Welcome, mortals! Like me you have probably been staring up at the heavens at some point in a secluded area away from light pollution, pondering the mysteries of existence when a single brilliant thought enters your mind - this sky would look great in AoM!
Today I take a tentative step into the realm of modding to bring you this guide. Long the realm of the intellectuals, mortals have tried to compile complex code only to have it return an unfathomable error as the ghosts of the modding gods of old laugh at their syntax error. Dare I say that this guide is
So to make a sky you'll need a few tools to help you.
So we need to understand a few basic things before we set about creating our own skies. First of all, to make a new sky you will need three elements:
I created a few images as a test to see how AoM puts skies together. It's messy.
| So what's this? I know that AoM uses eight texture files to compose a sky as evident by the eight .ddt texture files that you will have downloaded for each skybox. I set about creating very basic .ddt texture files to see how they fit together. Each file is The first reaslisation is that After I had got my head round this, I found out how AoM puts a skybox together. This is a really important point so gets its own big image! |
This image is your reference, it is how a skybox is put together. We can see that a total skybox has an area of
So for example, if we make a large skybox picture the file that will be in the top left corner will be named
I mean really basic. This part of the guide will walk through how to actually make a sky.
We won't be making anything fancy - far from it. This sky will just feature one 256x256 image that repeats.
You should have eight copies of the same bitmap file named as follows:
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It details all your skies in an obvious way and can be edited with notepad. Add the line:
<sky>SkyYeebaa</sky>
Save the new file.
Open the models folder.
Load up one of Stephen's sky files in your hex editor. Let's open
Scroll most of the way to the bottom, and you'll find this line.
This is where the model file loads your textures. However
The file size of the .brg file cannot change otherwise your sky will not render. This means that we must keep the character limit and thus the file size
Find the search menu on HxD and then open up 'Replace'.
Input 'Cloud1' and replace all instances of it with 'Yeebaa', if the file replaces eight instances you know you've done it. Sometimes a warning will pop up if you are about to change the file size. Select
THE FILESIZE MUST NOT CHANGE.
Hopefully now in the hex editor you will have SkyboxYeebaa_RT and eight other entries corresponding to our list above in step 3.
Save the file as
If you're having trouble with this step - case sensitive is important as well.
Open up AoM, use the render sky trigger and enter
Not possible, perfection has already been achieved.
OK fine something a bit more technical.
Let's go for a starry sky. Now I don't want there to be sharp image edges such as you saw above with SkyYeebaa, so this means our sky must be flipped.
We do this by finding a starry sky image (left), and crop it to 256x256. Orientation doesn't matter too much here. AoM will flip this image vertically and horizontally but we don't care because you won't notice must difference.
Now let's save the image on the left as
So this image becomes to topmost leftmost image in our skybox. Moving along to the right we next hit
Now we move down a row. The original
We should now have four image files that form a perfect 512x512 square which is seamless and will repeat without rough edges when stacked next to each other.
But a skybox requires eight boxes, so we simply
RT is also LF
RF is also BK
RT2 is also LF2
RF2 is also BK2
That way we have made a skybox of the required eight images.
As above. This should be easier now you've done it already.
This would be challenging to start out with, if you came straight to this section I recommend you read and do the above two sections to become familiar with the process.
As you've already made two skies this one should be a breeze!
I want to use one of my photos of the aurora. This image will not tessellate, so I find the photo I want and crop is to 1024x512.
Orientation matters here so I flip my photo in both the horizontal and vertical plains so that when AoM does this, the image is restored to normal orientation.
Next I have to split my image up into eight 256x256 squares and name them. Let's overlay the IMPORTANT REFERENCE IMAGE. The keen eyed amongst you will see the top row is the '2' row - this is just because of the high camera angle I use in my map. If you could zoom out there would be the start of another picture underneath.
Perfect.
I then crop each section and name appropriately, as per above. I compile the skybox going through steps 4-9 above.
From a scenario perspective I don't really want to be hunting the perfect camera angle and building my eyecandy around that, I want the sky to slot in with my scenario.
The tessellating sky is the best way to do this.
You will see in the example of the starry sky above we only utilised 512x512 of the 1024x512 available to us.
If we want to create the largest tessellating sky possible, the image we will need to flip must be 512x256.
On to google image I go, and soon enough I find a sexy lightning image. I crop this down to 512x256 and flip it as below:
Looks hawt.
Working through steps 1-9 and in less than 10 minutes I have myself this beauty,
Have fun creating your own skies! Please direct questions to this thread and I look forward to seeing pictures of your creations! If you want to try and figure out how to get round the character limit,
Post sky pictures!
"You can't trust yeebaagooon to lead a rebelion, He would send everyone to steal mirrors so he could bask in his own brilliance." - Out Reach
"Yeebaagooon had never seen a more handsome man in all his life. He couldn't control himself, He needed to act. Gripping the mirror in his strong arms he kissed the figure before him..." - Out Reach
AoMH: Unfinished Scenarios|Singleplayer: Codename Ripto|Multiplayer: Minigames Z|CSC 7
Ex Seraphs Dictator, Spore Heaven Seraph
[This message has been edited by Yeebaagooon (edited 04-27-2019 @ 08:56 PM).]