[AlexG]

After another hiatus I am back again. NO STOP! I have already been welcomed. Don't welcome beam me again! The skin grafts from the burns last time are just beginning to heal and I don't want any more surgeries. 

Anyway, one of the problems I have noticed about forum searches is that it's often hard to find the answer you're looking for unless you can hop onto the train of logic shared only by the posters and the forum search protocols themselves. So, with that said, I'm going to just go ahead and ask this question even though I am sure it's been asked and answered at least a billion times before.

I am working on FREDing now. I did the extended walkthrough and I intend to make a simple mission of my own, and then try something at the Academy. But in trying to mess about with the backgrounds I haven't had any luck. A bit of searching told me I could use starfield.pof which improved the situation tremendously, but I wanted to see what other skyboxes there were. I know about VPView and using that to view the contents of VP files. Now the only question remaining is, where oh WHERE is the proper VP file? I've look through them all looking for starfield.pof, thinking that perhaps some of the other skyboxes would be in the same place, but I can't even find where starfield lives. Can someone tell me?

EDIT: On a completely unrelated but somewhat annoying note, clicking on ships to drag them in FRED isn't working. Instead I have to click on the name plate that hovers underneath the ship and drag that instead. Is that a feature or an issue?

[Stormkeeper]

EDIT: On a completely unrelated but somewhat annoying note, clicking on ships to drag them in FRED isn't working. Instead I have to click on the name plate that hovers underneath the ship and drag that instead. Is that a feature or an issue?

Its somewhere between a feature and an issue. Because of the variable ship sizes, I think FRED was written to handle selection using the name plate, because no matter the size of your damn ship, the name plate stays the same. In that way, you just have to locate the name plate to manipulate the ship, which is handy when you're zoomed out and can't see the tiny Loki anymore.

As for the skybox, I'm not too sure myself where they can be found, but iirc, there were options in FRED itself for the skyboxes.

[AlexG]

As for the skybox, I'm not too sure myself where they can be found, but iirc, there were options in FRED itself for the skyboxes.

What I have when I go into the Background Editor is a textbox where I can type in the name of a skybox to use, and a browse button. But since you can't browse to .pof files located inside of a .vp, you seem to just have to know the name of the skybox you want and type it in (just like starfield.pof). Once I find the proper VP file I can find out what all the names are and try different ones until I see one I like, but not until.

[WMCoolmon]

It's in MV_Assets, in data/models, of the newest MediaVPs (3.6.10). In the old ones (3.6.8), it's probably in mv_models or mv_effects.

There's not any other popular skyboxes that I know of besides the one in the MediaVPs, but you can have a bit of fun by making models that use different textures. You can use any POF as a skybox, I think, but since it's more or less just a big box with a texture applied to it, you can create something totally different by upgrading/changing the texture.

You can also change the skybox in the middle of a mission with set-skybox-model[/feature pimp]