Spherical Sky Beauty???

Alright guys I got another question 4 ya. I have established a sky through flipping a sphere and scaling it around my level. I have applied some textures and lighting but it seems to still be lacking can any of you guys drop me a few hints or tips??

Here's some of the coding I used
----------------------------------------------------------
;load a sky
Global air = LoadTexture("C:\Game\sky.bmp")
Global sky = CreateSphere()
PositionEntity sky,0,-95,0
TurnEntity sky,0,0,90
ScaleEntity sky,500,500,500
FlipMesh sky
ScaleTexture air,1.5,1.5
EntityTexture sky,air

;the clouds
Global cloudy = LoadTexture("C:\Game\clouds.jpg")
Global clouds = CreateSphere()
PositionEntity clouds,0,-95,0
TurnEntity clouds,0,0,90
ScaleEntity clouds,450,450,450
FlipMesh clouds
ScaleTexture cloudy,1.5,1.5
EntityTexture clouds,cloudy
EntityAlpha clouds,.40

;establigh my lighting
Global light = CreateLight((1),(sky))

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-Like I said guys any help is appreciated!!

I forgot to post that I am slowly turning the entity's using this code:

Function Sky()
TurnEntity sky,0,.005,0
TurnEntity clouds,.005,0,0
End Function

Spheres use a lot of polygons that quite frankly you don't need. Do a search for 'skybox'es and you will see how using a cube is a much easier and faster solution.

Easier, yes, faster, not really.

Thanks but could you be a little more specific as to where to search for skyboxes?

Don't you need to make sky boxes/spheres 'fullbright' to stop them revealing their geometry? I dunno - never used one myself. :)

What does fullbright mean exactly?? I am still pretty new to the 3-d scene

EntityFx entity,1

Fullbright means that all the triangles are drawn without any regards to lighting - they're all fully lit. Try it with an untextured primitive such as a cube and you won't be able to see which side is which because they'll all be the same exact colour and brightness.

Psionic used to have some free skyboxes to download, but they aren't available anymore. Pity. The actual sky textures are easy enough to generate (below is a tutorial on how to create the images using Terragen,) but his samples also had code.

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Creating_a_2D_skybox_with_Terragen

There's a function to generate a skybox in the Castle Demo. Some generously donated replacement textures can be found here.

Check this tutorial (.zips in the end are broken though):

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

would this work as well??
..
create a skybox w/ mountain terrain but w/ no sky (instead apply a color used for masking/alpha) and then create a skybox/sphere behind that that you could then rotate.
that way you could have a nice rotating sky, but w/out ur mountains rotating as well.
i'd try this out myself right now, but i'm at work.. it'll have to wait til i get home.

Yeah, you can do similar with water (especially useful as static waves look daft).