_white_sun
atmosphere_range = 11000
burn_color = 160, 222, 245

You could try changing the Archetype to that of a planet (SPH) and see if the textures show up.

Suns aren't all that hard to make, but most people are put off by all of those numbers in the Stararch.ini, most of which are nothing more than RGBA values. If I can can find my notes and files from when I created a couple of black suns I'll post them.

**shuffles off with a new headache**