This is an idea I got recently when I replayed Unreal Tournament 3 for a few matches last night. Basically, my idea is that you can dynamically change the rotation of the skybox. This would move the sun & moon relative to the rotation, as well as the position of where day becomes night and night becomes day.
A good use case for this would be to simulate a rotating ship in space, or an asteroid, which is how I thought up of this idea in the first place. This feature could be ran locally, or it can be ran serverside, local obviously not replicating to the server.
While this would be helpful and does have a lot of potential uses, it’s unlikely this will ever be added to the skybox system. Reason being, Roblox is more focused on their upcoming procedural skies which will be much more dynamic and customizable.
“Our big sky direction is moving more towards procedural skies rather than tactical features around skyboxes.”
(https://youtu.be/KPpGjml4uLU?t=23m24s)
This is definitely something people want which is why I’m hoping we’ll get rotation with the procedural system, but I think adding new features to skyboxes doesn’t make a lot of sense given how ancient it is and that it would distract Roblox’s engineers from finishing the new skies.
Yea, probably. Roblox likes to follow a step-by-step process for feature replacements like this:
Ship first version as an opt-in feature
Make improvements based on user feedback until the new is superior in virtually every way
When enough creators have adopted the new, deprecate the old and give a warning that it’ll be removed at a certain time
After the time, force all places to use the new system
They followed these steps with smooth terrain to replace blocky terrain, they’re currently doing it with PGS physics to replace legacy spring physics, and they’re considering the same process for Future Is Bright lighting. I don’t see why it would be different for procedural skies to replace skyboxes. There are some exceptions where Roblox doesn’t get rid of the old (such as R6) so it’s possible skyboxes could still be an option long after procedural skies are shipped, but don’t count on it.