Rockets in the sky

I don't know if this has ever been discussed but why do rockets just disappear into nothing when they hit the sky and don't explode?

// explode a missile
  if (ceilingline &&
      ceilingline->backsector &&
      ceilingline->backsector->ceilingpic == skyflatnum)
  {
      // Hack to prevent missiles exploding
      // against the sky.
      // Does not handle sky floors.
      P_RemoveMobj (mo);
      return;
  }
  P_ExplodeMissile (mo);

ah okay. I wasn't sure why rockets sometimes just get removed.

Ideally projectiles should keep going when they "hit" the sky, until they get far enough away that you can barely see them, then disappear.

However coding that would be difficult, so id had two choices: make the rocket explode or make it simply disappear.

In QUAKE the rockets explode, and their are bullet puffs when you shoot the sky with a shotgun, and I think it looks much worse since it breaks the illusion that the sky is really a sky (something very far away).

Yes, but the rocket simply disappearing isn't very realistic either.

General Rainbow Bacon said:

Yes, but the rocket simply disappearing isn't very realistic either.

Never really bothered me.

I think it was a nice touch. Same with lack of bullet puffs.

Going "into the sky" would be almost impossible to code, especially in Quake. Since it uses a 3D BSP tree, it wouldn't exist in any node and there would be no way to test for collisions or determine rendering order.

Scet said:

Going "into the sky" would be almost impossible to code, especially in Quake. Since it uses a 3D BSP tree, it wouldn't exist in any node and there would be no way to test for collisions or determine rendering order.

I think you could simply keep all "in sky" projectiles in one big list, render them all every frame, and not worry about doing any physics with them. But it may still be difficult to ensure they are rendered properly, the obvious thing to try is drawing the sky without writing the depth buffer, but that probably causes its own problems.

General Rainbow Bacon said:

Yes, but the rocket simply disappearing isn't very realistic either.

Remember that in the original executables without the capability to look up/down, you rarely had an opportunity to fire a rocket into a sky texture.