lots of apps bound the sky with a cool texture and wrap it all around. i''ve done the same with a rather huge cube. um this is very slow, what''s the best technique to use? this image doesn''t have to look all that good and it never moves (for me). ps > thanks for all the help so far, you folks are awesome!

If you are talking about using a cube for your sky, that''s a bad idea, unless, of course, you mean you''re inside the cube, then it''s not so bad...

You have two options (I don''t know which would be faster...) First, you should make the image as small as possible when you draw it (by small as possible, I mean the smallest picture with the quality you want) Then, you could...

a) tile the picture onto a single faced couple of triangles (since vid cards are optimized for triangles...)

or

b) stretch the picture onto a single faced couple of triangles

That''s how I see it at least...

S.

I am using a sphere. But that''s slow too. If we could use a hemisphere (coz we don''t need the hemisphere extending from 180 to 360 anyways, so why draw it) then I think it will be pretty okay. try with a Sphere, it looks better than a cube as it bends down over the distant mountains.

Neo

Except a sphere is made of many many polys unless you are doing nurbs and curves and all that... Lots of polys take time.

S.

I don''t really see why the cube would be slow, but maybe this will help. I make the cube rather small, and turn of z-buffering, and then draw it first. This means that you could go wherever you want and it would never be any closer to the cube. It is like a small box always position around the camera, except you don''t need to calculate it''s position every frame.

*** Triality ***

You should try and figure out why it is slow.

What is the size of the texture that is being put on the cube ( if there is one )?
Do you clear the buffer every frame? you should not need to.
Do you have many layers of objects in front of the cube. It takes very few triangles to slow down a machine if they fill the screen.

i experimented with lots of different textures and qualities. the speed is somewhat acceptable, but it is a honker. have not culled it yet but that should help to.

yes the box is around the entire scene, very simple. last night after posting i searched for this same subject and found alot of techniques, but today while twiddling my thumbs at work i can''t search the message board cause the sql server be timing out!

so i''m open to ideas if you want to post them here, but i think alot of this was already covered so my bad for not looking first.

thanks for the tips,

-byte

the reason it goes slow is cause it takes a LOT of fillrate to do a skybox/sphere. one advantage is u dont have to clear the colour buffer. its not so important how many polys there are in the box/sphere. (obviously a sphere of 1000+ tris will cause a slowdown)
also size is NOT important for the box/sphere just make it large enuf to be further than the near clip plane.
turn off depth buffer writes when u draw it also