I use giant placeables as borders around areas to accomplish a similar effect. I have one for mountains, one for forests, and another for hills, with alpha transparency to allow the skybox to shine from behind. I also use an animated one with a nebula-like texture that rotates around the area to represent an area in the midst of a planar rift. They could be shaped and textured however is needed, and create what I think is a convincing effect, much better than skyboxes alone.
I use giant placeables as borders around areas to accomplish a similar effect. I have one for mountains, one for forests, and another for hills, with alpha transparency to allow the skybox to shine from behind. I also use an animated one with a nebula-like texture that rotates around the area to represent an area in the midst of a planar rift. They could be shaped and textured however is needed, and create what I think is a convincing effect, much better than skyboxes alone.
I use giant placeables as borders around areas to accomplish a similar effect. I have one for mountains, one for forests, and another for hills, with alpha transparency to allow the skybox to shine from behind. I also use an animated one with a nebula-like texture that rotates around the area to represent an area in the midst of a planar rift. They could be shaped and textured however is needed, and create what I think is a convincing effect, much better than skyboxes alone.
They are very cool, I've been considering the potential of adding extra models like that to the skybox models.
The skybox models have a render clip of something like 1000m (100 tiles) whereas even static placeables currently have a two digit meter render that I don't recall precisely at the moment. I want to say about 85m, which is 8.5 tiles. This becomes more problematic with larger areas, which, even if they are still smaller than the ring, could give a distorted appearance if the player was far from the ring's center.
I think it is also the case that the ring CAN be as large as the skybox, but setting its origin to the center of the area would cause it to downsample as you strayed from center. You could defeat this using TXI's to set downsamplemax, if you haven't already.
Thanks for the positive comments. I keep my areas limited to a max size of 16x16, so the character is never more than 8 tiles away from the model base. This just happens to be the largest size I'm comfortable with being able to populate with sufficient placeables without hindering performance, so I've never run into issues with render distance. I have experimented with skybox-sized backdrops, but I found them unnecessary due to the max area size I use. The one shown above has a 2400m diameter, and its 2048x2048 texture shows up pretty well even at maximum viewing distance.
The backdrop below is the one I use for forests; you can see it just beyond the archway:
I've also experimented with using a large model of hilly ground with a 16x16 area cut out of the middle to surround areas that are supposed to represent more open plains, as a better-looking alternative to the edge tile system:
Some specific map settings + specifically using shiny water : void tile, still usesless for clear horizons & non shiny water set clients, + useless in so many other ways, but was fun to see this happen anyway
@Ancarion: Beautiful views! What tileset did you use for that worden/elfen scene? @badstrref: Interesting tests
Something I'm interested though, since I used '~Worms Wagon Travel Interior~'. Even it is used only for one tile, these surrounding and moving 'skyboxes' are fascinating. Some of my players want to sit in those waggons and won't move out.
badstrref
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For example, a ship at sea ought to have a round mask horizon.
Elemental planes might benefit from empty border tiles, and so on.
I use giant placeables as borders around areas to accomplish a similar effect. I have one for mountains, one for forests, and another for hills, with alpha transparency to allow the skybox to shine from behind. I also use an animated one with a nebula-like texture that rotates around the area to represent an area in the midst of a planar rift. They could be shaped and textured however is needed, and create what I think is a convincing effect, much better than skyboxes alone.
The skybox models have a render clip of something like 1000m (100 tiles) whereas even static placeables currently have a two digit meter render that I don't recall precisely at the moment. I want to say about 85m, which is 8.5 tiles. This becomes more problematic with larger areas, which, even if they are still smaller than the ring, could give a distorted appearance if the player was far from the ring's center.
I think it is also the case that the ring CAN be as large as the skybox, but setting its origin to the center of the area would cause it to downsample as you strayed from center. You could defeat this using TXI's to set downsamplemax, if you haven't already.
The backdrop below is the one I use for forests; you can see it just beyond the archway:
I've also experimented with using a large model of hilly ground with a 16x16 area cut out of the middle to surround areas that are supposed to represent more open plains, as a better-looking alternative to the edge tile system:
@badstrref: Interesting tests
Something I'm interested though, since I used '~Worms Wagon Travel Interior~'. Even it is used only for one tile, these surrounding and moving 'skyboxes' are fascinating. Some of my players want to sit in those waggons and won't move out.