please support dds sky cubes (there is a cube map option for dds files).

and it would be nice if skies could be displayed without preparing the level with sky surfaces in WED. i would like to have an option to just display the sky in the background (drawn before everything else). wouldn't this also make sense for lite-c where WED isn't available?

There are several examples in the lite-C tutorial for a level without anything but the sky -

level_load("");
ent_create("mysky+6.tga",....);


DDS sky cubes will be supported.

I noticed the new variable d3d_skydepth on the beta page. Please explain it a little more how to use this. E.g., if I would set d3d_skydepth = 4;, will then a 6144 x 1024 DDS be accepted as skycube or not (this was originally ventilators and my intention)?

No, it still needs to be a TGA sky cube; it's internally compressed. This solution replaces my promised support of DDS sky cubes, which turned out to be difficult because DDS files can't be loaded before DirectX is initialized.

Would it be then possible to load a DDS skycube during runtime (after DirectX initialization)? I load all my ressources dynamically and a DDS skycube solutionduring runtime would be great! Can't you print a compiler error when a user tries to define a DDS file in a static sky definition but allow to load the DDS during runtime?

As it has been accepted by you, the promised material functions (to load a texture surface from file or from bitmap to individual instances of one entity (-model), see here) could serve for the DDS skycube feature. What do you think?