I now officially have no idea what to do about the sky/background in my old project. I have tried putting regular xyz+6.tga, mat color xyz+6.tga, tried to match sky color with fog, tried to apply different shaders to skycube but nothing produced any usable result:(

I am open to all suggestions concerning this, all in a sense that it can be a realistic,unrealistic, minimal, b&w, psychedelic, experimental, ..as long as it can look good I am willing to give it a shot:)

So if anyone has a good sky solution implemented or an idea for a good sky solution or knows of a project with a good sky solution, please help out:) Btw I can only use C-Script for this.

EDIT:
The sky should also be usable as a background because there are places in the levels that allow player to see the lower parts of the sky cube.

Just get a nice looking skycube... I don't get your problem. On cgtextures you'll find great ones!

@Heelix
Thanks for reply, I looked at CGT again but I found only 360 degree sky textures & partial sky images:(

..but I had a lucky turn yesterday & found almost a satisfactory solution that combines two skycube+6 images & a rotating sphere. For preliminary testing I used Boulder_bay+6.tga: the thing is to cut out the sky, replace it with a nice mat coloring & add a sphere with clouds:)

Here is my quick test app, files need more work & a better sky cube image with better sky cutout but the main concept is there:
http://www.4shared.com/get/rVnf6QbK/SkyTest.html



If someone has a better idea on how to do sky(background) or a way to enhance this concept I am open for suggestions:)

you know what I do?
i set sky color in code
i make a transparent cloudy sky tga file. the transparency allows my sky to still have the color set in the code. that way i can have my cloudy sky and change the colors dynamically in code.
on top of that i add a transparent 6 sided PNG skycube for eventual mountains. and that not only looks awesome it also is dynamically changeable and doesnt use alot of recources...

It's not a bad concept, changing of sky color sounds good. I guess it could also work for this thing if I separate sky+6 from mountains+6 and place them in different layers. What do you do for clouds?

a sky.tga file that consists of grey clouds without color and an alpha channel for transparency. a simple hollow cube with that texture applie and the clouds will move nicely and be transparent. you could also use a skysphere with the same settings but i found that to be not as nice....

I don't know if I get it, do you use sky surface flag & dome for clouds or you have your own code for cloud movement?

create 512*256 texture
create clouds on both sides, tileable (2 tiles, one left one right)
make alpha channel transparency
save as sky.tga
open WED.
make hollow cube.
texture it with texture named sky.tga
build
done

edit:
okay if anyone spell checks it i will write that WED tutorial seriously somebody needs to explain this editor to the people...

He,he I get it now but this is the same thing as using the standard GS cloud dome through script, except this way you can't specify the layer number:) I tried this of course but I don't like the way clouds are changing their pan when camera moves, it kills the entire thing for me. Did you manage to prevent clouds from shifting their pan in your levels?