Hello,
I just installed Blender 2.7 on Win7 and Mac Os, and on both systems, I’m missing the Stars panel in the World settings for Blender Render.
Has the panel been forgotten, discarded or simply relocated?
Greetings
They did away with stars. You could keep a old version of blender on your desktop for those Christmas cards through. Actually, in no time someone will come up with a new way of making stars probably with physics. Check YouTube a month from now maybe.
You can kind of fake it using a Stucci texture for the world background. Turn on the color ramp and adjust values to make the stars the size you want. Remember to set the mapping to Angular and set the influence to Horizon for the texture to map correctly when the camera moves. Not an exact replacement but for simple scenes it might work.
Attachments
27_fake_stars.blend (75.8 KB)
Thx people, for the feedback, Atom, nice workaround ! 
This looks pretty amazing as well:
http://blenderthings.blogspot.com/2013/04/an-osl-starfield-shader-for-blender.html
@ FutureHack : Very effective indeed, but Cycles is about everything, nevertheless, BI is often prefered if you have an old machine…
However, here one blend from me I did a while ago, it’s a very basic setup I did in cycles for a starry night:
Attachments
Starry_night.blend (514 KB)
You can make a pretty decent one with the particle system:
This took roughly 10 min to make
I think you can do a much better on in Gimp though. It has a couple nice plugins, (Stars in the sky, and Supernova)
I did this one a couple years ago ( I could do much better now…):
Either one could be applied to the world as a background with some other adjustments.
Hi. Really like the ‘star field’ using stucci. But… when using in a pan shot, the stars don’t move. I’ve tried a few things but any ideas to keep them ‘steady’ as the camera moves?
I got this one working and its well adjustable… Thanks for that
i have not used the latest blender version yet but i would advise against using the stars settings in that panel, in my experience: using them will either crash the program, or t will render stars so close to you that they will pass through objects in your scene. both are bad. the method i use for stars is to have a very high res image(the european southern observatory website is good for these) textured onto a bleeping huge sphere(out to 100 kilometres when using 10 metre long models), keep your action and camera near the centre and give the sphere a slight glow and it comes out well. it could be improved by putting a couple of modelled stars randomly onto points on the sphere. failure to make the sphere big enough leads to things that look fine in still shots but that quickly descend into hilarity when the camera starts moving and parallax and perspective effects become visible. you will need to use gimp to make the image seamless.
If it helps anyone, Playing with my logo, I tried doing stars using a circle and then instead of setting as Surface, set to Halo. I stacked a few, and also did a few using a sphere mesh. Resizing with x,y,z coordinates and colors to get different effects and stretching. You have to play with the settings on the halo section (alpha/size/etc) and I would imagine if I played with it more, I could get a pretty cool look. I will probably try playing with particles next. Hope it helps, it was pretty simple once you got the hang of it.
abitowhit
That’s looks pretty okay, but like Neal Evans said about the “stucci” version - it’s not moving when the camera moves, so you could only use it in stills. By the way, is there a reason why you subtract -0.9 instead of adding 0.9? 
I use a method similar to that jagdpanther suggested. I find an equirectangular image (ESO has a very nice one of the milky way), and I project that onto a sphere with inverse normals (so that it shows in BGE as well). The main difference is that I apply a Copy Location constraint onto the sphere with the camera as the target, so I don’t have to worry about the camera getting too close to the sphere and messing up parallax, etc.
Hi. I posted about the missing stars and after a bit of mucking around got to use particals.
Hi. I posted about the missing stars and after a bit of mucking around got into use particals. Using 3 identical spheres, encompassing the whole area, one with a dense back ground (for the ‘infinite’ galaxy’s bit) the second for a few bight spots (planets) and a third for oddities (I used a few blue particles) for that occasional super nova! Obviously its very important to get the settings correct, mainly to stabilize the image as you do an animation (or your stars, literally fall out of the sky). And by adding objects and using ‘emit’ you can get things seriously bright, if one needs it. But the main bit i like is, they stay still as the camera pans! Can’t seem to up load an animation… I’ll continue trying.
Might also want to add a separate render layer for the sky. That way you can apply effects in the compositor. Great for streaks and glow on the stars, but not affecting the foreground stuff. 