New Skyboxes for Phobos and Io

One of the oddly goofy aspects of the original Doom game is that although Episode 1 clearly takes place on Phobos, complete with a crater covered map, the skybox is forest-covered mountains in China. Just... why? Sergeant_Mark_IV got it right for this Brutal Doom version of Doom64

and I'm surprised I can't find something similar for Doom1.

Has anyone done this yet?

Final Doom TNT: Evilution has a similar problem, with snow-covered mountains for what should be the hellish, volcanic landscape of Io with Jupiter taking up much of the sky... that would look amazing. *Edit* Having the "Demon Spaceship" in the sky would look sweet too.

I've searched all over, and the Brutal Doom64 skybox is the closest thing I've found. I wish I could do it myself, but I've only recently started learning about and using the plethora of mods out there.

Thanks,

SimKoning said:

http://media.moddb.com/cache/images/mods/1/29/28992/thumb_620x2000/2016-07-15_21_07_44-CompatWindow.png

Can you really see a planet in such a big size from the ground? Unless it's about to collide with the one you're on.

If you were on Phobos, yes, Mars would be that kind of size in the sky.

Mars is about 3400km across, and Phobos orbits a mere 6000 kilometres above the Martian surface.

Phobos is really close to Mars, so close that it will be ripped apart by Mars in about 10 million years. To put things in perspective, Phobos is 9.5 thousand kilometers from Mars at at its most distant, while the Moon is 405 thousand kilometers from Earth at apogee.

So something like this:

Io is Jupiter's closest Moon, so it would appear huge in the sky as well. The Skybox should look like massive volcanoes with stars and Jupiter above.

SimKoning said:

One of the oddly goofy aspects of the original Doom game is that although Episode 1 clearly takes place on Phobos, complete with a crater covered map, the skybox is forest-covered mountains in China. Just... why?

One could always assume Earth had started terraforming Mars and its moons.

Ok, thanks for the pics/explanation, just shows how little I know about astronomy. :)

@JohnnyTheWolf

There's no atmosphere on Phobos to terraform. It's really tiny, basically just a captured asteroid. A more plausible rationalization is that the E1M1 Hanger is inside a huge cavern that was hollowed out and pressurized by the UAC. The only problem with that is the hanger base is shown on the moon's cratered surface on the world map.

Just assume there's a force field of some sort to keep the air inside the crater.

Gez said:

Just assume there's a force field of some sort to keep the air inside the crater.

The world map shows a barren crater with no atmosphere, not forest covered mountains. A huge, subsurface dome would make more sense. The structure that's shown on the surface could be just the very top of the dome.

So basically this, but underground where it would actually be protected from impacts and radiation:

Except that on Phobos and Deimos the gravity is so low and escape velocity is so low that you can almost jump into orbit :P

This is very true, but this is the same corporation that can basically create wormholes (that connect to Hell no less...) without planetary masses, so I guess we can assume they figured out how to generate artificial gravity without using rotation or linear acceleration.

Anyway, an accurate skybox would look cool regardless, realism aside. The Doom64 skybox certainly looks awesome.

Pretty sure that sky can be reused for E1 in Doom..

Probably. I was going to try to figure it out myself, but I figured I would see if someone else had already done it, or was considering doing it.

Pretty sure you would have to edit the IWAD maps to do that, and it would only work in ports with skybox support.

Also, Mars is looking a bit dopey and cone-headed in that screenshot there. And those mountains look snowy rather than astroidy. I think someone could make vanilla-compatible sky that looks better.

The rims of the craters (not mountains) should probably be brownish, too, like the pic linked earlier in the thread. Otherwise they would clash with the brown colors of the base itself and they wouldn't match the world map.

Sorry to be off-topic, but has anyone seen or taken a picture from the Yangshuo Cavern like the one used for the Doom E1 mountains? I suspect after all this time the mountains may not even look the same so getting the right angle is probably near impossible.

I was playing through Knee Deep in the Dead, and I'm starting to doubt what I'm suggesting would work. There are several points where you go outside, and you can see what looks like algae growing on the exterior walls. So a sky like what's shown in the Op probably wouldn't make sense, visually.

It would be easier to photoshop a transparent dome over the crater during the end mission screen...

Sorry for bumping an old topic.

Resurrected Nightmare addresses this issue via the means of experimentation into gravity wells, essentially some 5 decades prior to the events of RN, the UAC basically built a gravity well inside of Phobos, essentially explaining the Earth-like gravity. On top of that the UAC in RN attempted to terraform (to experiment in terraformation) which succeeded initially but after a few years a lot of the plants + whatever grass died (aswell due to the addition of an atmosphere) is there to explain why an Asteroid has loose enough soil to have sand everywhere.

Another thing aswell, RN doesn't (well IT WON'T have them in the final release) have the infamous mountains using a custom-mixed sky texture with a skybox-ified doom alpha sky mountains (using the GZDoom sky viewport method)

I love the original sky, looked appropriately outerworldly to me when I first played it - had no otion of it being foliage covered or in China, they were just weird grey hills to me. Trying to shoehorn it towards realistic is opening a gigantic can of worms & just makes the setting less imaginative & more predictable and samey-samey as everything else. I'll take artificial gravity, crater forcefield & "hell's influence" for whatever remains as all the explanations I'll ever need.