EmperorSteele on 29/7/2013 at 01:45
First of all, are there any "New Sky"s that are half forest and half city?
If not, how would I go about making a custom one?
ZylonBane on 29/7/2013 at 01:49
You're talking about Distant Art, which is just one component of the NewSky renderer.
kdau on 29/7/2013 at 02:15
See newsky.txt ("DistantArt" section) in the official documentation for details. The problem with half-and-half distant art is that (unlike with the old skybox system) there is no configurable orientation. You can have two textures, but they just alternate with each other, and there have to be at least three panels. At best you might be able to get a small area to have a special detail (arrangement 1 2 1, where texture 2 has the detail), but it would either be very blurry looking or require enormous texture files.
The usual solution is to block the view in one direction or the other: in your case, either with trees on one side or buildings/walls on the other. I actually have the same in my WIP - edge of the city, forest vs. buildings - and it worked better for me to block the forest side with trees. My forest section was smaller, so I could control the points of view more easily. Along with the "forest wall" textures from Viktoria's Maw, that was enough to prevent the buildings from showing through. You might just as well have better luck with large walls and distant buildings blocking a forest distant art.
Edit: NV suggested years ago:
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
You might be able to use a celstial object for this - using a building sprite instead of a moon or sun. You're limited to a maximum of three celestial objects per mission, which is still two more than you need for the moon in most cases.
ZylonBane on 29/7/2013 at 16:49
Is it possible under NewDark to have the oldsky skybox and the NewSky everything else going at the same time?
kdau on 29/7/2013 at 21:49
No, having NewSky enabled at all causes the skybox to be ignored, even with NewDark. One might use the "skybox" command from game mode to take a snapshot of a forest-only or city-only NewSky, then paint over parts of the resulting skybox textures with the opposite background. They would still be massive files, though, and there would be no animation (star visibility relative to lighting or wind shear on clouds).