TileSets: Skyboxes

[ChupaReaper]

Simply a g3d file like a sphere with a large texture or something, the camrea possition from the skybox should be adjustable too and in the centre of the g3d file by default, this gets rid of the black sky of doom. Skyboxes could also be animated so animation speed control would be very important (could simply rotate to form a sky with clouds maybe having layers of spheres using transparent textures. An option (if not already) to adjust how far the camera can look up and down would be nice so you can zoom right in and have a good look about as if you were in the game.
Before skyboxes a feature to change the colour of the sky and unexplored land would be good too rather than just black all the time, same goes for unseen land which has been explored but isn't visible to any units. Also at the 'end of the world' rather than just going into darkness, the neighbouring tile's texture could be repeated onwards or maybe the skybox would be visible, which ever looks best.
Having a sky, etc would add a bit more life to the game.

[silnarm]

I made my first 'blend-map' a couple of days ago, which in more simple terms means I'll be rewriting the terrain rendering soon, I'll experiment with this when I do so, but I fear getting the edges of the map to extend to the skybox nicely could be tricky... Will let you know how it goes (but it wont be happening until after 0.3 is out).

[wciow]

Simply a g3d file like a sphere with a large texture or something

Already tried that one Chupa  It actually works okay, simply put a large textured G3d sphere as an object in the middle of your map.

The problems are twofold. Firstly the huge model casts weird shadows over the map from certain angles, secondly Silnarm's camera culling is too efficient, so you only see the sky when you are also looking at the centre of the map  a simple "always visible" switch for models might solve this though.

[Omega]

Well, I have some experience of working with sky boxes, and here's my two bits:

-First of all, make sure its a box, sky spheres don't work very well. Plus, they are a dozen times more difficult to make.
-Boxes need to be excluded from lighting, and can't have ANY shadows, neither casted or recieved. Its important that we can't see the edges of the box.
-Boxes are usually placed far from the player. They don't rotate, but they usually move away from the camera. ie: if we move to the left, so does the sky box, so that we never appear to get closer.
-Sky boxes can't be culled. The camera should always be able to see them. In short, the camera only cuts out certain types of objects, such as units, when they get further away.
-Biggest problem is the edge of Glest maps. What would we see then?
-Another problem is fog of war. I have no clue how they would react to this.
-Sky boxes would also need to change depending on the weather. We wouldn't want cloudy skies when its sunny, or sunny skies when its raining.

Overally, sky boxes could be very difficult to impliment in Glest. The fact that we can't see them without rotating the camera, as well that we will usually never play with the camera rotated like that, just makes sky boxes impractical. While I do think they would look great, and wouldn't mind seeing them, I just think they are too difficult and too unneccessary for Glest.

[ChupaReaper]

Well I would like to see skyboxes in GAE, though they shouldn't be a priority for now as multiplayer and AI is more important at the minute, but I still think it would be a nice feature to implement at some point.
At first the edge of the map could should drop off into the sky (it already just goes to black so still a bit odd) or the bottom of the sky box could be grass or whatever so it would still look odd but no as odd as sudden blackness or an endless sky.
The Fog of War would be a problem, at first the sky box should just rendered regardless of the fog of wall, maybe tilesets could change the colour of the fog of war so it's not just black, a nice pale orange would be good for a desert tileset for example, or maybe a fog of war texture could be defined for unexplored ground.
The skybox could darken (or change colour or do nothing depending on tileset settings maybe) when the camera moves into the Fog of War, that would work.

[silnarm]

Ok, I created a ticket... but it has no target set, and wont happen for a long time 

[ChupaReaper]

Ok, I created a ticket... but it has no target set, and wont happen for a long time 

Sounds good to me, there's no rush for something like this when there's more important things to do but it's nice to have.