Hey all,

I've been making use of some of Shannon's lovely http://mw.modhistory.com/download-44-13822 for some of my more otherworldly cells. The issue is that with larger cells, the skyboxes are just too small to encircle the entire cell, leading to the situation where the player can get dangerously close to (or walk through) the mesh, killing the illusion. So far I'm aware of two potential solutions:

1. scale the skybox up.

This works when the size conflict is minor, but with excessive scaling the textures all end up stretched and visibly pixelated.

2. script the skybox to follow the player.

Shannon included a script to have the skybox follow the player (example incl. below). The issues with this method are that the skybox visibly moves as the player moves, and it looks visibly jarring, and also in larger cells this moving can lead to the skybox visibly clashing with other structures in the cell.

Any tips on how to get around these issues?

For reference, here is the tweaked "follow me" script.

Begin NON_Shan_Skybox_Sc;attach to skybox to make it follow player around;commented out the lines that adjust the height of the object. You may want to change it to suit your preference.; from Shannon's skyboxresource, adapated slightlyshort counterfloat playxfloat playyfloat playzif ( counter < 20 )	set counter to ( counter + 1 )	returnendifset counter to 0Set playx to ( Player->GetPos x )Set playy to ( Player->GetPos y )Set playz to ( Player->GetPos z )SetPos x playxSetPos y playySetPos z playzend

Your best bet is probably scaling it up and finding some higher resolution textures. Alternatively you could maybe do some magic with the models UVmap in Blender to avoid excessive pixellation.

What about if it lagged behind the player a bit so that the movement with the player would be less noticeable?

Does it get pixelated or blurry when you get close to it?

Yeah, I thought about playing with the "update time" so to speak. I'll fiddle around with it, but I doubt it will get past the primary problem of "suddenly shifting scenery looks awkward" even if those shifts happen less frequently. It would be good if I could maybe make the skybox shift only when menumode == 1, but relying on people to open the menu that often seems... risky.

It doesn't get blurry when you get close, but it does get noticeably fake, especially if the player has a light source on them.

Perhaps I will try scaling the skyboxes up and applying a lot of fog to the cell to try and mask the blurriness.

there is a simple way to see if moving the mesh by script can ever be fast enough, just try skipping the delay. e.g.

change

if ( counter < 20 )

to

if ( counter < 0 )

if this does not work, as already suggested the only way is scaling up the mesh and using bigger and/or less blurry textures

I edited the skybox mesh for my claim in ModTown 2015. If you download the latest claim file and take a look in Meshes/MT15/md then you will find it. The special thing about it is that I added alpha to the mesh itself rather than the texture at the outer edge. This way it really blends into the fog and can be placed higher in the cell.

http://darkelfmodding.com/forum/index.php/topic,17.0.html

Let me know if that helps.