Starfield turns every GNOME desktop, workspace, and monitor into a cinematic starship view. It renders perspective-correct depth layers with colored stellar cores, soft flares, tapered motion trails, distant twinkle, and a restrained blue-violet space haze.
output.mp4
No film assets are bundled. The effect is generated procedurally in a compact GPU shader.
- Forward flight through a central vanishing point
- Left-to-right flyby across the complete GNOME monitor layout
- Right-to-left flyby across the complete GNOME monitor layout
- Pointer-guided forward flight with smooth steering inertia
The pointer mode reads the pointer position without creating a reactive actor, so desktop and application clicks continue to work normally.
The renderer uses one shader actor per monitor, six fixed depth layers, and one shared animation clock. It creates no JavaScript object per star. Balanced defaults render internally at 60% resolution and cap updates at 24 FPS; both values are configurable. Rendering is skipped for unmapped monitor actors.
Star color is configurable with the native GNOME color dialog. White,
#7755aa, and #126b73 are available as one-click presets.
An OpenGL-capable compositor is required. CPU-only rendering is intentionally not supported because it would place animation work in the GNOME Shell process.
- GNOME Shell 50
- An OpenGL-capable compositor and graphics driver
./build.sh build
./build.sh installOpen preferences with:
./build.sh prefsGPL-2.0-or-later. See LICENSE and THIRD_PARTY.md.
