"May I suggest a way of reducing the amount of renders would be to move the skybox as te cam moves it as the cam moves, ie, if you move the cam in a +X direction move the skybox in a -X direction, this way you'll get the background scaling the correct amount and maybe you won't need to render so often."
I already tried that, and for some reason it works terribly. In fact, the rendering seems to go wild and the image on the skybox jumps around like mad. I don't understand why that was occuring. I would think it was a bug, but I looked over my code a hundred times and I couldn't figure out what was going wrong.
What I did was I turned off skybox moving unless the skybox image was updated, and the image was updated evert few meters just as before. But for some reason when I would walk up hills all of a sudden the sky could turn black or shift downward suddenly. This happened even if I only moved a little bit away from the point where a render last occured. I can't for the life of me understand why it would do that.
"And as Podperson suggested you don't need to render behind you. But you already knew that!"
Well I have not actually implemented code to render only in specific directions mainly because it would still be too slow, so there's no point in optimizing that.
One method I have been considering is to somehow render smaller slices. Instead of rendering four sides of a cube, I would instead render the sides of a cylinder, which could have many more sides than the cube, so I could render much smaller sections of distant detailed terrain each frame.
Also, one thing I might do is combine multiple renders into a single texture building the texture up over time intead of rendering a whole texture at once. So even if I rendered to an 8 sided cylinder, I could divide that rendering up into an arbitrary number of render slices and render each side texture in 16 thin slices. Because only the texture needs to be square, not the render window.
I already tried that, and for some reason it works terribly. In fact, the rendering seems to go wild and the image on the skybox jumps around like mad. I don't understand why that was occuring. I would think it was a bug, but I looked over my code a hundred times and I couldn't figure out what was going wrong.
What I did was I turned off skybox moving unless the skybox image was updated, and the image was updated evert few meters just as before. But for some reason when I would walk up hills all of a sudden the sky could turn black or shift downward suddenly. This happened even if I only moved a little bit away from the point where a render last occured. I can't for the life of me understand why it would do that.
"And as Podperson suggested you don't need to render behind you. But you already knew that!"
Well I have not actually implemented code to render only in specific directions mainly because it would still be too slow, so there's no point in optimizing that.
One method I have been considering is to somehow render smaller slices. Instead of rendering four sides of a cube, I would instead render the sides of a cylinder, which could have many more sides than the cube, so I could render much smaller sections of distant detailed terrain each frame.
Also, one thing I might do is combine multiple renders into a single texture building the texture up over time intead of rendering a whole texture at once. So even if I rendered to an 8 sided cylinder, I could divide that rendering up into an arbitrary number of render slices and render each side texture in 16 thin slices. Because only the texture needs to be square, not the render window.