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Maybe you could have used Shockwave or something? But until WebGL implementations were shipped in 2011, there was no 3D API accessible from Javascript. At the time, Google Maps just did 2D tile scrolling. I remember being super impressed when it started letting you zoom out to the globe like you could do in Google Earth.

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It's trivially easy to do 3D graphics using a 2D API if you don't need rasterized z-buffering (which Stellaris obviously doesn't).

You should try writing some code to pixel-shade a screen-sized canvas in JS (which you'd have to do to get the textured skybox). I don't think the performance would be usable, especially 15+ years ago.

You simply chop up the textured skybox into tiles and then draw them using transform and drawImage. This was supported beginning in 2008.

Sure it wouldn't be as perfectly accurate as a custom shader for rendering accurately rendering each pixel of a spherical skybox, but it would certainly be good enough.

Alright, seems plausible in this case :)

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