Tiger's Sky Pack; HELP!!!

[[Wiking]]

Well, I think most of you that downloaded the Replacement Sky pack by Tiger (JohnS) have experienced the same problem. I swap the bmps with the old sky files, run CMBO, and ... YUCK! The skies are blurry, streched (you can actually see the lines where the batlefield is a square) and it's really disgusting :confused:

What the hell could that be? I heard similar stuff about this sky pack, but can't really remember. I tried to copy back the skies from the CMBO CD, but they become the same.

Could anyone help?

Thanx

[[Wiking]]

Anyone alive?

[Cubbies Phan]

What do you mean by blurry? Do you mean that the colors aren't a clear and sharp as they are for the rest of the battlefield?

If so, that's because the sky is displayed in only a 256-color pallete, I believe.

Where the battlefield is square? What do you mean by that?

[[Wiking]]

Well, not as much blurry as pure crap. It's completely messed up. You can't even know it's the sky.

The CMBO maps where you fight are squares, as is the sky. It's so messed up, you can see that. It does not look like a sphere. Why is that?

[LimShady]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by SS_Obergruppenführer:

Well, not as much blurry as pure crap. It's completely messed up. You can't even know it's the sky.

The CMBO maps where you fight are squares, as is the sky. It's so messed up, you can see that. It does not look like a sphere. Why is that?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Must be the new German uber-weapon to confuse and ground the Allied air forces.

:eek:

Chris

[Manx_CM]

Tiger produced two different bmps sizes for these IIRC. Which one did you install??.

[Cubbies Phan]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by SS_Obergruppenführer:

Well, not as much blurry as pure crap. It's completely messed up. You can't even know it's the sky.

The CMBO maps where you fight are squares, as is the sky. It's so messed up, you can see that. It does not look like a sphere. Why is that?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I'm confused. How long have you been playing the game? The battlemap has always been square. The blurry area between the map and the horizon is file 1503. The sky files are displayed twice I believe. Each wraps around a half of the square box you speak of. Or maybe four times. Hard to tell if you can see the seems.

[[Wiking]]

I tried both Sky packs; same problem. I would post up a screen shot, but dunno how. Tell me how to do it, and you'll see what I mean.

Thanx for your assistance

[Maximus]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by SS_Obergruppenführer:

I tried both Sky packs; same problem. I would post up a screen shot, but dunno how. Tell me how to do it, and you'll see what I mean.

Thanx for your assistance<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

First of all the image must be somewhere on the Net, ie Personal Website or someplace like PhotoPoint.com

Then you must use the UBB tags and put the entire URL of the picture in between the tags.

[[Wiking]]

Here they are. You can clearly see the square edge.

You can see it has nothing to do with the resolution. Too streched pics. :confused:

[[Wiking]]

Just moving the thread up ...

[Tiger]

Here's the fix:

Remove the sky textures and replace them with the original bmps off the cd.

Three reasons why this happens:

1) the CMBO program auto-renders the sky bmps in 8-bit format. This causes a lot of resolution loss.

2) the sky for CMBO is indeed a "skybox", not a dome. Intrestingly enough it has 4 sides and the sky bmp gets tiled.

3) What you're seeing is not a seam but a corner. You can see these with the original bmps too but will have to look a little harder since they don't use as many clouds. If I hadn't mirrored the edges of the bmps you would indeed be seeing seams, not vague corners.

Please do not hesitate to remove the offending, crappy bmps and replace them with whatever you like.

Perhaps in CM2 we'll get 24-bit sky textures to play with.

-Tiger

[mrcobbler]

Been trying to stay out of this post, but can't. Try SurlyBen's 'blueskies' mod. He has

done a good job with the corners. Does not have all the weather yet(?) but what is there is really nice for the low-res guys.

(Tiger, I love all your other mods though!!)

Shoeman

[Tiger]

Yes he gets around it by not having very many clouds and keeping them near the center, away from the edges, something I don't plan on doing just to avoid having rather vague corners.

I just checked my skies in game and can not find the corners of any of them without intentionally looking for them. Like I said if this bothers you too much just revert back to the CMBO skies of the cd or use someone else's.

-Tiger

[SurlyBen]

That's just not true. Or it's only true for my summer blue sky (which was the first one I did). Both the screenshots below show the corners of the box that the sky is mapped on to. You can still see it, but it's not that noticable, and in both cases, there are clouds going right across the seam. I used a panoramic filter to correct for the fact that they are mapped onto a square. I'm not saying my skies are perfect (they aren't. please don't look at them too closely ), But I think I got the seams right, for the most part.

FYI There is no way to fix it perfectly for all parts of the map, since what causes the corner to become visible is a perspective effect, and if you are looking at the sky from a different part of the map, you will get a different perspective.

SurlyBen

[ 04-24-2001: Message edited by: SurlyBen ]

[Tiger]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Or it's only true for my summer blue sky (which was the first one I did).<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Yes it's the blue sky pack is the one that was mentioned.

You are correct Surlyben that there really is no way to "fix" the corners. The panaramic filter is similiar to a seamless tile if I'm not mistaken, something I did for my sky bmps. I can even see the seam on one of your sky bmp that you posted above.

The skies I did were not stretched in any way; I did use a seamless tile on the edges only though.

The best thing that we need to see is to increase the rendering of the sky bmps to 24-bit instead of 8-bit, hopefully in CMBB.

As I mentioned: if you don't like 'em simply use something you do like.

[SurlyBen]

The panoramic filter is not quite the same as a tile filter. What the panoramic one does is take the image and curve it so that the corners are harder to see. The areas that are higher up in the image are curved more than the ones lower down:

Getting the edges to match up is a different step (at least for me). You are right about being able to see the seam in the dawn shot I posted above. In that case, the original photo had that cloud sloping down like that, and I'm afraid that end result is that the seam is more obvious. In game, it's only noticable if you really look for it...

This differs from the summer blue sky from my blueskies mod which had the pano filter applied incorrectly, so if you look at the blue parts of the sky, you will see that the corners are obvious. The corners are visible on the stock skies too.

Anyway, It's only something you notice in view one. I don't want to come across as critizing your skies. Heck, I use your overcast skies.

SurlyBen

[CoolColJ]

No seams here

[ 04-25-2001: Message edited by: CoolColJ ]

[[Wiking]]

Tiger: I didn't mean to offend you in any way. I do have many great mods from you on my comp

I just posted this to check if this happens to other people or just me.

Obviously, so far; only to me