3D Skyboxes

[Preach]

Exactly how difficult would it be to add support for 3d skyboxes - the kind of thing you see in half-life 2 - into the quake engine? The sort of thing I had in mind is having a worldspawn key called "skymap" that would tell you the bsp file to render in place of a 2D skybox - although to complicate things that bsp could have a conventional 2D skybox as well. The "skymap" could, if need be, be made at 1/16th scale so that you could render much further than usual with this.


I have this vague idea that the crude way of doing it would be to render the "skymap" in full first, then render the world - omitting the sky polygons - without clearing the buffer. But instantly two problems strike me with that: one is that there would be a lot of overdraw, the other is that this method leads to a problem from early ports of quake engines. You start to see bits of the map through what should be "solid", line of sight blocking sky. I don't think either of these things are a huge hurdle to overcome, but I've been wrong before, so thoughts welcome...

[leileilol]

q3map2's already got a hacky way, try it, it's _skyroom entity

[frag.machine]

You don't need a separated .bsp to do that. Just be sure the map has a sealed room, render normally from inside it (ie. including ordinary sky textures or conventional skyboxes), then clear the Z buffer and render the world skipping any sky polygons. A simple "skyroom" coordinate in the worldspawn info would be enough. OTOH, separated sky rooms would help in the case of original id maps.

[Labman]

[Spike]

[Sajt]

[frag.machine]

[Sajt]

[Urre]

[frag.machine]

[Sajt]

[Preach]

[Sajt]

[Preach]

[frag.machine]