by mh » Fri Oct 21, 2011 11:41 pm
The sky could be done with 3 cubemaps.
The first (furthest back) one has clouds and rotates the texture matrix. Likewise the second (middle). The third (frontmost) has alpha 0 in the source images where the clouds should show. No need for rotating spheres drawn at a distance, this can be done directly on the original world geometry. The cloud layers needn't be high-res - clouds are pretty fuzzy anyway so a 256-size cubemap may even be enough; the mountains layer can be as high-res as your hardware can take. One pass in a shader (that could also include brightness factors, as well as other properties to make it look cooler). You could even go nuts and have many more layers, if your hardware was up to the job of running it. Blend between 2 "day layers" and 2 "night layers" for the clouds, then add in the frontmost/mountains layer with a fade to black/night colour. Nice day/night cycles.
It may even be possible to do without shaders, if you're comfortable with setting up texture combine modes, but any hardware that's capable of it would probably also be capable of shaders too, and shaders are just so much easier to do this kind of thing with.