Undertow Games Forum

I noticed that the skybox is just a cube shape, well, if you look closely at the real sky, you may notice it looks round. Well I was thinking of the sky model of being re-made to a sphere shape instead of square for a realistic look

It's faster to render a skybox instead of a skydome.

It's faster? well, if im honest, im putting this as smooth as I can, but that kind of sounds sort of lazy. We need to put effort into this game, so quicker? Balls to that, even if it so much as making the skybox, EVERYTHING needs effort.

I hope I didn't sound like too much of a dyke there.

What I meant is that a skybox has less of an impact on performance than a skydome. Since Blitz3D uses DirectX 7, this could be important.

What if we had a low poly sphere with ~50 faces, or would that be enough to decrease the performance?
Don't know how that would look though. The current skybox works fine IMO.

Skyboxes can look pretty convincing if they're done right, though, as a example have some of HL2's maps.

But of course, getting them right is REALLY hard.

The skyboxes in-game are pretty darn convincing, I don't really think a skydome's necessary for the effect it's trying to achieve, since it already seems its doing fine.

Dynamic or 3D skyboxes seem sort of neat though, Gate A seems like it could need something like that for the complete abyss in front of it.

Omniary wrote: Dynamic or 3D skyboxes seem sort of neat though, Gate A seems like it could need something like that for the complete abyss in front of it.

Oh yes, one feels as if the area would be surrounded by a few roads and hangars before coming to an end in some kind of abrupt fenced area, followed by an extensive flat/hill plane and then the mountains in the background.

Irontaco wrote:

Omniary wrote: Dynamic or 3D skyboxes seem sort of neat though, Gate A seems like it could need something like that for the complete abyss in front of it.

Oh yes, one feels as if the area would be surrounded by a few roads and hangars before coming to an end in some kind of abrupt fenced area, followed by an extensive flat/hill plane and then the mountains in the background.

It'd be nice to also see dynamic entities in the skybox, like helicopters, ospreys or jets, maybe an APC on ground level. Not too sure how complex that'd be.

Omniary wrote:It'd be nice to also see dynamic entities in the skybox, like helicopters, ospreys or jets, maybe an APC on ground level. Not too sure how complex that'd be.

I believe you'd need to animate the skybox for that, wouldn't it be easier to have low poly models far away which permanently follow a settled route?