I am working on a custom sky. the map takes place on the moon, so I need to have the sun and the earth visible in the sky above.

I set up the scene applied an earth texture I found and the stars texture already in Halo.

I set up the Sky tag and put it in-game, but the stars are not showing up. I can see the earth and the sun just fine, but the rest of the sky is purple.

This my first try at a custom sky, and I am not sure what I could be doing wrong, plz help.

Use a default sky that has stars as a start, and make sure they don't get deleted? I dunno if you're making a custom one in max or not.

I created a new one in max.

I need it to have stars, with a really large planet textured like earth, and then of course the sun.

The tutorial I looked at said to have a half-sphere with the stars texture and then a square plane with the planet texture.

In my experience skies don't follow "normal" draw-ordering. As a result Bungie-made skies have the different shaders/elements split up into regions prefixed by a number which is used to sort them correctly. For example, in the A50 sky, the shaders are split into the following regions:

02.sky (background)
03.land
14.threshold
15.basis
20.ring
24.fogband

The fogband is drawn last while the background is drawn first. Without this forced region ordering skies can look extremely odd with shaders being drawn out of their normal order.

Also of course make sure everything is linked to the root node and has the correct shader applied, it never hurts when dealing with these problems to re-import your model into 3ds and see if anything obvious is broken.
Edited by teh lag on Aug 15, 2011 at 09:01 PM

I am not entirely sure what you mean.

I just need the stars (backround), the sun, and one large planet (Earth in this case).

Earth and the sun show up fine, but the backround stars are not there. Instead the rest of the sky is just purple.

I can't figure out what could possibly be wrong. I tried importing an existing sky model into 3ds, but it wouldn't work.

My problem with sky personally is that I never was able to have the sun be in the right place, somehow whatever I did it ended up in the exact same location even if my #sun marker was in a totally different location

@Yoda, you name your objects correctly. For example:

10.stars
15.planet
Edited by Higuy on Aug 16, 2011 at 03:44 PM

That's in the sky tag, you specify an angle and pitch there.

"It wouldn't work" - what does this mean? Please explain what you do and what goes wrong.

With respect to the regions: I mean that you may be having issues because the background is somehow not being drawn correctly and that by assigning model regions using the method I described you can avoid such problems though I do admit that on reconsideration this probably isn't the cause of your problems (it's still good to know though if you ever make more complex skies).

A few other things to check:

-The scale of your sky; maybe you've just scaled it incorrectly
-The background shader itself; try referencing it in a default sky's gbxmodel and make sure it shows up correctly. This is actually starting to seem a likely cause of your problems, unless you're using a pre-existing shader tag.
Edited by teh lag on Aug 16, 2011 at 06:36 PM

The only way that I know of to import existing gbxmodel is to export it to a .txt with gorrila and then import is into 3ds with a the ghosts model importer. But when I import it into 3ds it just gives me an error and doesn't import it.

I think I understand what you mean about the regions now, I see how that would be good to know for future reference.

The tutorial that I used didn't tell me how to scale it, all it said was that if it was too small or to large that none of it would show up. Any advice on this would be GREATLY appreciated.

I have tried a few things with the shaders, but I think I have just messed things up and confused myself, so tommorrow (If I have time) I plan to delete the tags that I have so far and recompile to get a fresh start. Then I will try referencing an existing sky like you mentioned.

http://ghost.halomaps.org/bluestreak/gbxmodel/

Use that for scale comparisons and model importing and all that - sometimes it screws up shader indices but you can fix that by using the option to split up models by shader, and sometimes it screws up vertex weighting but that's not really relevant here. No .txt file crap, that version goes straight to the .gbxmodels.
Edited by teh lag on Aug 16, 2011 at 10:43 PM

Your half sphere should have a shader_transparent_chicago_extended shader applied to it.
In the 2 stage maps section, you will see the dropdown menu. This needs 2 parts, so click "add" if you need to. You should set one of them to have a background texture "map" and the colour function should be set to "current". The second part should have the stars texture "map" and be set to "add".
You can also just check the settings in sky\dusk\shaders\sky dusk.
I think the 4 stage maps section is for if you need more than 2 slots, but i am not sure.

I got it working, thanks for the help everyone.