The Illusion of Sky Boxes

pontus writes to ask “On a game called Half-life 2:Deathmatch there is a thing called skybox - what is a skybox?”

A skybox, now a fairly outdated form of representation of far, and very far objects in a gaming senario, helps games to have the illusion of deapth. A skybox is constructed of 5 or 6 faces (dependent upon the need for a floor), and stays stationarry with respect to the player. As the player walks around the level, and objects within the level that they can interact with, or walk upto (like a building actually within the confines of the level), appear to move much more quickly than the background, or inaccessable portions of the level. The faces of the skybox are usually a sky (hence the name), modeling of surrounding terrain, and occationally unaccessable buildings.

This outdated system has been superseeded by a dynamic skybox (one in which objects like buildings do move relative to the player, but the sky is still stationarry, giving infinate deapth to the sky, but not to the surroundings), and the skydome, which is constructed of a sphere or hemisphere, to appear smoother.