After having played relentlessly with a sky sphere, I have taken another aproach to building my sky. ..A cube map. Basically, the same thing as a sky box. You build your environment in a 3d application (Bryce in my circumstance), take rendered shots for up, down, left, right, front, and back. The camera fov has to be set correctly and such, but it looks beautiful. I have a few questions reguarding the implementation however.
What would be the fastest (fps) way to handle the cube map?
1. A texture mapped wmb?
2. A mapped inside-out model? -- the texture woudl ebe fairly big however
3...this is an interesting idea.. I thought about setting up all the pics up in code as sprites.
Any ideas suggestion, forseeable problems.
I do have some problems with using a wmb, when you create a hollow cube, it is diffucult to get the 512x512 texture mapped to the cube because of the minute overlapping in the cube, I thought about building each side box separatly, but am worried about leaking.
Anyway for a good refrence article, go here:
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/visual_arts/19981023/skybox_01.htmThey look spectacular, I simply am trying to find the "best" way to do it.
TIA guys,
Cam
---edit---
another idea... a single sprite in the foreground, that is dynamically set to the appropriate view based in the orientation of the ship...I could do this in a dll.
I believe there may be some DirectX routines explicitly for cube maps, but I need to do more research.