Depends how much you want to do. As you said, you could call "Colour backdrop 0" and that will make a black "sky".
Alternatively, you could load a night sky image, and call "Texture backdrop
NightSkyImageNo".
The other ways introduce you to skyboxes and skyspheres. What you do is create an enourmous cube or sphere (maybe 13000 units, depends on how big your worlds are) only make it inside out:
Make Object Cube 1, -15000
Make Object Sphere 1, -15000
When you apply a night sky texture to the object, it will only be visible when the camera is inside the object. You'll need to position the skybox at the location of the camera each screen refresh if your moving the camera (not sure if that's an issue, I haven't actually run your program yet - but it's just finished downloading!
)
This is the code that Riftspace uses to generate the star backdrops (if you've played the game, then you'll notice the nebula clouds - these are (I think) .png files that are textured onto skyspheres). It comes from an example that Riftspace's creator releasesd explaining how to do
lens flare.
rem make some stars
create bitmap 1,256,256
for i = 0 to 1000
o=50+rnd(200)
ink rgb(o,o,o),0
dot rnd(255),rnd(255)
next i
get image 1,0,0,256,256
delete bitmap 1
rem make background stars object
make object cube 1,17000
texture object 1,1
scale object 1,-100,-100,-100
set object 1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0
scale object texture 1,2,2
(This uses an alternative method of making a large normal object, then scaling it using negative numbers - this also turns it inside out.)
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