Scripting a Skybox Transition from Night to Day?

[Tormentor667]

Okay, imagine the following situation: I have a 360° skybox mapped to a 6-sided sector cube that is meant for night-time. Now I have another 360° skybox mapped to a 6-sided sector cube that is meant for daytime. What I would like to do now is fade from one sector to the other - or actually fade from night to day. How would you guys achieve that?

[Nevander]

I'd use a combination of sets of graphics to represent a day night cycle (dawn, mid day, sunset, night) and changing light values of the map to achieve the transition. Use ChangeFloor, ChangeCeiling, SetLineTexture, and Light_ChangeToValue.

[Rachael]

What I would do is simply create an interior cube model, assign it to an actor that's in the same location as your skybox viewer actor, map the daytime skybox to that, put it in your nighttime skybox, and simply set its Alpha value between 0.0 and 1.0 depending on what time of day it is.

[Major Cooke]

As in an actual model? According to the wiki, you may need to make it a little more spherical, it appears. Hopefully I'm wrong.

[Rachael]

I don't see it saying that, at all... and in fact it shouldn't matter. Technically the existing skybox GZDoom uses is a model, anyway, if you think about it.

It's not altogether a different method than what Quake2 uses, anyhow.

[Gez]

Have you asked Nash? His Bumi stuff is pretty much exactly what you want.

[Nash]

Bumi would be waaaaaaay too complicated for whatever it is Torm wants to do. :P Plus my skybox isn't as artistic as pre-rendered skyboxes. It's just the sun and moon and a bunch of flat cloud sprites.

The easiest solution was given by Rachael - put your second skybox in an inverted cube and fade that cube in and out.

[Major Cooke]

This way?

[Tormentor667]

The easiest solution was given by Rachael - put your second skybox in an inverted cube and fade that cube in and out.

Thanks for the hints to all of you, we are exactly trying that now

[Tormentor667]

Okay, still having issues: I tried it with a model skybox and with alpha but for some reason the model doesn't get affected by any alpha settings, no matter if through script or through UDMF.

[Rachael]

This may require a working example to diagnose.

[Tormentor667]

I found the problem myself, the rendering in UDMF needs to be tagged as "translucent", with "normal", the Alpha doesn't change anything. Unfortunately I found a different problem now: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=58608

[Rachael]

"Normal" not being translucent is normal, actually (pun not intended).

It's actually meant to trigger a simpler drawer set in the software renderer that bursts extremely quickly since it does not need to check the pixels underneath or do translucency math.

As for the model issue - I am sorry but that's definitely going to need an example posted.

[Tormentor667]

I understand that

No problem, I will create an example in a few minutes.