Night skybox confusion (manually enable NightSkyMat)

Night skybox confusion (Night skybox workaround)

Hello my fellow BeamNG drivers

I've run into some confusion concerning the skybox when you set tod to anything past 0.5 (or nighttime). By simply editing tod, the shading and lighting of the level get to that of nighttime, but the skybox stays the same bright blue map (with clouds). I've not seen anyone else make a thread about this issue, nor have I seen any pictures of BeamNG in proper night either.

Here is an example of the problem


This confused me because there's a setting under the sunsky entry titled "Night", which made me wonder if the night sky had a certain instance where it becomes enabled automatically. Is my game glitched?

Either way, my work around is to just replace the day skymap with the nighttime skymap through the skybox entry, like this:

Under SkyBox, look for the Material entry. Click the globe icon on the far right.


The Material Selector appears; Make sure all the tags except Skies are unchecked (in other words filter it down to only Skies)


You should get these maps. Select NightSkyMat and press select.


The skymap should now be set to the night map. Press F11 again to exit.


The moon lighting is very beautiful, it is a shame there aren't more pictures of it.
Sorry if my formatting is bad, I haven't made a thread post this complicated in a few years

I also apologize if this tutorial isn't needed because its common knowledge and I just didn't get the memo. I just wanted to let others know of this problem. I figured it was affecting other people since I never saw pictures of the moon in-game on google images etc, and to let everyone know of this workaround.

Thanks for reading.

 

Re: Night skybox confusion (Night skybox workaround)

Thanks for posting

 

The ocean has weird lighting when you change the skymap:
Before

(imported from here)

Toggling fullReflect sort of fixes it, along with changing the cubemap.

(imported from here)


After

(imported from here)

 

There is a proper way of doing a day/night transition, and you're doing it wrong. Apparently you've never played any of my maps either, because 2 of them have proper day/night cycles.

This method is MUCH easier:

First of all, DO NOT use a skybox....if you have one, delete it, it's not needed. Make sure you don't have any "basic sun"s either. Delete them if you have any, because they cause atrocious lighting. Instead make yourself a "scatter sky" element. To enable the nighttime sky in the scatter sky, go down into your scatter sky settings to the "night" section. in that section, checkmark "UseNightCubeMap", and directly under that select one of the cubemaps to use as the nighttime sky. (I prefer "nightCubemap", it looks the best.) Then voila! you have a night sky that will automatically change when your TimeOfDay changes to night! You can also edit the color scheme of the night using the other settings under the "night" section.

Also you can enable a moon and pick a moonMat to use

Here's a screenshot:



Also if you don't know how to set up a Day/Night cycle, Make sure you have a TimeOfDay element in your level, if not, add one from the "level" folder in your scene tree. Then go into your settings and it should have as follows:



Ignore the parts that are crossed out. Here's what the rest means:

dayLength: The length of the day in real-life seconds. I set mine at 1600, which is about a half an hour real-time to 24 hours in game.
startTime: The time of day that the map is set at when you load it up. 0.1 is early morning.
time: The CURRENT time.
play: Check this checkbox to unpause time, uncheck it to pause time. simple as that.
dayScale: The scale of time the daytime will last compared to nighttime.
nightScale: The scale of time that the night lasts. For example, setting it to 1.5 means nighttime will go by 1.5 times faster and shorter than daytime. Setting it below 1 will make it slower.


And finally, here's a great site to learn how to do all of this:
http://docs.garagegames.com/torque-...ent/documentation/Introduction/DefineT3D.html

 

Thanks for the response. None of the levels had scatter sky element when I loaded them and hadn't thought of adding it. My only problem with scatter sky is the really bad fps dip when I enable it (60 to 15).