Remember those skybox effects?

[FreemanHL2]

We have had a few threads debating about 3D skybox effects in HL2... Yesterday I was looking at the source effects and I found this.


Renderer
- Version 2.0 (and below) shaders, bump mapping, LOD on models and world
- Author shaders with HLSL
- Cube and environment mapping
- Dynamic lights, vertex lighting and light maps, many light types including flickering, pulsing etc.
- High-Dynamic Range lighting
- Water with refraction and fresnel effects
- Advanced particle system that can emit sprites or models
- Projected shadows allow for a large number of characters per scene
- Occluder entities for visibility blocking
- Indoor/Outdoor environments
. Deformable terrain
. 3D skyboxes extend the horizon and add parallax on distant objects . Dynamically rendered organics (grass, trees etc)
- Subdivision surfaces, diffuse & specular bump maps
- Real-time radiosity lighting
- Effects include but are not limited to: particles, beams, volumetric smoke, sparks, blood, environmental effects like fog and rain
- Scalability
. Dx6-Dx9 hardware supported

 

[DannoHung]

Yeah? So?

You can see them on the CS:S when you get killed and go all floaty. You can go and look at the skybox.

 

[Vegeta897]

Yep, that 3D skybox helps render things like the Combine Citadel tower in the background of some shots.

They don't have to actually place that thing in everymap, its part of the skybox. (So basically you can make things in the background extremely huge, regardless of map size limits.)

 

[2ltben]

So anything outside the sky brushes is part of the 3d skybox. So in, say, DoD Source, you could look down the coast and see men landing down the shore, outside the map. That's also why the Citadel can be so high in the HL2 singleplayer.

 

[Hazar]

what were the debates about?

I don't remember them.

 

[2ltben]

I also think it means entity-controlled foliage outside the sky brushes?

 

[FreemanHL2]

We were debating about weather HL2 suportyed 3D skybox effects, and yesterday i saw this in the source engine rendering capabilities.

 

[ShadowFox]

I don't know how they work, but I think they look awesome.

 

[NetWarriorDan]

Things attached to the sky box are scaled down to one eighth (I think its eight) the size of normal things.