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Well after not being able to find sky textures in the texture folder I decided to go hunting for them. This is what I found.

Thanks to Shoot for the work put into this tutorial.

Well after not being able to find sky textures in the texture folder I decided to go hunting for them. This is what I found

• 1: sky.shader in the script folder
  
• 2: sky tga texture files in the env folder
  
• 3: Sunfile in the script folder
  

(This is all assuming you have extracted a every pk3 file in the main folder into a seperate folder somewhere just to view and tear apart)


Sky Shader
The sky.shader is in the script folder and in there is all the sky information, seems they left the qer_editorimage for each o­ne out of the texture file. I personally think that this is better because you dont load all the sides of the sky - this caused a lot of confusion in sof2 and I spent a lot of time helping ppl work through this. I will not go into what is in the sky shader here, there is a post about the sky shaders in the sof2 forum somewhere, just do a search.

In the sky shader there are single player and multiplayer skies. Here is a list of the skies that are there:

Singleplayer Maps

• airfield
  
• brecourt
  
• burnville
  
• carride
  
• dam
  
• chateau
  
• factory
  
• hurtgen
  
• pavlov
  
• pegasusnight
  
• pegasusday
  
• powcamp
  
• pathfinder
  
• railyard
  
• rocket
  
• sewer
  
• stalingrad
  
• ship
  
• training
  
• trainstation
  
• truckride
  
• tankdrivecountry
  
• tankdrivetown
  

Multiplayer Skies

• mp_carentan
  
• mp_dawnville
  
• mp_depot
  
• mp_brecourt
  
• mp_pavlov
  
• mp_powcamp
  
• mp_harbor
  
• mp_hurtgen
  
• mp_rocket
  
• mp_railyard
  
• mp_ship
  

non-conventional named Skies

• damtest5
  
• d-daydrop
  
• d-daydrop2
  
• d-daydrop3
  
• chateaunight
  
• burnvilledawn
  
• hedgerow
  
• night01
  
• sewersky
  
• stormy
  
• starfield
  
• stalingrad2
  
• test01
  
• test02
  
• credits
  

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Using the sky in the map
You can view the individual tga panels of the skies in the [u]env folder[/u], this will give you an idea of what your are picking, you could go run each map and check them out - you decide.

Once you have choosen the sky you want - go into your map.

Select the brushes you want to be the sky...select them all.....press s for the Surface Inspector tool.
You will see the texture field - type common/caulk in that field.
Click apply and then OK.

Now you need to select just the faces of the sky brushes that will be seen from inside your map.
1. Press and hold the control and shift keys and click o­n the 1st face you want to be sky.
2. Do this for each face - be sure to press both keys for the face - if not you may select the entire brush.
3. o­nce the sky faces are all selected, press S for the surface inspector.
4. In the texture field - type sky/skyofyourchoice for example: sky/mp_rocket
5. The sky faces should all turn red - you will not see your actual sky texture in the editor - you have to compile for that.

Why Caulk?
Well the caulk is a tool that tells the editor to ignore the brush faces or brushes that are textured with caulk. This reduces the amount of triangles that are drawn in the game when you play as well as reduces the number of faces that need to be lit by the compiler - it will speed up your game and your compile time. Caulk is a very powerful thing and I urge you to use it and search the forum here for how to use it.

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Sunfile - what is that?

I am hazzarding a guess o­n the sunfile here but I think that it is a set of settings for what the sun if any will look like and how its light is affects the map. The funny thing is all the sunfiles are not there in the script folder - not sure why - anyway just for sake of information I have included the shader entry and sun file for the mp_dawnville map as examples - I won't go into what each line means at this time, have to figure some of them out myself actually.

Shader for mp_dawnville sky

Code:

textures/sky/mp_dawnville { qer_editorimage textures/sky/hedgerow.tga surfaceparm sky surfaceparm nolightmap surfaceparm noimpact surfaceparm nomarks skyParms env/hedgerow 512 - sunfile mp_dawnville }

Sunfile for mp_dawnville.sun

Code:

r_sunsprite_shader "0" r_sunsprite_size "16" r_sunflare_shader "gfx/sun/global_flare" r_sunflare_min_size "12" r_sunflare_min_angle "90" r_sunflare_max_size "600" r_sunflare_max_angle "2" r_sunflare_max_alpha ".50" r_sunflare_fadein "1" r_sunflare_fadeout "1" r_sunblind_min_angle "30" r_sunblind_max_angle "5" r_sunblind_max_darken ".3" r_sunblind_fadein ".5" r_sunblind_fadeout "3" r_sunglare_min_angle "30" r_sunglare_max_angle "5" r_sunglare_max_lighten ".1" r_sunglare_fadein ".5" r_sunglare_fadeout "3"

Well thats a start o­n sky's and how to use them, I am sure this topic will develop more as we go along.