Skies

PostFatal

Is there a tutorial for making sky boxes. My skies look pretty good except there is a disc in the middle when looking up that has nothing but a matching color. I know that the original games only allowed a limited ability to look up (if at all) but now with full mouselook the sky needs help. Also if you can point me somewhere that would make the clouds move I would appreciate it. thanks. I know this has been posted somewhere but danged if I can find it.

KuriKai

are you making a skybox or a normal sky?

PostFatal

LOL, I have no idea. All I know is that if I look up there is a circular disc area that has no texture. I have clouds about 2/3 of the way up and then no clouds. I would like to at least fill the void and after I've mastered that maybe make an animated sky. I just don't know where to start. I have the same sort of thing in doom, heretic, and hexen.

I don't know if it matters but my OS is Vista Ultimate 64 bit and my Vid card is ATI 4870 with 512 mem. I have 4 gig of ram and an AMD 9850 quad core in an MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard.

Psychikon

Did you write out the definitions for the sky?

http://www.dengine.net/dew/index.php?title=Sky

Notice for the Model definition how it has the Yaw and Yaw Speed choices? Those will cause the sky to spin, and for an actual SKYBOX, you may need to make your own model to define the sky faces to be drawn on, or perhaps you could ask KuriKai for one (he made a cool skybox from what I saw) and the credit for that can be given him in the credits or something like that.

PostFatal

Ok, this is an old thread but I am in the same place as then, where do I find the sky def? I have changed sky texture 2 so that it is night, it is a greyscale and looks dark. I have a sky3 that has lightning and makes the sky blue. I'm not real happy with it and am thinking of doing another greayscale. I love the sky so far but I would like the surroundings to reflect the change from night to lightning. I am only dealing with the first map at this point. (Hexen) I'm thinking that the whole outdoor part should be greyscale and then the lightning should add color. But I'm ahead of myself, I simply want to make the sky spin at this point.

PostFatal

I really don't know what I'm doing and I guess nobody has the time to help. I just want to make the sky in Hexen map01 spin slowly.
I understand from Psychikon that I need variables for yaw in a ded but couldn't find a sky ded. I copied the sample from the wiki as follows. It doesn't work and I know it's probably missing lots of important things but the wiki really isn't much help.

Sky
{
    ID = "Map01";
    Flags = flaga | flagb | flagc;
    Height = 0.666667;
    Horizon offset = 0.0;
    Light color { 1.0  1.0  1.0 };

    Layer 2
    {
        Flags = flaga | flagb | flagc;
        Texture = "";
        Offset = 0.0;
        Color limit = 0.0;
    };

    Model
    {
        ID = "";
        Layer = 0;
        Frame interval = 1.0;
        Color { 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 };
        Offset factor { 0.0 0.0 0.0 };
        Rotate { 0.0 0.0 };
        Yaw = 1.0;
        Yaw speed = 3.0;
        Execute = "";
    };
}

It didn't work but at least it didn't stop the game loading so I don't feel too idiotic.

DaniJ

I think the reason you might be confused is because Psychikon is assuming that you intend to use a model for the sky. The yaw property he describes is actually in the Model sub-element definition and is applied only to a 3D model. In this setup you would build/find a sky model, apply your texture to it, write a Model definition and then finally write a Sky definition which references that model and applies the spin. The same method cannot currently be used to "spin" the texture applied to the sky-dome.

It sounds to me that you are more interested in something simpler, such as the spinning you see in the later stock Hexen maps? If so then what you want to do is to replace the MAPINFO definition for that map (note that this is not the DED definition of the same name. Also ensure to use only the Hexen syntax and features as other ports have extended this in ways that Doomsday does not currently support).

PostFatal

Thank you for your reply. I have read the link and still do not know what I'm to do to keep the sky as is with lightning and such but with a slow spin. Map 07 and 09 do exactly what I want but don't have the lightning, I suppose I could adapt one of their mapinfo files to work on map 01 but, where do I find this mapinfo file? I don't want to be a pest but I'm just not understanding this.

DaniJ

You can find the original Hexen definitions in the MAPINFO data lump in your Hexen.wad (IWAD). To extract it you'll need either a GUI program such as SLADE, or some other suitable tool such as wadtool (which is installed by default along with Doomsday and can be found in the /bin folder on Windows).

PostFatal

Thank you so much, I have found that map 26 is doing exactly what I want and is using my altered sky textures as well so I think I only need to find that file and copy it with a map number change for map01. Once that is done I will tear into my rain pk3 and try to change the color of the rain. It is a sort of glowing blue and looks quite odd with my dark sky. I guess I'm spoiled by the beautiful rain effect in the Darkplaces/Quake Epsilon bundle. It looks great with impact rings and spatter when the raindrops hit the ground.

Edit: I extracted the mapinfo and got a txt file. I altered map 01 where needed then deleted everything else and saved. I then renamed mapinfo.txt to mapinfo.lmp and placed it into myresource.pk3\Data\jHexen\Auto folder and it works perfectly. Now to get rid of the glowing blue rain. Thanks again for your help.

Edit: The above edit proved to be a mistake. I had to keep ALL mapinfo intact and also it only needed to go into the root of my resource.pk3 or simply zipped and renamed as a pk3 to be used on it's own.