FreeGameDev

Just to show that new things are being done with Syntensity the whole time, here is a vid by new contributor T7g:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4yK-0NysyY

That is f**king awesome!!

Yes the graphics are scratchy but so what, someone would have to redo the 'sky' images and so on to lok like a real sky (or a wierd futuristic or medieival or whatever sky). And if you can make the sun cycle around, you could probably randomize stuff like clouds and make them cycle around in odd ways as well...

Heck why have only 1 sun.. why not a couple..!

Hi, I'm Spiney. I was checking out Syntensity yesterday and decided to register here.
I'm just a player mostly. I study graphics design and like to draw, so I have some artsy background. Unfortunatly I can't do 3D very well, but it's on my ever expanding 'to learn' list.

Peon: Maybe if you have 3 or 4 skyboxes you can make them cycle. I know you can generate them in landscape generators such as Terragen.
Anyway, I found some nice looking skyboxes that are public domain:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~reije081/skyboxes/

I think Syntensity could use a couple more skyboxes
The current ones are a little low res too I think, they look a little pixelated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YWiovHkZYM
New vid with less ominousness

Adrix, why didn't you reply to these gentlemen...

Peon, it'd be easy to do multiple suns, you just need to add them as images. Also, the clouds are randomly generated already

Spiney, those skyboxes are pretty neat, and I agree that the current skyboxes are rather mediocre. This system could possibly fade between skyboxes, but I think T7G was aiming at having them auto-generated But I'll point kripken at those skyboxes and hopefully we could add a few to the current repertoire

Adrix, why didn't you reply to these gentlemen...

Haven't actually seen the last post....strange

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.