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Submitted by iryan on Sat, 2016-08-20 19:54

Araknuum wrote:
So, skyboxes are enabled in ds2... I wonder if I can get them to function in 1? Thank you Iryan, this is a treasure of info. I've found myself to be very fond of building maps, but I have all of my tools working for DS1 now, and I hesitate to try getting DS2 and it's tools working, as I had quite a lot of trouble when I tried the second siege editor a couple years ago.

You may be out of luck trying to get skyboxes working in DS1. I'm not 100% sure but I believe mood functions are hard coded. Creating a dll (which is possible in DS1) to hook into the engine to enable the call for the skybox from the mood_manager.skrit may work but only if the basic support is there in the first place. Though with your map layout it would look spectacular.

One idea though is to consider that its relatively straightforward (now we know) to port maps from DS1 to DS2. So once your map was finished, or even before then, a version could be made to work in DS2 and take advantage of skyboxes or just to see if it does indeed make the map look better.

Araknuum wrote:

This is the camp area of the royal hunting preserve where my story begins. I've done the node work to make the hill, sans connecting tunnels between the caves underneath. Without a mood, the world frustrum set to default shows just a black background and a sphere of rendered terrain which doesn't show individual nodes loading, but instead just cuts them at the edge and reveals as you approach. You're saying that the skybox also reveals at the frustrum limit, and is placed, not around the character, but around the region at a certain distance, am I correct? so this edge would show black until my character came within range of the skybox? If so, it is a solution, though you're right, it would only work in small enough areas that the frustrum limits can't be seen.

I wonder if any experimentation can be done on the frustrum to see how far it can be stretched until it starts breaking things? hmmm... I theorize that the amount and variety of objects in the region would become the limiting factor, again making this work best in small areas and for FMV's.


The skyboxes in DS2 are actually placed around the character and moves with them. This causes scenery to fade in and out as the player moves. DS2 also has a render_proxy gizmo (as used in the beach NIS scene at Eirolon) which is static. I tried using it but unless you stand in a specific place, it doesn't work well. It does work well in NIS sequences where the player doesn't move so I guess that's why GPG uses it but if you pay close attention to the areas it is used, they are all surrounded by high rock walls so you can't see any imperfections in the scene.

So in DS1 I believe you are correct in experimenting with the mood frustrum and also colours to get a good compromise. I'm not sure what the limit would be in DS1 but in some NIS sequences in DS2 I have it set as high as 120. However the DS2 engine is more advanced and optimized than the DS1 version so it may be lower in DS1 even though we're running the game on lot better hardware now than when it was first released 14 years ago.
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