Quote: "but for the rest of the time its just black and ground segment clones itself when youre moving the camera."
When this happens in Classic, it is because the engine cannot render the skybox- this is due to either missing files, an incorrect path/spelling in the "setuplevel.fpi" file calling the skybox, or an incorrect listing in the X file of the skybox. I have encountered this issue many times and know exactly what the issue is and where to look.
First, you need to make sure you are correctly specifying the skybox in your "setuplevel.fpi" file. After many years of using classic and successful deployments, I know that the skyboxes were a big pain that had some issues to be resolved. First, spaces in the skybox folder itself or skybox name will cause the above issue. That is why (you notice), the skyboxes listed all have "three" characters (skybank\folder\123 as an example). Anyways, to specify your skybox, the correct format is this:
:state=0:sky=skybank\NFM\dea
:state=0:skyscroll=skybank\generic\clouds.dds
The above not only will load the skybox, but this is how you also can load and use the skyscroll command (which only a very small few of us actually used).
Second, ensure you have all files required- in a build game I noticed that a .dbo and the six textures would copy but I too had the above issue. I removed the .dbo from the build and instead copied the X file and voila- it worked.
Third, open the X file with notepad and look at what texture file it is referencing. For example, I will use the skybox CTY (located in my "skybank\ww2\Cty" folder). I will not quote the entire file, but here is the first texture file reference.
Material Material__6 {
1.000000;1.000000;1.000000;1.000000;;
0.000000;
0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;;
0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;;
TextureFilename {
"cty_D.tga";
}
Notice the "
cty_D.tga"? That is the file for the skybox D field and so on in the rest of the X file (B,D,F,L,R,U). If your X points to TGA but the textures are DDS, that is okay; if they point to DDS and the textures are TGA that is also okay. But if the X points to DDS and they are PNG, BMP, JPG, then you will need to convert them and adjust the extension in the X file according. In other words, skyboxes using JPG textures did not work properly once shaders were developed after v1.18- heck they never even got copied to a final build and thus some of us converted the images to either PNG/DDS/TGA, then manually edited our skybox X files according and pointed to the exact extension.
These above examples are the
common reasons why you get the issue you do. From v1.18 and up there were issues and reports with skyboxes not copying to a build, etc and it was addressed more or less as best that the development team could do. Some things were missed by most (such as having spaces in the folder names or skybox name, using a texture no longer supported or working properly with shaders), and it is hard to try and determine an exact reason with the various versions available as each reacted differently depending on the setup.
There's no problem that can't be solved without applying a little scripting.
