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Half-Life ENV's

Environmental themes for Half-Life
In Half-Life many of the maps have out door settings that require a 'sky' texture. Valve designed Half-Life to use a '.tga' 256 colour texture file system made up of 6 images labeled 'up, bk, dn, ft, lf, rt & up'. All 6 images would be used to form the sky as seen in maps like 'crossfire'. Some maps designed by skilled mappers come complete with new custom made env sky files those that don't default back to using the standard Half-Life sky texture which appears as a desert like setting (As seen below).


Default Sky Texture

Only one problem with the default sky and that is it does become very boring and by changing the sky you'll be suprised by how much more enjoyable it is to play the map.

So how do you change the sky texture (known as 'env' files)? Easy, first you need to create or better still download some new custom env (sky texture files). Install them into your half-life/valve/gfx/env/... directory. They must go in this directory for them to work, this also goes for AG; Place them all in here. Ok now you need to type the following into your Half-Life in game console.

rcon sv_skyname <place here the name of the sky texture>

You need rcon to do this!!
As you may have seen the command to change the sky texture is an 'sv' Server command so you will need rcon rights to the server. If you don't have rcon/admin rights you will need to ask the server Admin to change it for you or create your own server/Lan game.

What is it again I need to type in for the 'skyname'??
Look in the directory where you placed your env files (see above) and make a note of the file names. They should look like for example fullmoonbk, fullmoonrt, fullmoonup etc... To enable this sky texture you need to type in 'rcon sv_skyname fullmoon' note you leave off the bk, rt, up etc... Just the name only is required. In some cases you'll find env files called 'Hexagon256_up' here you need to include the underscore for example 'rcon sv_skyname Hexagon256_" for the texture to work.

I done that but still it hasn't worked?
You need to 'reload' the current map for the settings to take hold or change the game mode so the map restarts. Some maps may override the sky texture so you can't change those ones others may require a .cfg file for the map. I found 'AG_crossfire.bsp' is one that doesn't like to allow a new sky texture to be loaded yet the standard crossfire.bsp map will work fine.

Here are some Sky texture env files already created all in 1 zip file.
Just download & unzip into your directory half-life/valve/gfx/env/... and then to enable a different sky texture just type the following line under the sky texture you want to load.


Default Sky avanti


rcon sv_skyname Blue


rcon sv_skyname Des


rcon sv_skyname Hexagon256_


rcon sv_skyname seafort


rcon sv_skyname swamp2


rcon sv_skyname TrainYard


rcon sv_skyname cm-thosemntns256_

Default Sky desdusk


rcon sv_skyname fullmoon


rcon sv_skyname glacial


rcon sv_skyname grass


rcon sv_skyname sb_


rcon sv_skyname spa-snow


rcon sv_skyname theyh3


rcon sv_skyname tropical

Downloads all of the above sky textures.

sky_textures.zip
Size: 12.5mb, Hits: 525



Changing Your Sky Background Without RCON
Writen By: werk

How it's done
Besides what Sandz said above, if you don't have 'rcon' and still want your sky maps different - look in your env folder and just simply rename texture sets... Done!

Same thing with map textures, all you do is edit the halflife.wad, water textures edit liquids.wad. This can be done using 'Wally' Get it from here or below.


Sponsored Link

wally_115b.exe
Size: 1.1mb, Hits: 140

You can download some nice sky back drops and textures from here: www.planethalflife.com/wadfather


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