and it wasn't anyway, althought I like art competiotions too, time by time.
The point was not who has the longer penis but about the best way to go. Personally after many tests I think that background bitmaps does look BETTER than skyboxes when they are..uh... say not more than 70% of your screen (at default fov), but if they are larger you start seeing fisheye effects.
On the other hand skyboxes always have some warping, they just are lower when the image is bigger.
Fisheyes effects may also be due to the insanely high FOV settings of FS2 btw
The point is that with skyboxes you have a better control of all the area, and you can make for example nebs completely surrounding you (which I'm working on...).
If he has a different opinion it's not a prob to me, and the same about stars, personally I prefer and I'd like to have control over density in specific areas, and I also think it make look better many "star objects", and surely it is more tricky using background images: in skyboxes you can make a basic starfield background coherent with the main image, so you don't see areas with stars without motion blur and areas where the all the stars have it, and with background images you also have to make the star images decreasing in density while approaching the borders.
Also I found a better way to map the skysphere than the cubic uvmap, partially using spheric uvmaps, which reduce a lot the warpings present on many older skyboxes.
As for the performance issues, I'm having again headache, because background images are a bit random on my system, sometimes they just don't work, some others yes, regardless the flags, with different performance results.
oh I found another funny thing with skyboxes:
the pahntom tie:lol:
