Skies

How do you create a sky, along with a sun and clouds? How would I go about doing this?

Have a look at Terragen:

http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/

And at the following tutorials:

http://www.blitzcoder.com/cgi-bin/articles/show_article.pl?f=gametracer04092002.html
http://www.blitzcoder.com/cgi-bin/articles/show_article.pl?f=gamejoseph03212002.html

Nice!

But is there a way to make a box and just texture the inside with a seamless sky texture?

And since I plan on making commercial products, I can't use the downloaded version, and I can't afford the commercial license. Is there any _cheaper_ way?

Well you could use the CreateSphere command and Flip it's mesh and paste a tileable or sphereical map on it. You would need to make it larger than your game world and place it's center at your game world's 0,0,0...

OR

You can look at the Castle demo that comes with B3D. It uses a box-type sky. It's under the Samples>Mak directory if you have the purchased version.

Hope that helps...it's the only "free" way I know of. If anyone else has a free solution please share the info.

You don't really need to make the sphere larger than your world. You can just change it's Z order so it gets rendered before anything else, then it will appear behind everything. Move it with the camera so you'll always be inside.

Graphics3d 800,600

world = LoadMesh("level.b3d") ;load your world
sky = LoadTexture("Sky.png") ;load the sky texture
skybox = CreateSphere() ;create your sphere for the sky
FlipMesh skybox ;flip the surfaces to the inside
EntityOrder skybox,1 ;change the entity Z order so it will be drawn first.
EntityTexture skybox,sky

camera = CreateCamera()

While Not KeyDown(1)

UpdateCameraPosition() ;Some function used to read input and update the camera view accordingly
PositionEntity skybox, EntityX(camera),EntityY(camera),EntityZ(camera) ;move the skybox to the camera's position

RenderWorld
Flip
Wend

thanks

Ahh...

That makes much more sense. And it improved my framerate.

Thanx!

BTW- what is the preferred framerate for a game anyway?

60Hz

BTW one guy released a dozen or so very nice skybox textures not so long ago, probably you'll find it in the art creation section. (search for "skybox")

There's a very good CreateSkyBox function in the archives, for constructing the mesh :o) You simply provide the textures.