realistic hires space

[674375f757057RocketMan]

I imagine it really depends on your FOV.  If you're looking through a distant window, it probably won't be an issue.  If you've got your nose to the glass however and are looking at the extreme corners you might see some weird bending going on.  That's just my guess.

[674375f757213voodoo47]

checked the latest GSkybox1.7z pack, and this is good enough for a release (earth could use a bit of that outer glow I think, but hey that's just me). let me know if you are planning to tweak it further, if not, I'll fix that one incorrect texture, convert to dds and upload as a full mod.

[674375f7574d5Grosnus]

Couple of things definitely need fixing, I'll probably go back to it somewhere next week as I am a little busy atm.

About the size of the earth - just like others said, unfortunately even if I was able to properly render earth that spans over several sides of the skybox, I'd bet that it would appear round only at a specific camera angle. Also I didn't wanted to make it too big to preserve quality of the image I used. Actually I already had to sharpen it significantly.

I'll see what I can do about the glow but it's not going to be a big increase. IMHO we already have Vurt's "pretty" version of the skybox and the concept was to make something different, but still a better option than vanilla.

Moon might be a good idea too, dunno, I am kind of neutral about it. I guess it's more likely that it would be visible somewhere rather than not.

[674375f7576a7voodoo47]

ok. also, I would leave the earth size alone, I think it looks best with a fair chunk of space visible as well. as mentioned before, this doesn't have to be 100% accurate representation of what would be visible from a real space station orbiting earth, it just needs to look good and believable enough. about the moon - it is present in RM package, and for some reason (maybe because it is at the edge of one texture), it looks really flat and makes the skybox look less believable. unless you can avoid that somehow, I'd just leave it out.

[674375f757809RocketMan]

I imagine what you mean is, because the moon is smaller, it's not as detailed and therefore doesn't provide the same illusion of 3 dimensions that the obvious curvature of the Earth gives.  Perfectly valid.  I should point out however that the orbital "plane" of the moon is not the same as the Earth-Sun plane, so if you are able to see the Earth fairly square, as is the case now, the Moon would either be above or below the Earth, behind the station, or eclipsed by the Earth.  It's definitely not a show stopper but my vote is to put it somewhere.  To avoid having to deal with gibbous or crescent moons, you could put the moon almost directly behind the Earth and above/below it so that the sun illuminates it the same.

[674375f7579a5ZylonBane]

Grosnus' skybox looks really good, but the version I downloaded has a texture orientation error near the top. Or has that already been fixed?

[674375f757aafvoodoo47]

yeah, that package contains one incorrect texture, just delete it, and replace it with the second top texture (delete skyt.png, copy stationt.png and rename to skyt.png). or wait for the next version, Grosnus said he'll be uploading it sometime this week.

[674375f757b8aZylonBane]

Sounds good. So is this going to be incorporated into 400? If not, I totally want it for SHTUP-ND.

[674375f757c61voodoo47]

it will do just fine as a standalone mod I think.

[674375f757d46ZylonBane]

Meaning?

[674375f757e3fvoodoo47]

that it will be moved to the mods subsection once finished. but I see no problem in it becoming part of SHTUP either, as long as Grosnus is ok with it.

[674375f758037Grosnus]

Ok, here's an update, probably last: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13017979/GSkybox2.rar
I fixed minor quality problems regarding Earth's texture, added Moon (can always be removed by replacing "stations" with "skys") and changed how Milky Way wraps around the skybox, so there's a greater chance you will see it through windows.

1,2,3,4

And I think that's it.

@voodoo47, @ZylonBane: I never really intended this skybox to be very faithful to the vanilla one (If I would I'd probably make more giant nebulae, like in Vurt's), but if you think it will work fine as a replacement then I don't mind it being included in any other mod.

[674375f7581c2voodoo47]

looking good. only one thing - the moon is too far to the right, it will never be visible from the (currently existing) station windows. I'd recommend moving it either more to the left on the stations texture (first pic), or even better, somewhere into the middle of the stationt texture (second pic).

[674375f758324Grosnus]

I moved Moon to the left on the stations.png, moving it to the top texture would force me to rotate Earth about 90° which I wanted to avoid. Instead I moved one of the nebulae to the stationt.
The archive is now updated (see my previous post).

[674375f758739ZylonBane]

@voodoo47, @ZylonBane: I never really intended this skybox to be very faithful to the vanilla one (If I would I'd probably make more giant nebulae, like in Vurt's), but if you think it will work fine as a replacement then I don't mind it being included in any other mod.

Awesome, thanks! The original vanilla skybox is actually pretty sparse, other than the two or three nebulae scattered on it. Your much more dense starfield is more visually interesting all over. Now, if you want to see giant nebulae, look at the unused space skybox in the fam/sky folder (as opposed to fam/skyhw).

Just so you know, for the SHTUP version I'm thinking about replacing the Earth image with this one. IMHO the photorealistic Earth looks strange next to SS2's stylized, almost cartoonish art style.

EDIT: Hmm, now that I've checked it out in-game, I think I liked the previous version better. Having the Milky Way strips running horizontally somehow seems less interesting than before, where their orientation drew the eye upward and downward. Also, for the Earth skybox, it's less realistic-- the solar system is oriented diagonally to the galactic plane.

EDIT2: Oops, the stationb texture is missing.

[674375f7588e7RocketMan]

Hypothetical question:  To get around the skybox limitations for very large outdoor environments, is it feasible to create a ginormous dodecahedron brush and tile a space texture all over the inside of it?  I mean what if you want an entire level to exist inside of a visible space field without the stars looking like shit?

[674375f758a50Grosnus]

Yep, solar system is oriented diagonally to our galaxy which is why both version are wrong. I originally wanted to do it that way but making it diagonal would require a bit more work at the edges of the skybox and I ran out of time. I want to get back to it at some point and fix it, as I feel that visually it would be the best choice (apart from being more realistic).

I could even upload two versions, both horizontal and vertical as it's really easy to change it in project.

Added stationb and re-uploaded the archive: link

[674375f758cffZylonBane]

Hypothetical question:  To get around the skybox limitations for very large outdoor environments

What limitations? 

[674375f758ea2RocketMan]

Grosnus:  I shouldn't have posted in this thread, my bad.  I wasn't referring to your mod but just asking a general question actually.

ZB:  Well, you can't tile on a given face of a skybox can you?  I mean if you do the N,S,E,W,T,B proper skybox and you make it massive enough to envelope an entire level, wouldn't every little star look like a giant fuzzy blob?  I'm trying to figure out if you can make some super big brush to fit a level in, which would serve as a skybox but would allow you to preserve a decent amount of detail.  A dodeca was just my first idea since it's roughly sphere shaped.

[674375f758fc5ZylonBane]

This is where I would normally ask the other person if they actually know what a skybox is. Or I might explain to them that a skybox doesn't have a size in any meaningful sense-- that it's just a box rendered around the camera before anything else is drawn.

But I know you know what a skybox is, so I'm really confused by the things you're typing.

[674375f759283Olfred]

Well, there are games where you have to create a box manually and declare it as sky.
Don't know how it is handeled by the DarkEngine.

But when you don't do it manually and it got this automatic mechanism then you won't get big blurry blobs if you make the level bigger since it's probably get's drawn in relation to your character.

It really depends on the engine used, ZylonBane probably knows a lot more about how the DarkEngine does it.

[674375f7593f5RocketMan]

Right... of course... I was just kidding 

I think you give me too much credit for these things lol.  However, when I look in medsci cryo recovery, of course, I see only a small box outside the window that clearly fakes the grand expanse you're talking about.  Makes sense now.

Let me put it a different way.  I want to have real space around a level because I want to fill it with things and be able to use the space, not just provide scenery for the player.  Imagine a space ship that you could actually circumnavigate if you wanted to without running into the DromED abyss.  I suppose then you could still use a skybox and just make it huge but is that the best option?

[674375f7596deZylonBane]

I suppose then you could still use a skybox and just make it huge but is that the best option?

A skybox doesn't physically exist in the level. It's a purely visual effect, that is for all practical purposes at infinite distance from the camera. Any time you see a "grand expanse of space" in SS2, what you're actually looking at is a patch of terrain that's been painted with a special texture that tells the engine to let the skybox be visible.

[674375f7598c6RocketMan]

Ok so that little brush I was looking at in medsci must have been for the satellite explosion sequence then. 

So does that mean I can put a big giant brush around a level and use the intervening space without having to worry about what it looks like because the "skybox" has been enabled and will portray the same background regardless?

Basically I get what you're saying about the skybox being a virtual construct and all.  What I'm having trouble with is understanding where it gets rendered, what it's being rendered on and whether that's going to interfere with or be interfered by anything I'm doing outside of my solid brush (my level) and inside a larger air brush.  If my character is floating in space outside of a ship (which itself contains 90% of the level), and he looks all around him, are there going to be strange visual artifacts, objects in space being clipped, perspective problems, etc?  That's why, as an alternative, I'm wondering if it might be better to actually manually texture the inside surface of the huge air brush so that there is no skybox but just real space textures tiled instead.