Best way to do a space sky box/sphere/whatever

Hey guys,

Question.. what's the best way to make a good looking sky for a space based game?

I've tried using large textures on a box, sphere, geo-sphere, etc .. but they all look pretty bad..

We're looking to make something of this quality:



Any tips on how to achieve this would be much appreciated :)

Tracer

This is quite good

http://www.diardsoftware.com/

Steve.

Not an uncommon problem, but, all methods can make the same affect, and look perfect. For a box you'll need to strech the content in a special way, spheres made from lots of polys can be hard to handle, and will up a bit more resources.

You say they look bad, could be your general artist skills. But maybe you could use Tattoo or something similar (dunno if it's good for such a task) and just make a sphere.

Well, think some good tool for that task is needed (put on do later list).

Maybe I can fix a star algorithm, for making it all look the same in a box. Will be back sooner or later.

Edit:
Yes they are beautifull, but it doesn't seem like they were created as spheres.

You can always take a peek at the Absolute Zero screenshot in the galery, that one used a sphere skybox for the nebula's, tho for detail and performance matters it is best to display the starfield on quads (single surface if performance matters :P).

No no.. making the texture is not the problem.. I have that Universe program and our artist has made skybox texture very similar to the example above..

Just that texturing them onto a box/sphere/whatever.. makes em look HORRIBLE in Blitz.. we've tried up to 4096x4096 textures (much to the hatred of the artist) and they all look extremenly UGLY :)

We got it the best looking with a box, but if you look, you can still see the corners and edges of the box as it dis-colors slightly there (gets bit darker), even with fullbright set .. this is caused by the bilinear(?) filtering that Blitz does and that cannot be turned off (do not start with the "cleartexturefilters" thing, as that doesn't turn off the bilinear(?) filtering either, source: Mark).

It seems that there is no way to do this apparently, until Mark gives us a command to turn off that filtering.

(i am not sure if that filtering is bilinear, but i am guessing it is)

Tracer

I've got this. It produces a decent enough sphere with stars. But you can probably improve on it considerably.

www.3030deathwar.com/downloads/example.zip

Oh yeah - non-default fov messes up the res.

Clamping the UVs should eliminate the visible corners/ edges of the skybox.

TextureFilter "",16+32

-Pudding