Okay, I'm not trying anything overambitious. I want to make a new star, but it's going to be a different size than the standard fare. For that I'm going to need to change the size of the mesh. I'm also going to need to edit the texture.

There's a three-part operation to this, and I'm having a little trouble at each one. Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction.

So here's where I'm at. I opened up and changed the texture (.dds file) using the nVidia DTX plugin for Photoshop. However, I don't know what DTX compression method Sins uses, or what the hell a mipmap is (though I believe it's related to alpha channels?).

I'm not proficient at all with models, but shrinking an existing one should be no problem. However, what do I need to open the existing meshes in 3DS Max?

Finally, in-game integration. In the .entity files, there's various pointers to filenames like:

hudIcon "HUDICON_STAR_YELLOW"
smallHudIcon "HUDICONSMALL_STAR_YELLOW"
infoCardIcon "INFOCARDICON_STAR_YELLOW"

I do not know where these files are, or how I need to edit them. I found a handful of files like: "HUDIcon-Action.brushes", but I can't open them in any usable format. What are these 'icons' and where are they defined? They're obviously related to icons_planets.tga, but I imagine I need to define what / where the icon is. How do I edit these then?

Finally, on a related note, is there a way to edit how far away from the star the gravity well starts? It doesn't appear to be a setting in the .entity file, so is it just a set distance away from some part of the model itself?