Making outer space look as cool as possible (also: Skyboxes)

Hey fellas.

I have this SHMUP I've been working on on and off over the past few years. During this time I've switched toolkit and/or programmer maybe four or five times before finally finding and settling with Construct. It's an awesome toolkit, and I have no doubt that I'll be able to finish the game this time.

So.

As the game is a space shooter and Construct is a highly versatile toolkit, I would like to make the game look as mindblowing as possible. I've only scratched the surface of what Construct can do, so I was wondering if you could give me some tips on how to create vast space sceneries, scrolling stars and random space elements?

How would you develop a space games? Any cool effects you can recommend?

I'd also like to know how to implement skyboxes, because my current idea for the main menu is to have it located inside a skybox, and allowing the player to look around in this constricted "outer space room" by navigating the menu. Like say that for instance the topmost parent main menu (New game, load game, quit etc.) is located in a specific area of this space view, clicking one of these options would pan the camera to a diferent area of the room where the menu options are then displayed, and so on.

How do you make a skybox?

And also, any thoughts on making a space game in general? How would you do certain things? Any cool effects you can think of?

Thanks in advance.

I have never heard of a skybox in a 2D game, please explain.

http://www.gullen.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ ... skybox.zip

Did you make that in Construct? Is that a 2d effect or is it a model?

It's a Construct demo from the frontpage.

Oh, ok. I had never seen it before. I'm not sure of the specifics on that, but I'm curious as to any practical application inside a game. Construct has extremely limited 3D support.

What I would suggest is you look into some parallaxing effects to create a cool star field. You could generate space objects randomly and even look into adding some distortion effects when your player approaches certain objects (black hole, whatever).

Btw are you Drule from GW?

EDIT: Oh, sorry, I misread. I see you only want to use it for a menu. Cool idea. I've never created a skybox before, but your best bet might be finding some and opening them up in Photoshop to see what they look like and how they wrap.

As far as placing buttons and such inside the skybox.. hmm.. I'm not sure. You might just be able to play them on a layer over it and pan accordingly, but that might not achieve your desired effect. Have you tried opening the .cap of that demo? It might provide some more insight.

I fiddled with that idea before. If it is only for menu screen, then I suggest a tiled background covering the whole screen.

Now, you can make it scroll over time, using offset of the tiled background. Be creative; use sine movement, etc., I ended up making the starfield move around gently as if I was looking around.

Also, there is Perlin Noise plugin by Arsonide, if you want more "random" stars, it is not difficult to use. You can use the same seed number to generate same stars, too.

Yeah I don't know about that, math isn't my strong side. I'll do my best though.

Also, I threw together a mockup.

http://junk.drule.net/space.exe (press 1, 2 and 3 to alter views)

It's kind of laggy though, probably due to the large size of the backdrop image.

Any ideas on how to reduce these problems?

It doesn't lag for me, but it is much more helpful if you post the .cap so we can see exactly what you've done.

You should have each menu item be a planet, that'd be cool.

It does lag a lot for me, and I'm on a mid-high-end laptop.

Posting the .cap would be kind of useless. It's just regular old layer zooming and panning.

Well if you don't want to post the .cap, that's fine.. uhh... that it could be caused by non-power of 2 textures of fairly large size.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/c ... ation_tips

Have a look at that, but yeah, I'm not going to play GUESS THE PROBLEM.

I'm saying it wouldn't reveal much as I've just set up a few functions to zoom and pan between different layers, but I'll post it when I get home.