Battlefield 1942 Mods, Modding Tutorials & Forums

Is there a possibility to have the skybox rotate like any normal object with a rotational bundle? Stumbled upon a texture for a skybox that would look really cool if it rotated like the earth. Would make the map super awesome. Any ideas?

The skybox is the only mesh that will appear "outside" the fog range. Because of this, you can't really use anything else since they would be obscured by the fog settings of the level. The skybox unlike the terrain, is not placed on the map via on object. Thus, unfortunately you can't put it on a rotational bundle, nor can you use an animatedMesh to do it since that also requires an object template to set up the animation state.

You can make a new dome mesh and make an animated texture as a BIK video and assign it to the skybox/dome. It can be done with the vanilla skybox meshes, but it would involve 6 different textures and would be tricky to keep synced up with each other.

Well damn, if only the bf engine made it easier to do such a thing. Thanks fo the wise words!

You can make a new dome mesh and make an animated texture as a BIK video and assign it to the skybox/dome. It can be done with the vanilla skybox meshes, but it would involve 6 different textures and would be tricky to keep synced up with each other.

well a year ago I had the same thoughts, till I asked myself WHY(!) there should be 6 different bik files which should be synced.

Tip:
- make a new skybox mesh with 1 side as bik covering all 4 sides of the box (front,left,back,right). So its simply a plane in 90 deg all 40000 units ( 1600000 total) width ( 40000 units height). Its nothing else than a folded cinema plane, you assign the video.bik to in rs.
- The top U assign a sky.bik ( animated stars or moon for night ) or animated moving clouds & birds for daylight etc. )
- Bottom stays black.dds
Texture size for animation 2048x2048 till 512x512 are showing good results as bik, depending on length of wanted movie

Also a skydome mesh works, but creating a video for such a meshtype in a program like Magix is more difficult. The plane version is definately easier and the skybox top dont need to run synced with the 4in1 plane !

Skybox TOP bik



Skybox 4in1 bik


Sunrise



Greetz

... or just make a big ass 3D object that can be rotated around the side of the map without coming inside of the boundaries.
Then set the culling distance to ... something far away like 837698049874295690284569384596083476. Well, smaller than that.

I'm cheesy like that, but at least it might work. It would only take [hmm] 8 vertices and a somewhat large texture.
Heck, you might not even have to have the bottom face. Just the side faces (facing inward of course) and the top face.
Or just make a big dome shape and slap a nice texture on it, but that would take up a lot more vertices.

Then attach the 3D skybox object to a rotational bundle and put it smack in the center of the map.

Problem with this solution is that it might/will create more overhead.

As I said in an earlier post, the fog would obscure the mesh due it it's size. It would only work if you turn off fog.