Hey Craig, another quick question for you on this: Do you guys use photoshop to make your .dds files? If you do (and im assuming here you use the .dds plugin for it) What settings do you save the .dds files as.

I can get nice looking skyboxes etc, and I can also get nice looking menus and so on however they always turn out to be twice the size of you guys' (20MB+ instead of the 10MB of the originals). It's obviously some kind of setting im missing, I just dont know which one! Any help would be appreciated.

Yes, we use Photoshop. We use both DXT1 and DXT5 ....usually 5, alpha will be your decided factor.  Don't bother with DXT3, file size should be the same, but the quality worse for most applications. TGA's will be signficantly larger, so DDS anything that can pass the quality test.

Here is the plug-in for you:
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photoshop_dds_plugins.html

Best of luck Nacey

Nacey, You!!!!!! I want your skybox!!!!! IM so envious!!!!!

I cant wait to get photoshop!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah I forgot about that, the planet elevators on vanilla Sins use this method don't they and I assume therefore the new starbases use a similar technique. What is interesting about those examples is how the texture is wrapped around the objects in DDS format as opposed to the normal TGA.

I think this is a very under utilised feature of the particle system from the modding community so far and warrants closer scrutiny I can see a lot of potential uses for this.