I don't like the look of the 3D skybox on bm_c2a5c (Surface Tension, the map with the massive cliff)

Right off the bat, it’s only the 3D skybox I have issues with. The map itself is very pretty, and very well done.

But I’m talking about this:

https://imgur.com/a/epkGq

The map itself has nicely detailed walls and cliffs and the whole lot, but the 3D skybox is just… something else. The textures are super low-res and visibly streched, and the mountains themselves are really pointy. It’s really something that drags down the otherwise amazing view from the playable space. It was there when the original mod was released 4 years ago, it’s kinda a shame to see it still being there.

I would love to see this area get an artpass of the 3D skybox in a future update to make it look just as good as the playable space.

Actually, it’s the same resolution as the mesas in the distance, but that’s the problem. I agree that they should make the ones on the cliffside higher-res and higher-poly. Same goes for the ground actually.

What, they are actually models? Afaik it’s just a displacement mountain that’s just really low detail, probably one massive brush face with a power 3 displacement on it instead of 256x256 brushes with power 3 displacement.

IIRC the vista skybox is displacements, but ones that were generated from an external program and imported somehow. The material was also imported from it and just cut up to fit the displacements.

Depending on the power of the ‘near’ displacements, it could be increased, but I don’t know that increasing the texture resolution is a good idea - unless you do it across the board, it might lead to some very noticeable seams, which is something that they’ve managed to avoid despite the sheer amount of different displacements and textures being used in that skybox.

EDIT: I just took a look at it, and the displacements are already at a power of 4. There’s no way of making the geometry higher resolution without cutting it up into smaller pieces, and I don’t know the logistics of the method they used to get them into Hammer from the program they were generated in.

The same problems got my attention ever since the 2012 mod release.

The rest of the game is very detailed, and even ST and especially the STU maps. However, this chapter always lacked in areas, in particular that skybox. While in the distance, the vista looks great, the rocks on the cliffside look really bad… . They give me such a… GoldSrc-ish vibe.

And not just this actually. Another problem that bugged me for a long time is the ground. It looks pretty under detailed as well. For some reason all these remind me of the ST maps found in the 2006 leak.

I was hoping these would be addressed in the STU update as the team stated that they’ll rebuild the chapter instead of just adding the missing maps. But it seems that that is what happened instead… there are some noticeable changes in the existing maps (like a hazardous zone somewhere at the beginning of the chapter, which was missing in the original), but they could’ve definitely used more love…

Perhaps this will change at some point in the future.

I expected to see a new cliff area in STU update, but it was a little dissapointment for me to see literally the same version again.This area should be expanded a bit because they created such a great skybox and we spend only 10 min there.The part with building and water is good but the closer parts need to be reworked.Maybe they can use parts of their new STU skybox there?

There is absolutely no issue with the mesas in the distance. I would leave them as they are, they look gorgeous.
But they should probably replace the displacements for the cliff that the player is on (more or less) with a higher-quality displacement.

It doesn’t need to be seamless since the player can’t see the cliffside he’s on from afar anyway.

my only real issue is the skybox’s color being slightly off to the map geometry’s rock color

That’s Rayleigh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering

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