I’m wondering if it’s possible to use a skybox effect like was done in ye olde Unreal Engine 1.
For those who may not recall, the way you used skyboxes back then was you had normal BSP surfaces that you marked as being “Sky,” and then you have a special spot somewhere on the map where you created a skybox, which was just a small-scale scene for the outdoor sky. In the skybox you placed a special skybox actor which acted like a camera. When you played the level, the surfaces marked as sky would not render, but instead would render the view from the skybox camera.
The important thing was that the position of the skybox camera would never move, only rotate. This created an illusion of distance because as you moved around the scenery didn’t.
I’m wondering if there is such an effect still inside of Unreal today. I know the running practice these days is to just build an incredibly large scene so the backdrop is just naturally part of the level, but I’m designing a game where the background isn’t really “attached” to the gameplay area, and the same background will be used in several levels. I don’t want to risk a large level poking through a background element after spending a lot of time struggling to get a background to look like the right size and proportion. I’d like to keep my gameplay level and background areas separate from each other.
To that end, I also wonder if it is possible to set streamed levels to be rendered apart from each other. Like, two separate levels, each with their own camera, but the camera will only render elements from that particular level. Is such a thing even possible? Well, possible without completely rebuilding the game engine just for this exact purpose.