[Sp7777]

Whats a good program or tutoriald for making space skyboxes?

[Anaz]

go to www.gamedev.net

I imagine that they will be much more helpful

[Black Wolf]

Forgive mine ignorance, but...what's a skybox? I first jumped in thinking it said Skybaxes -

[Bobboau]

I'm prety sure he's talking about the backgrounds in FRED

[Petrarch of the VBB]

Hmm, they're hardly skyboxes though, are they. Skyboxes are what you use in the Unreal engine, are they not?

[Anaz]

most other outdoor FPSs use them. They are simply a box that goes around the whole "world" and has some type of sky texture applied to it.

[SKYNET-011]

Where's that welcome beam...

[ZylonBane]

A skybox is a nothing more or less than a cubic environment map. The term originated in the 3D rendering world.

I've played around quite a bit with using the FRED background editor to make skyboxes, but was hampered by a couple of nonoptimal behaviors on FS's part. First, it clips pixels off the right and bottom edges of bitmaps, and second, it doesn't scale the same vertically as it does horizontally. Makes it all but impossible to get seamless joins.

[StratComm]

Why don't you try a box with the normals flipped?  ST:Armada uses a technique something like this, with acceptable results.  I'm not positive that FS would take it but that would get your seam problems resolved fairly easily.  Of course there is always the issue of scale on the mission level, as you really don't want to confine space with a box if you don't have to, but if you are trying to do an atmosphere effect of some kind that's probably the way to go.

[ZylonBane]

No. Rendering a skybox in gamespace simply doesn't look right, and is just asking for trouble.

Now if someone on the SCP wants to get involved, note that FS already supports a "skybox" in the form of the subspace tunnel. All they have to do is modify it so you can specify the subspace POF (and spin) on a per-mission basis. Ta-dah!

[StratComm]

I never said that it would look good, it just seems to be the only rational way of skyboxing a level.  using panel images in the background is even more problematic.  That could work; hadn't thought about subspace.  I'm still not fully convinced that it would look any better that way than as a box though.