Skybox Solution

By: Eradicator
monre@yebo.co.za

#### Foreword:

Skyboxes? Great stuff, right? But what if you see your redeemer explode against the moon? Yeah, not so great… Like the other tutorial I submitted before, the method I developed may not be the best, but still, if it is quick and easy to use, why not?

#### Abstract:

I have entered into a few forum sites and couldn’t find a way to deal with this, and when I finally managed to get something on it, I didn’t understand it. Maybe I was just still too rookie, who knows? But this is how I figured it out.

#### Assumptions:

You read Tomasz’s Skybox tutorial, and have built a skybox, but now experience the problem of “shootin’ da sky”!

#### Tutorial:

#### Intro

I won’t be taking you step by step to do it, but instead I’ll tell you how it is done, so that you can go and do it! It will be so easy that it will actually be pointless for me to sit and take shots of everything as I go along. In anyway, this tutorial is not about building the skybox, it is about fixing the problem with shooting the sky.

#### Tutorial

When you have your window looking out to the stars from the spaceship, or your clouds panning across the sky above, and find you shoot into the skybox and hit something, do this:
1.) Between you and the fake backdrop, build a thin wall/ceiling with the builder brush (i.e. a wall between the window to the stars and the fake backdrop outside.)
2.) Add the brush with the “add special” button, choose “regular brush” from the predefined settings, but tick the non-solid attribute before adding it in.
3.) Now click on the texture of the new wall and set its effect to be the new fake backdrop.

#### The effect

If you rebuild and test the map, you’ll see that you can safely shoot at the sky and not see the projectile hitting anything. This is simply because the non-solid attribute allows you to and everything else, to pass right through the brush, while still obscuring the view of anything behind it. The projectile effectively explodes, or whatever the case may be, on the wall behind the fake backdrop, completely out of view!