I have a 1024x6 skycube working, and it is rendering fast - but is this way too huge??

I am sure it would fail on even a medium level card. If you are shooting at a current gen game, what size sky cube is reasonable? (for a graphics intensive game )

Pick your target platform, build the game, and then scale down the skycube to match your target framerate. I think a 512x512x6 skycube is reasonable, but if you want to aim for the edutainment market you would have to reduce it further than that.

Thanks, I have been researching this a bit. From what I can tell, most modern games are using 512x - Some people have had luck using 768x. I am not sure how video memory works, and its relationship to system memory.

In planning my game, moving from a few rooms to a full level, are there guidelines beyond keep your textures as small as possible? Like if I use a 512x sky, what does this mean for the other textures in the level. Links to this sort of thing would be appreciated if someone has something.

thx again.

Normally, the limit is from your video card. My card only goes up to 2048 on a side. I could get a sky of 2048x2048 (or 12288x2048 given the 6x1 wide method), but this isn't recommended. 512 for each of 6 sides (3072x512) is decent. You could go with 1024 on each side (6144x1024), but this means using 18 MB in video memory just to store this (versus just 4.5 MB with the 512 size). 512 is a good size to use.

As for the outside area, I suggest using models for the scenery. With keeping the models from 2000 to 5000 polygons (according to my benchmarking experiment), you'll be able to have the greatest detail (for shape) and have the fastest frame rate. For basic scenery, always add an action with "my.dynamic = off" in it to speed up the rendering for that model by 25% (since it seems to always be on by default). MDL terrains allow for much more flexibility in shape and can be just as fast as HMP terrains (sometimes even faster, depending on how you design it (and when a cut-out is needed, that's where the rendering speed really improves), but they take considerably longer to make. Also, model-only levels take but one second to build, regardless of what settings you have.