Oct. 10th, 2002
Introduction

Ok, time for yet another installment. I'm still working on how I want this diary thing to turn out. I think what I'm going to try, starting today, is to actually update this diary throughout the day instead of doing it all at once. I'm worried that if I wait until the end of the day to summarize everything I did during the day, I would leave out too much of my "thinking" process and would end up just giving you the final product for the day. So, let's get started.

11:00am - Skies

One of the things I really want to accomplish with this map is to have outstanding lighting. By this I mean that I want everything from the lighting inside the buildings to the sky to look fantastic. I've always felt that lighting was of the weaker aspects of my map. I think I improved a lot with the Special Edition Bunker, and I learned a lot more by converting my old vertix lit Mountain Assault to the new Lightmapped lit Special Edition Mountain Assault. Now I want to improve upon that and really make sure I have an impressive sky.

So, first of all, I'm going to create my own sky from scratch. Honestly, I'll probably use pieces and parts from various sources but what I mean is I won't be using one of the stock wolf skies.

One thing I do want to mention is that I will likely be using the most recent version of q3map2 throughout this project. As of this writing the current version is 2.3 a21 (although I've heard that a22 is on its way). So in addition to everything else, you'll also get to witness some of the frustrations that happen when you switch compiler versions in the middle of a project. ;)

So, where to start? Well, I'm going to do exactly what I tell all the newbies to do when they come to the various forums and ask a very basic question, I'm going to read tutorials and then do some testing. I'm going to start with the skybox tutorial on Claudec's site.

5:00pm - Summary

Well, most of today went the way I'm used to. I spent all day playing with and tweaking various skies and, in the end, I think I've settled on using one of the stock skies, mx_forest2. This happens a lot with me. I'll kind of walk you through my process and how I got to this conclusion.

What I wanted to do was have a 2 layer sky. On the first layer it was going to be a blue background with a sun and on the second layer I was going to have a scrolling cloud layer. Sounds cool, huh?
My first thought was to simply use Terragen to create a blue sky with the sun and then find a cloud layer that came with wolf. Here is a sample of may Terrgen sky, converted to jpg to be used as my skybox:

And

I thought those shots were looking pretty good. But, then here's what happens to them in game:

Notice the pixelation. This, I imagine, is due to the stretching that must happen to fill the sky. After messing with that for quite a while, I attempted to create my own sky/cloud layers without the sun. Basically, I created a simple blue background and threw a cloud layer on it. In a nutshell, that looked like crap. So, I looked through the sky shaders again and realized that mx_forest2 is pretty close to what I was thinking I wanted, it just doesn't have the sun.

Such is life.