sky box support?

Pipeline
1

I am considering the best type of sky to use for my world, and wondering what Panda supports most easily. Am I better off with a sky dome, sphere, or box? The main problems I could see with the dome or sphere would be accurate projection, and for the sky box I would imagine the main problem to be applying all 6 cardinal direction textures to the box without any headaches. Any thoughts on these topics?

In any case, am I able to make the sky track the camera correctly? The usual OpenGL method is to draw the sky with current camera rotation (but not translation) applied, and then clear the depth buffer before drawing the rest of the scene. Every frame, it would need to adjust rotation based on the current camera settings. What does Panda think of this? Can I get a start-of-frame callback?

2

No clue on which shape is most convenient for your application. They all work.

However, to answer your second question. I wouldn’t “adjust the sky box’s rotation every frame.” Instead, reparent the sky box to render so that its orientation is globally fixed. Then, every frame, reposition it using setPos to the location of the camera.

As for the depth-buffer clear, I wouldn’t bother. Instead, render the sky box with depth buffer disabled. You can do that using a DepthTestAttrib and a DepthWriteAttrib.

3

Better yet, use a LerpPosAttrib with the “other=” parameter to cause the skybox to follow the camera around.