Torque provides designers with many different tools straight out of the box to help create compelling and convincing game environmenst, and, like the rest of Torque, are highly customizable.  However, this is a basic introduction to Torque's environment package, and we will be dealing mostly with the in-game World Editor.

Like many other engines, Torque encases it's world in a giant cube, with the inner faces textured to create a sky.  The skybox is rendered slightly differently than the rest of the world; position of the sky does not change in relation to the character.  In other words, no matter how high your camera moves, the skybox remains at the same distance, to create the illusion of an infinitely large space.  Clouds are rendered in a similar way.

The skybox template can be downloaded here.  Simply unzip the archive into the data/skies directory of your root Torque installation.

The template contains ten images.  Six of them (sky*.png) each map to a separate face of the skybox.  The image envmap.png is the image used if environment mapping is enabled for your character or vehicle.  The remaining three images, cloud*.png, are three cloud layers allowed by Torque.  Finally, these images are all indexed by a text file, sky_demo.dml.  Open it up in your favorite editor.

Each line is the name of an image (the extension is not necessary).  

Now, fire up Torque.

[to be continued]