Texture Pack I - Stars and Planets

This is some of the stuff I created to enhance my personal gaming experience. For simplification purposes, I'm excluding all custom planet types and other .entity changes and making this a plain texture pack. If I get some time, I'll try to sort out and polish the rest of the modded content and release it as a separate package sometime later this month.

Screenshots:


Primary download location:
http://files.filefront.com/Sins+Texture+Pack+I/;9639406;/fileinfo.html
Secondary download location:
http://rapidshare.com/files/92205748/Sins_Texture_Pack_I_-_Stars_and_Planets.zip.html
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Description
Slight visual upgrades of all planet and star textures: brightened stars, reworked and darkened volcanic types, retexturized gas giants, etc. With the exception of starfield.dds and starcorona2.dds, there are no resolution changes. Any possible performance impact should be completely negligible.

Disclaimer
Since I had no intention of redistributing this outside my LAN, I didn't bother to spend more than a couple of minutes on each texture. Don't expect anything groundbreaking. Please don't forget to back up the original textures (see the installation instructions below) and/or preview the new ones before you install the pack - you may end up reverting some of the changes, particularly the new gas giant textures that look entirely different from the originals. If that didn't scare you off, I do suggest you download and try out the package. The brightened stars alone should make it worthwhile.

Installation Instructions
Method 1: As of v1.02, extract the contents of the archive into your Sins of a Solar Empire folder (default C:\Program Files\Stardock Games\Sins of a Solar empire\) and run "MT Install.bat" that will automatically backup the original files to "MT Textures (backup)" and replace them with the new ones. If you as paranoid as I am, check the contents of the .bat file using a text editor. It's perfectly harmless.
Method 2: Allegedly, v1.03 will allow us to use custom textures without copying the whole 1Gb+ Textures directory into the mod folder. In this case, you may want to perform a "softer" installation of the pack by registering it as a game mod.
To do that (and to install any other mods), first you have to find the used by the game:
• Start the game and open the Mods screen. (Options->Mods).
• Click the "Show Mod Path" button.
• A dialog will appear telling you where to place your mods (e.g. C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Mods)
Go to this \Mods folder, create a new subdirectory, name it after the mod, extract "MT Textures" from the archive into that subdirectory, and then rename "MT Textures" into "Textures" to make it visible by the game. Restart the game, and enable the use of the mod through the Mods screen. Piece of cake.

Copyright
I, the author, waive all claim of copyright and place my versions of Starfield.dds, Planetgas0-cl.dds and Planetgas1-cl.dds into the public domain. Feel free to use them for any imaginable purpose and without any conditions.
The rest of the images are all derivative works that are subject to the original terms of Sins of a Solar Empire licensing. Do not re-use outside of the Sins modding community.