Simple Noob skybox question

I've gotten the 2d skybox to work by creating huge brush around my map, hollowing it out, and putting the skybox material on it. I've been reading some of the tutorials and everyone says you should definitely not enclose your level in giant brush to stop leaks. Am I using the skybox incorrectly?

You can do this is you want to. But, it would be more economical, system wise, to only cover the bits you can see out of, for example, if my map was outside, i would start with a cube, make the floor of the cube a grassy texture, and the rest, skybox.

If it was inside, i would make a window, the make a small cube just outside of the window, then delete one side, and make it flush with the window.

Unless there is a window on the floor of your map (that would be cool) you do not need the sky to be displayed underneath your map.

Ack, do you understand what im babling about, i certainly dont :sad: lol

There's nothing wrong with doing this, you can just cube in your map like this if you really want. But it will cause VIS to take a lot longer to run on your map, and may affect in-game performance. IMHO it's okay to do whilst you're in the early stages of building your map, but later on it pays to "shrink wrap" it with sky.

Those were the words i was looking for, darn my innaccesible brain!!!

WAAAHHH MY BRAIN!!!!

First off, let me start by saying I am in no way very knowledgable about the editor. But, from my understanding of when you enclose the level in a giant cube you use too many resources. You end up with lower frame rates while playing, you make the map aera much larger which probabally leads to longer compile times. Try this out...

Make a square room with width,height and length of 512 units and put a info_player_start. Place a camera in the room, click on any wall to select it and ungroup them (Crtl+u). Now select the top wall (cealing) with the face edit tool and place the sky texture ( tools/toolsskybox ) on it. Now go to the map properties and select the skybox texture name and put in a valid name of a sky texture. You can find the names here http://www.hl2world.com/wiki/index.php/Sky_List .

You can also try this tutorial http://www.hl2world.com/wiki/index.php/Light:_Adding_sun_light

but make sure you use a different sky texture name because the one in the tutorial did not work for me. I used sky_wasteland02.

Hope it helps.

Ok, thanks for the info guys. I'll definitely work on keeping my skybox real estate to a minimum in the future.

I have heard a lot of people say things like this but would just like a bit of clarification, what does tools/toolsskybox mean? My first impression is from the tools drop down menu, find skybox, but there isn't anything there.

I also have tried to make a skybox for my simple map. It's an outside map and I enclosed it with four huge walls and a ceiling. I tiled the walls with "skybox/havft" from the texture selections and then tried running it. When I ran it the walls didn't end up with the sky on them, they had wierd large squares, and seemed to be through my other walls. Anyone else have this problem? Have any ideas?

french toast, "tools/toolskybox" it's just a texture. but the
word "tools" in front tells you it's not a texture. there are
plenty of things in the texture browser.

i dont know what skybox/havft does or the others like it do. just
use Tools/skybox for your upper walls and ceiling. I started
teaching myself to make my map last sunday so i dont know all the
tricks yet.

I learned how to do the skybox here http://www.valve-erc.com/srcsdk/Levels/3d_skyboxes.html

it worked perfectly.