Idea: DREAMified skies

[carademono]

Hi all (and especially King of Worms),

I absolutely love playing DFU with all the DREAM mods activated. I also love the old-school Daggerfall skyboxes, with the mountains and forested hills in the background. They look amazing combined with mods like Interesting Terrain. But while gorgeous, the skyboxes do stand out alongside the Dream mods because they're so pixelated. Would it be possible to apply the same DREAM magic to those skyboxes so that we can play with handpainted mountains behind the terrain? Thanks for all your hard work!

[King of Worms]

I wanted to do it, but I dont think this part is open to modding..

Also, the fact that there is this nauseating distortion between the 2d background and 3d world...

I just cant believe there is NO way to make those backgrounds actually look like they belong there in the scene. Map it on the sphere or cylinder, what ever... It must be possible.

Also, there were numerous discussions about this already, but we found no solutions. I will just repeat myself, that DFU is currently dependent/limited to one very basic mod for a weather and bellow the phone level of lighting :X I cant believe nobody picked the light/weather system yet. That thing would change the game to current 2020 level, for those who want that.

Some of the last discussion about sky was here
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=3470&sid=41f6a08a3 ... 3&start=10

[carademono]

Funnily enough, I don't find the distortion between 2d background and 3d world to be a problem... It actually tricks my brain into thinking that the world goes on and on forever far more effectively than, say, Skyrim. But hmm, mapping it onto the Enhanced Skies sphere might do the trick, right?

[King of Worms]

For me its vomit inducing, looking up and down, all the distortion, cant do that :X Looks awesome at the screenshots, and Id switch to the 2d backgrounds immediately, if the distortion was eliminated.

The 2d question about a mapping is for a coder...

[carademono]

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions! Hopefully there's a solution out there that's true to old-school Daggerfall and doesn't make anybody throw up

[joshcamas]

Modding in a custom sky (whether it be a sky shader or some sort of cubemap) should be very doable, just with some scripting. It would probably involve disabling the skyrig and having a custom sky manager+shader.

The question of course would be what would we want the sky to look like? I would imagine the dreamified sky would be a handpainted version of the vanilla cylinder sky, but put onto a cubemap. A shader that fades between saod various cubemaps could do the trick.

Here's an example of a cubemap skybox texture:


And here's an example of a random cubemap I slapped into DFU:

[King of Worms]

If I understand it right, it looks like the SKY files for each moment have 2 files. Each file covers 180 degree of view. I tryed to put em together in photoshop and they indeed appear to be seamlessly tiling. One set starts with 0 and the other with 1. Combine em and you get 360 view.

Example of 0-7 and 1-7 - if you combine em you get 360 view:

0-7.PNG (33.93 KiB) Viewed 1533 times

1-7.PNG (34.45 KiB) Viewed 1533 times

I already see a issue, where the SKY files do not have the UP and DOWN parts. The down part will not be too much missed, but the UP part is important Id say... So it appears it will be hard to create a cubemaps from the original SKY files if Im not mistaken.

Here is just a quick upscale and denoise. It can look good. I can make it 2x this resolution or even more..

1-7(RGB)(noise_scale)(Level3)(tta)(x2.000000).png (249.16 KiB) Viewed 1533 times

Im a bit afraid the upscaling will cause the files to stop being completely seamless tho :X EDIT: tested it and indeed it created some small seam, but its nothing major, my guess is nobody will notice it unless he knows what to look for.

Also before I forget it, few things Ive noticed:
There are 4 background types
Each background has 8 types of weather
So there are total 32 types of skyboxes
Each complete SKY animation covers 12 hours (in 32 frames) - and than its played backwards to create the opposite sun movement.

[joshcamas]

Yeah, it would take manual painting to make it support cubemaps, I'd imagine

[King of Worms]

Yeah, it would take manual painting to make it support cubemaps, I'd imagine

Than it is basically out of equation... nobody will draw so many images in a way it tiles seamlessly in terms of shapes and colors with the rest.

So what we need is better weather system and also better color/brightness curve of light during the day. To make the full 3d render look better. This one is "ok"-ish but its just so basica and not really great looking. Considering this is what makes or breaks the game, its very sad this part of DFU lacks so much and nobody picked up the torch to make DFU look actually good during the years.

[Ralzar]

I actually tried at one point to "fix" the classic skies so they would look right with terrain mods and longer view distance. I set up a script that edited all the original sky images to cut off the hills at the bottom and stretch the picture so the format was still correct.
Only problem was, those images are not supported for easy texture replacement. So it stopped there. I still have all those images ready to go though, if it ever becomes available for texture replacement.