Minetest Forums

Presenting, beautiful and immersive skybox kits!

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-m3HFGJ--Ig

Please watch the video to see it's effect - a screenshot would not do it any good nor explain the mod as well.
The mod creates 6 skybox kits. The kit consists of the 6 textures, but also includes a daylight modifier and color tint for fog, and tuned clouds (thickness, color, speed, lightness, translucency, density). Together, they allow the skybox to look much more immersive than a simple texture-only skybox change.

This mod is fairly large! Be prepared for slow server logins on the first connection. The skybox textures are balanced for detail and visual quality, and not tuned for fast loading.

Beware though! Using a skybox effectively disables sun, moon, clouds and day/night will be very different.

Github/source: https://github.com/minetest-mods/skybox
Download: https://github.com/minetest-mods/skybox ... master.zip

If you want to enable a specific skybox for all users, put this into a worldmods `init.lua` file on your server:
(replace <number> with the number of the skybox you selected)

hooray! besr mod of the year!

Made (found) my own skybox using this amazing mod. It's a crappy image, but hey, it worked! :D

huh? awesome! but where is the real ground?

azekill_DIABLO wrote:huh? awesome! but where is the real ground?

I flew up enough that it faded away. I was just testing the concept :P

This is pretty insane! Wow!

Quick question: How possible would it be fading/changing the skybox into another skybox basing on biome the player is in?

yes, with half transparent textures, surperposition and color variation :)

Linuxdirk wrote:This is pretty insane! Wow!

Quick question: How possible would it be fading/changing the skybox into another skybox basing on biome the player is in?

Very difficult, engine work needed.

The only thing possible right now in the engine is to use texture compositing, but there is no way to do blending of textures right now. Even animated textures are not supported right now for the skybox.

and the problem is also we can't see moon, sun or anything with skyboxes.

omg!

That's indeed very immersive! ... but produces a heavy load. I scaled down the textures with Gimp (50%): that helped a lot -- and it’s quite beautiful enough.

Since I’m running the stable version of Minetest I had to comment out all lines related to store the player attributes storage (line 43 and lines 56-76).
So it works for me, anyway I’m playing singleplayer.

Very cool PEAK, thank you
I hadn't even thought of that.

time for me to go play :D

PEAK wrote:That's indeed very immersive! ... but produces a heavy load. I scaled down the textures with Gimp (50%): that helped a lot -- and it’s quite beautiful enough.

Only at startup (first server login), really. The size of the images doesn't affect cpu or gpu utilization.

If you're a minimalist, you should remove the textures that you're not using.

It would be awesome if there were a way to code in some animated overlays ; )
now those would add some proper lag :P

But I am more than thrilled with what you've done so far..., sofar (see what I did there?)
this is definitely a huge visual enhancement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiGSZR-q6AM



Skybox textures AND clouds at the same time. I hope to be able to push this into minetest-0.4.16.

I think I just had a crisis (as Jeremy Clarkson puts it) :P

Anyone who opposes this should be politely, yet repeatedly hit on the head.

I am not usually one for such language but... NICE f@%#in work sofar!!!!! (whew, thankfully the filter kicked in)
I'm wicked excited about this... if it wasn't obvious yet

(next step) try to use this same method (sort of) for the sun and moon and set them on some sort of cycle movement :D

hail sofar god of minetest. YEESS!

The skybox mod as of now enables and tunes the clouds to match the skybox textures. This does require that you use a `git` build from today, or newer. It's probably best to wait for one of the semi-official builds before you try this, or you'll have to compile yourself.

Cheers,

sofar,

I have forked selected items from RBA's git repos.
I have not looked through most of it, just a bit here and there but, it would be really awesome to find out how the hell he produced this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UO_8U3 ... yo&index=4

seems to be related to the axis of rotation of the skybox?

anyway, just thought i would throw this here. I am sure you have prob seen it in the past but, just in case.

wow.

TumeniNodes wrote: I have not looked through most of it, just a bit here and there but, it would be really awesome to find out how the hell he produced this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UO_8U3 ... yo&index=4

seems to be related to the axis of rotation of the skybox?

The skybox itself is just a geometric object that has position, rotation, speed, etc.. What he does in the video is just slowly rotate the entire skybox over the Y axis.

It's certainly cool, but, there are some big problems with this approach, since it is very simplistic.

You can't do this in a mod.

There is a way to make this actually work well, and give it a good API, but it would basically throw away all the existing sky and skybox code, and would need an entirely new API.

Ideally, a future API would allow "sky objects" to be created independently, and have them of different types (e.g. "texture" for a star, moon or sun, or even a planet, spaceship, and a "box" type for things like clouds or star field, or majestic mountains, or deep blue sea etc.) and given them all parameters like order (z/depth), rotation axes, transparency, time related coefficients (day/night shading/blending etc).

Thanks for the info sofar, nice to be able to understand more about this.

And if a new API is built to facilitate this in the future, it will be well worth the wait.

And, btw..., welcome back.

that very nice work, i hope 5.0 will allow us to do much more!