is it the same stars in the same spots each time? or is it all random? so if I played your game and wanted to go back to a star... would it still be there the next time i fired it up?
The star generator is semi-random, meaning the star count and coordinates are generated real-time using the sector coordinates as a base seed. It doesn't use the stock brl.random, as it would use the hardware random number generator with what the results wouldn't be consistent on different machines. The methods I've been using ensure that the universe is the same for every game, every player and every machine anywhere. Well, actually I have some doubts about machines with PPC processor, as I'm using bit shifts/rotations in the code, so the Big Endianess might cause different kind of results.
But no, there is no external file for 500 million stars :)