Spacescape is one of those neat little tools that just takes a few parameters, and then uses rules and randomisation to produce something magical.

It's excellent for producing "sky boxes" of space scenes. In essence, it generates six textures that can be applied to the front, back, left, right, top and bottom of a 3D scene to create the illusion of space. You create the textures simply by making layers of stars and noise (for nebulae etc).

Although it's certainly possible to do very indepth stuff with it, I ended up just making a few tweaks to one of the examples to use as the new sky box for Derelict and Firestart. I have to say, it has made looking through the windows in both games far more spectacular.

Spacescape is both free and open source, and can be downloaded at the author's site here.