Atmosphere Rendering?

Hey y’all.

I’ve been attempting to figure out how Freelancer renders environment maps, and I’ve gotten so far as figuring out it uses a scaled quad sphere with atmosphere.dds mapped to it.

atmosphere.dds i verified through PIX, though I couldn’t get much more useful information out of it (probably lost in the d3d8-d3d9 translation I guess).

It isn’t just blindly mapped onto the sphere as is proven below:

(Click image for full size)

But it also isn’t naïvely done as a sphere environment map as so:

(Click image for full size)

Hopefully one of you graphics whizzes out there can be of assistance!