something i’ve really wanted to see for a while now is better control over skyboxes, canvas domes are an option but they often don’t look so great due to their low poly count, weird shadows, and not-so-great UVs
to fix that issue, i propose skybox primitives! these would be basic cubes or spheres (with hollow variants of course) that could potentially some kind of shader that looks something like smooth dirt’s skybox, similar to the system used in the “fake interior” material, just for the sky!
there could be multiple variations and settings, too! for things like weather effects, and especially for different skybox appearances like a space theme, void, or other exotic types of skyboxes that would all be built directly into the game!
you could place them down in condos like any other normal item, but they’d give off (and recieve) no shadows, while also potentially having a shader effect that makes it look like it has moving clouds, or reacts to a day/night cycle, etc!
this could be TREMENDOUSLY useful for creating convincing skyboxes for something like a room that goes to the outside in a spot where you wouldn’t be able to reach the sky, especially on condos like theater & art studio where there’s no skybox at all
Glossing over the fact that this illusion falls apart as you get closer to the edge of the dome, a more important fact is that this solution is incompatible with a day/night cycle without advanced, expensive, custom Condo IO and multiple images for different times of day. Additionally, the inside of the dome is lit awkwardly beyond the ambient lighting of the current time of day. In order to get a convincing sky a glow of 1.0 is required.
There are custom built-in shaders available that solve the resolution and texture cache issue, but many aren’t mapped to the dome’s UVs properly, and this solution still isn’t compatible with the day/night lighting.
Even if this didn’t have canvas support at all and just let us pick from 3 or 4 skyboxes it would be great.
Ideally, it would be great if it tried to copy the settings you have set for the sky (though this would require changing how condos with no skybox work)
I just started building a condo that will need something like a default skybox that has a functional parallax effect only to find out that the only skybox textures available are the night sky and stars ones, which are not suitable for a scene in daylight obviously.
