As I have said elsewhere, Skyboxes - There’s a gazillion of 'em. So now that one half of this month’s CCC is skyboxes, I though I would compose a list of what skyboxes there currently are without spamming the CCC’s thread. This list is not exhaustive in that it doesn’t contain any of the skyboxes contained in any of the previous CCC, any module specific skyboxes or other “hidden” skyboxes. So here is the list. I have ordered them alphabetically without implying any preference. The vast majority of these skyboxes are of the traditional rectangular shape. This first batch are, as far as I can tell, single creator haks -
As I said earlier, most skyboxes use the “traditional” rectangular models. The next 2 don’t. That isn’t to say that a few of the skyboxes in the first list don’t also use different models, it’s just that the following 2 obviously aren’t rectangular.
Finally, here are 3 tutorials on making skyboxes. The first is probably the easiest to follow (it must be because it is what my skyboxes, thus far, have been based on.
Agree on models, stock cube has too many problems to bother with. You can get way better look and performance out of practically anything.
We tinker with skyboxes but keep hoping for some better solution stock. Teig posted some findings on nwn.wiki, but we don’t have all the answers yet, just more questions than we started with.
Skybox textures can have alpha and will show fog through without txi (mtr is no go on skybox model textures, so no shaders), so there’s plenty of versatility to be had there. Personally I generally slap textures on the Artful Skies models despite many models having a higher or no cutoff, 1-3MB of dds texture can look great at least at my 1080p. You can get as good results lower, but there’s an art to finding something the game will upscale well. Even my junk phone can take a panoramic image of the sky that looks pretty good, needs better views than I usually have though. On Android it’s a flat enough image that with a little editing will give you a seamless sky. There’s good source images at HDRIs • Poly Haven that are easy to use as well (license free).
Current state of the art is micro texture. 64 pixels in view, get the game to upscale it. I can generate one, but symphony has a great example on vault discord. Also the benefit of no anti-dithering (to fix compression artifacts/banding) or color depth probs to deal with as well. Should be able to get 5000 skyboxes in the disk space of one stock cube map
This was a quick one made helping with sky stuff on a Dark Sun module…doesn’t take fog as well as some of my other stuff, but hopefully conveys the general ideas.
@shadguy There are 2 reasons why I didn’t include that. First I didn’t know about it (I am not the fount of all knowledge after all ) but (second) more importantly, all the items, with the exception of one tutorial, are downloads which @Symphony’s blog page is not. So do you know of any stand alone downloads that I missed?
Yes, some advice/encouragement given there plus the tutorials listed led to my semi-off topic post.
Some things work 1.69+nwncx+some other things. Some things work 8193.34+nwnx_visibility, others maybe pre-shader change (.15ish). I haven’t exhaustively tested all the current txi gadgetry available to see what matters and doesn’t there. Console doesn’t have CC, mobile/tablet got no clue how much is useful. And I don’t know if any of it works with lerp or emitters for more fun.
It’s just a category that I think is low hanging fruit for a big general nwnee improvement, so always throwing my .02 in when the topic (rarely) comes up. But a new tutorial with dev comment on accuracy is definitely needed.
) but (second) more importantly, all the items, with the exception of one tutorial, are downloads which