Ritualistic

Summary	System Requirements
Genre: First Person Shooter Platforms: PC, Mac PC Publisher: Activision Mac Publisher: Aspyr Media Engine: Quake III, with Ritual's ÜBER Tools ESRB Rating: Teen Released: June 24, 2003	· DirectX 9.0 compatible 32MB video card · Pentium III 600 or Athlon™ processor or higher · 128MB of RAM · Microsoft® Windows® 98/98SE/ME/2000/XP · DirectX® 9.0 compatible 16 bit sound card · DirectX® 9.0 (more...)

Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6

Create your level as you normally would (Figure 1) and anywhere you want the player to see the world's sky, texture the brush with 'skyportal' from the common texture directory (Figure 2).

Build a square box out of the 'caulk' texture from the common texture directory . Inside that box, place your brush geometry or models that you want to be seen when anyone looks at the sky brushes (Figure 3). Different sky models can be found in the entity menu under SKY (Figure 4).

Add a script_skyorigin entity by creating a small square brush (16x16x16) textured as 'nodraw' from the common texture directory. Bring up the entity menu, go to 'script' and choose script_skyorigin (Figure 5). This entity will act as your 'camera' perspective to see the sky. I quote camera because it does not really work like a camera in that you do not need to point it in a specific direction to look at anything in your skybox. You place it typically in the center of your skybox however it can be placed anywhere (Figure 6).

If you have a skybox full of towering buildings and your level takes place at the street level, place the script_skyorigin at the base of the buildings. Your sky will show tall buildings that tower over the player. If you have a floating city in the sky, place the script_skyorigin high up near the top of the buildings in your skybox. The visual impact of your sky is easily changed by moving the script_skyorigin.

That should complete your skybox, you have three (3) components:

1. A level with common/skyportal textures on the sky brushes
2. Skybox room textured as common/caulk with geometry and models that will be seen when one looks at the sky
3. A script_skyorigin that acts as the level's perspective location in relation to the sky

NOTE: Scripting the script_skyorigin entity is optional and not necessary to get the basics working. You may skip this section if you wish.

To control the script_skyorigin through your script file you should give it a targetname such as "sky". Then in your script file you can write;

$sky.rendereffects( "-skyorigin" );
$sky_new.rendereffects( "+skyorigin" );

$sky is your script_skyorigin object which has different properties that you can access through script code. "rendereffects" controls whether that sky is visible or not. The "-skyorigin" will turn off the sky so that another script_skyorigin can be turned on with "+skyorigin".

Under View > Show > choose Render Skyportal Background to see the sky rendered on your skyportal textured brushes in the editor.

http://game.rbkdesign.com/ef2/example_maps/sky.zip

Includes (1) sky.bsp, (1) sky.map, (1) sky.scr