A Sky

[jaimele]

this may not be possible, but i was wondering if i could somehow change the black expanse at the edge of a typical map to another color (like a very light shade of blue instead of black)? Then when i tilt the camera up in the editor or game, it will give the appearance of a sky. can i mod this somehow? it would be so great if possible...

[feneur]

There is a sky, but since it's so rarely seen it's not active for anything else than reflections at the moment. If I remember correctly it's because of performance reasons. Eventually we plan to make it an option to have it show or not, but at the moment it's not displayed. It might be a while as we're focusing on gameplay features and performance improvements before we do much work on things which are only visual.

[jaimele]

There is a sky, but since it's so rarely seen it's not active for anything else than reflections at the moment. If I remember correctly it's because of performance reasons. Eventually we plan to make it an option to have it show or not, but at the moment it's not displayed. It might be a while as we're focusing on gameplay features and performance improvements before we do much work on things which are only visual.

ok i can wait =)

[Wijitmaker]

If I remember correctly it's because of performance reasons.

If I recall correctly the reason was because the "box" using the skybox textures (in the standard default viewing angle) was causing the edges of the map to inherit the colors of the skybox. So what you ended up with was various shades of blue around the edges of the map, not black. Philip modified the rendering engine to only show the skybox to the be reflected through the water textures. It was an easy "fix". I believe the correct fix would be to modify all of the skybox textures so that they were black from the horizon (prefect halfway point of the texture) down, and re-implement the feature.

[feneur]

If I recall correctly the reason was because the "box" using the skybox textures (in the standard default viewing angle) was causing the edges of the map to inherit the colors of the skybox. So what you ended up with was various shades of blue around the edges of the map, not black. Philip modified the rendering engine to only show the skybox to the be reflected through the water textures. It was an easy "fix". I believe the correct fix would be to modify all of the skybox textures so that they were black from the horizon (prefect halfway point of the texture) down, and re-implement the feature.

Aha, that sounds logical

[Ykkrosh]

Jason recalls correctly - it has no effect on performance, it was just changed so the map fades nicely to black at its edges. We probably ought to design the skyboxes so they are black at the horizon (i.e. if you look horizontally along the ground, it'll be black below the ground and fade to colour above the ground), after changing the renderer so we don't waste half the texture for storing that blackness. (Actually we could probably do it entirely in the renderer by blending a fade-from-black texture at runtime, to save the effort of changing all the graphics (other than cropping the side textures in half), or something like that.)

You can change the black by editing "skycolor" in the config file (see binaries/data/config/default.cfg).