InsideQC Forums

I'm creating a level for Makaqu (tochris has the same skybox code) and i would like to know how do i create a skybox? Should i create a box around my level and wrap a texture around it? Won't that fuck the VIS?

I'm using Q1BSP and Hammer, with hmap2.

yes that would drop your fps you could do it to test your map, but there's better ways to make a sky box. im heading to lunch but by the next time i get on a computer if no ones helped you ill try to find you a good tutorial. but basically just pretend its a ceiling and you have to connect walls to it from your walls.

I'm confused by the engine... they tell me to put the textures in gfx/env and specify a sky name in the worldspawn... will the engine create a brush for me automatically?

Don't think about it in terms of brushes or map geometry, skyboxes don't work that way at all. They're an engine feature rather than a map feature.

Just create your map as normal, including standard Q1 sky brushes and textures; no need to to anything special there. Add the sky key to your worldspawn and the engine will look after the rest.

I don't understand... i have my map here and, obviously, it has leaks, since in those areas the players should be able to see the sky. Should i wrap a box around it and use any texture?

No, don't wrap a box, don't even think about it in those terms. Just fill the holes with normal skybrushes, the exact same way as if you were building a map that didn't have a skybox.

Assuming that you then have the skybox textures in the correct directory and the sky key in your worldspawn, the engine will load the textures and draw the cube, using it instead of the normal sky brushes.

Like I said, skyboxes are all in the engine and absolutely nothing to do with the map.

Build your map in exactly the same way you would do with WinQuake/GLQuake (that's it, using brushes with a regular Quake sky texture to seal the map hull). When loaded in regular Quake, your map will show the selected sky texture, but when loaded in any engine with skyboxes enabled, this sky texture is not rendered; instead, it will render a box with 8192 units wide, made up of 6 images (usually, 128x128 pixels TGA,PCX or JPEG - check the engine instructions) named <something>up, <something>dn, <something>lf, <something>rt, <something>ft, <something>bk, around your level, creating the illusion of a distant background scenario. But you still need to seal completely your map, just like before.

Ok guys, thanks. Should i use any special name for the sky texture?

JasonX wrote:Ok guys, thanks. Should i use any special name for the sky texture?

No, just remember to add the suffixes frag.machine specified. And you could try to keep the name simple and short.

I remember, back in the days when I used Qoole for mapping (more than 10 years ago) and didn't have a clue about sealing and whatnot, I simply made a single flat brush with the sky texture, really large, up high above the outdoor area . Mainly because I didn't like how rockets exploded against it when it was close, so if I moved it up really high, you wouldn't notice as easily. Back then I didn't understand lighting either, so I had lots of fullbright maps. Fun times.

Makaqu actually supports skyboxes in maps with no sky surfaces.

Fightoon's railway stage is an example. All that map has are the railway bridge's brushes and a .spr model for the wood in the railway, because it runs faster in Makaqu when not VISed.

Plus, avoiding the necessity of including an unused regular sky texture in the map helps to keep the memory requirements low.