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Hey all,

I've put together approx. 20 seamless skybox textures that I'd like to put online (free) for the DBPro community but am having one of the most frustrating problems I've ever encountered.

The textures were created using the "skybox2.x" model which comes with the free Terrain plugin. The object doesn't appear to be anything more than a simple cube. Honest guy that I am, I don't feel comfortable posting somebody else's objects online, simple as the box is.

So for 2 days now I've been beating my head against the wall while trying to make a similar box in GameSpace. It simply will not work for me.

I'm sure it has something to do with how the UV mapping is done for the textures on the "skybox2.x" model, but I can't emulate it. It shouldn't be this hard... it's a 60x60x60 cube textured with bitmaps 1.bmp through 6.bmp, one for each face.

The symptoms are like what happens if you make a cube skybox with MAKE OBJECT CUBE and you forget to make the dimension a _negative_ number so that you can see the textures while you're inside the box. That is, normally the skybox can't be seen at all.

So, anybody have any idea how that nice simple skybox (from the DBPro terrain sample application) was built?

Make a Cube in GameSpace, Flip it's Triangles.
I've not used trueSpace in almost 5years so I can't tell you how to do it in gameSpace... but there used to be a little button for it in on the Triangulate button.

Raven, I think you provided the answer I was looking for, but I've somehow totally screwed some settings in Gamespace and can't reset to any config that works anymore. Suddenly I can't texture anything in GS and display it properly in DarkBasic.

There were two options in the area you pointed out, one to flip normals and one to flip faces. I did some simple tests on both planar and cube objects in GS, using one of my skybox images (there are 6, one for each side of a cube) painted onto the face with all possible combinations of (flip face, flip normals, cubic UV projection, planar UV projection).

Every single case though, looks exactly the same when I load it up in DBP. They all look exactly like what you'd see if you textured a cube with an image but set the UV projection to planar -- a long series of stretched colored horizontal lines. I don't think it's DBP's fault. Something I've set in GS during all the tests appears to be screwing me over. I'm going to uninstall and reinstall GS, I can't think of any other options at this point. Even the simple, non-skybox type of ops I was doing previously (like billboarding scenery onto cubes and planes) doesn't work anymore. It looks great in GS but like crap everywhere else).

How incredibly depressing. At the risk of sounding like a braggart, I think the skybox textures I built in Bryce would have been useful to a few people, judging by all the posts I see asking for them

you could always create a cube in DBP, then reverse it's vertex order.. save the mesh and it should work alright; but i'm not sure how to link things like textures without opening up the ascii file

Raven, your first suggestion was the one that solved it for me. Thankee kindly.

I was initially flipping the NORMALS on the GameSpace cube instead of the FACES, as you had mentioned. Once I got that going, I got bit in the arse by doing a SET TEXTURE with mode 1 on the cube. For some reason, DBPro really goes postal on you when doing that on the flipped faces. I changed it to mode 2 to get clamping at the edges & hide those unsightly box edges.

So maybe I'm there... I've got a few samples online at:

http://www.alsip.net/vaxwar/skypack/sky_up.zip

... if anybody would care to have a look and offer suggestions. WARNING, 6MB zip file so download via dialup not recommended.