Dawn skies Bmp numbers ?

[Sgt Steiner]

Hi all

Quick query anyone know offhand what the Bmp nos are for the Dawn skies set in Cmbb ?

Cheers in advance

[BeauCoupDinkyDau]

Please tell me you are doing new high res skies.

[Sgt Steiner]

Hi VJ

I wish it were so..........

Nope but going to try using some of the skies from CMBO mods instead.

I know they arent configured properly as such but I did manage to get Kumps Normandy clear sky to work and I think it looks ok so was going to try one of the Dawn mods as I am not a fan of the current Cmbb type.

Cheers

[Undaunted]

There are three versions of each sky in the game, one with green horizen, one with brown horizen, and one with snowy horizon. The sky itself is identical for all three versions. Each version is composed of three bitmaps:

For dawn:

Green: 1402.bmp(east), 1422.bmp(north), 1442.bmp(west)

Brown: 1408.bmp(east), 1428.bmp(north), 1448.bmp(west)

Snowy: 1414.bmp(east), 1434.bmp(north), 1454.bmp(west)

In CMBB, the northern sky bitmap is flipped to create the southern sky. IMO this setup makes it tricky to make a sky mod.

I tried to make a sky mode before, but my 24-bit bmps always suffer a loss in colour-depth when the game is running, resulting in some sort of ugly "colour contours". I tried to convert the bmp into 256 colours to introduce some dithering, but does not totally eliminate the problem. Does anyone has a solution to the problem?

[SurlyBen]

For my CMBO skies I used the photoshop 'add noise' filter before I reduced them to 8 bit bmps. This made the dithering look better, in my opinion, and definately reduced the "banded" look. It's important to reduce them to 8 bit bmps yourself so that you can control how they will look in game. If you don't, CM does it for you...

Also, if you want to make the dithering look even better, try making your skies bigger. I think it has to be even multiples of the original size... my high res skies were 2048 by 1024 instead of the orignal 1024 by 512. Keep in mind that bigger skies use up more memory (mine used four times as much vram as the regular skies...) and at least in those days, not all video cards could handle large textures (the 3dfx cards were limited to 256 by 256 pixels...)

Ben