Sending FI3RST skyward
Just got done adding some skyrendering technology to the FI3RST code base. The sky system I implemented uses a hybrid of sky sphere and sky box technology and pulls the best features out of both of them. The textures for the sky are assembled from 6 seamless textures arranged in a skybox form, this is then loaded in a cubic texture map. Then a skysphere is rendered into the world which performs lookups on the above mentioned cubic texture map in a shader to project the skybox onto the skysphere. This eliminates the texture ripping that occurs near the poles with skyspheres and the obvious edges that skyboxes produce.