Skybox Help

[Dridmar]

Hello guys, I looked through the sticky on skyboxes and choose one I will use for my swamp map. I tried to get it to work but I don't know how. Can you please help me out here? Thanks, and please reply fast.

 

[The Man In Black]

If you're just doing it for a TEMPORARY skybox (and Thothie will hate you/me/our grandmas if you leave it in), Make a brush that covers your map, hollow it (you should now have a box around your map) and give it a sky texture.

 

[Dridmar]

Why will thothie hate it if you leave that in?

And I got one of the skyboxes to work.

 

[evilsquirrel]

it causes maps to lag like no other if they aren't uber-small and simplistic.

 

[DarkWasp]

Say you had a can of paint, and you had to saturate EVERY inch of the map. With a skybox just over the sky, all you'd have to do is paint the ground/walls/sky.


But of you made a skybox box around the map, you'd have to paint the ground/flipside-of-ground/sky-on-all-four-sides/walls/flipside-of-walls.


Basicly you are doubling all brushes and making the map a bit bigger aswell.

 

[Thothie]

Why are you encouraging him to draw a box around his map?

Okay... Let me splain something... "Skybox" is a misnomer. Sky textures do not work like normal textures - a sky texture three inches from your face, and 500 feet away look exactaly the same, so you can have the sky as close to the player as you can, and it'll still look like its as high as, well, the sky.

So, make your ceiling as low as possible. The sky should not surround the entire map, rather, it should just be a block on the ceiling (a roof, as it were), painted with the texture SKY. This will likely be a light blue texture (sky blue, as it were), you can find in various wads. The illusion of the sky box will be projected onto this texture in game (but not in Hammer).

Now go to your Hammer's menu bar Map->Map Properties. It will pull up the "worldspawn" entity.

Under "enviromental map (cl_skyname)" you can enter your desired sky. Remember to only include the first part of the skyname up to the last two characters. So if you want the ax_darkclouds sky texture you would enter:
"ax_darkclouds_"
The last two letters are internal to the system for determining panels.

NEVER put a box around your map - not even for testing. If you do, HL will attempt to draw the entire map at once, every frame. This is what makes some maps absolutely unplayable.

Remember, Half-Life will try to draw just about anything it can bounce a ray to, so keep the areas as small as possible, with lots of turns and objects that stretch from floor to ceiling to block VIS. If it doesn't go from floor to ceiling - HL will try to draw whatever is on the other side of it. Hence, map inside box = whole map gets drawn.

 

[Netrogor]

Is that why looking in a certain direction on Helena makes it lag like no-man's land Thothie?? Because of that skybox thing..?

 

[evilsquirrel]

the helena skybox is very tall, for no real reason..

 

[Thothie]

The skybox on helena does not surround the map entirely, but it is much higher than need be.

If you want a good demonstration of skybox lag - go play Jester's unrest1. (Or better yet, the original lostcastle, if you can find it.)