Skyboxes
Skyboxes are a great way to add some drama to your horizon line. Almost all Quake engines support them (apparently vanilla quake does not). There are a few ways to add skyboxes and I am going to go over all the ways I am aware of.
Firstly, I properly renamed and packaged up 4 freely available skyboxes for you
here,
(original source). You do not have to use the ones I packaged. There is no magic with them. Any skybox set that is properly renamed will work.
About Skyboxes
location
Skyboxes must be located in
ID1/gfx/env/. If you do not see an ID1/gfx folder it is because it is inside your .pak. Simply use
pakScape or some such other tool to open the pak and access the gfx folder. Create an
env folder if one does not exist and place all of your skybox images in it.
*It is actually more correct to say that the skyboxes should be located in modFolderName/gfx/env/
conventions
Skyboxes use a naming convention to instruct the engine which designation each tile is to occupy. The convention is as follows
designations
up = top
dn = bottom
lf = left
rt = right
ft = front
bk = back
For the rest of this tutorial we are going to assume that the name of the entire skybox is
sb1_. You can prefix a designation with any name you want as long as that name stays static (unchanging) throughout the skybox. With that information the entire sb1_ skybox would have it's respective individual images renamed as follows:
sb1_up
sb1_dn
sb1_lf
sb1_rt
sb1_ft
sb1_bk
Adding Skyboxes
the conventional way:
1) open your map
2) draw a huge box around your map
3) give it a regular quake sky texture
4) hollow it out
5) in the entity inspector for worldspawn add
key:sky value:sb1_
Alternate darkplaces quick load - this is good if you want to test an array of skyboxes without repetitively compiling your map.
1) open the console
2) type
loadsky sb1_
Darkplaces .ent skybox injection - this way is good if you want to change the skybox for a map that you do not have the power to edit.
1) open the console
2) type
sv_saveentfile
3) open the .ent file and add this line to the worldspawn block
"sky" "sb1_"
4) save the ent and either start darkplaces or if it is already started, open the console and type
r_restart.
(Renderer Restart - this can also be bound to a key and probably should be if you make/change .ent files often)
Closing
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the skybox for Quake. My current map has no sky, nothing, black. It makes you feel very alone and screwed. Like, even if you get out of wherever you are there is nothing to escape to. I realize that this works because of the theme of the map and the textures I chose. That is exactly my point. Getting caught up in amazing skyboxes is easy to do and in that you could easily junk up your map. Imagine if I added small, whispy, cloud-like particle clouds that lazily wafted by, at random altitudes, against the black and within the "play area". Totally creepy and probably realistic (using particle fonts). This is something you should consider before just throwing some amazing skybox around your map. What does your map want? My map wants solitude, not Desert Ruin...
The final thing to consider is that, whatever skybox you choose will more than likely look nothing like your textures. You could convert the skybox to the quake palette, but I'm guessing that more times than not, this is going to make everything look about 1% more related (if it doesn't completely destroy the skybox). The alternative is to figure out what the skybox palette is, create a theme from it and then make all of your own textures to match it. It is way beyond the scope of this tutorial to explain that, especially since I don't even know how to go that far (I'll figure it out for money though ;D).
Thanks for reading,
Gypsy
