by t7g » 11 Apr 2010, 15:24
Actually, I came here to clarify a few things.
The effects are done in layers, the are up to four boxes and one plane that you can use to combine them together to paint your sky.
Your outermost layer is your starbox, this contains stars, a moon (or multiple) that you want to rotate around your level. This is spun at a rate which would make it spin one rotation per how long you specify your days as.
After the starbox is your skybox, except this time it has transparency and blending if you have a starbox loaded. This is what you see in the video fading in and changing colors, it's just a skybox with a white to gray gradient that can be tinted like the color of the sky as it changes.
After that you have your sunbox, which instead of spinning y, spins x. It's just a skybox with only a sun in the center of the top texture. You can put many suns in that texture, or other things you would want to rotate with the sun. (Clouds if you really want, you're not forced to keep any "box" loaded, you can switch them out whenever you want to a different image)
Lastly you have your cloudbox and cloudplane, the cloudbox is rendered on top of all the other sky boxes so if you were to do some sort of terrain you would probably want it drawn in the cloudbox so it obscures the sun and everything else.
It's not exactly randomly generated, especially yet, and you'll always have the option to use your own images with it. Though it is designed to manage a sky environment with no real extra effort to the programmer.
The videos I've shown so far are just rough demonstations. I've been so concerned with the details of the code that I have not gotten around to producing a lot of quality art assets for it to use. Once it's more near completion I'll add more oooshiny, wrap up a very good example video, and release all the code and art to the community.
Also, one last thing. If you aren't using a layer or a layer is fully transparent the engine will just skip drawing it, which is a nice jump from the way things used to work. Previously even a fully alpha set cloudbox would still be drawn.