The most advanced option to improve your track's look and feel is to generate a custom skymap. How does a skymap work? Think of it as a box surrounding the whole track in a certain distance. It doesn't appear as a box, but that's just an optical illusion. Believe me, it's a box. It consists of 6 bmp's (front, back, left, right, top and bottom) and they are 256x256 in size (as always).

Not every original track uses a skymap. In fact only 'Toys in the hood 1', 'Toytanic 1' and 'Toytanic 2' have a real skymaps stored in their folders. Now that you know where they are, how do you change them?

The best tool for creating skies, horizons and starfields is Bryce from Metatools (see screen) for it is almost as intuitive as the track editor itself. But nonetheless I will not describe how to work with it. It would take an own tutorial to get into the basics of 3D modelling and you do not need to know that much about it if you want to put up an ass kicking skymap with Bryce.

Simply create a new document in Bryce with 1024x256 (4 bmp's) in size, put a sky on it (there are many templates available) and apply a texture to the ground - your first map is ready! Don't change the standard height for the horizon because in custom tracks you'll only see a small stripe from the middle of your skymap. So make sure all the action in your skymap takes place in the very middle of it. Just look at the following 2 skymaps and you'll know what I mean:

I've put in help lines to show where the bmp has to be cut into pieces again after you told Bryce to "Export image". These 4 files provide a surrounding look to your track. Well, almost. They're seamless inside but the right tile doesn't fit to the left one. You'll have to make this two tiles seamless with Photoshop (more about that in the "Effects" section).

When saving them to your levels folder, make sure to store them in the right order: sky_lt, sky_ft, sky_rt and sky_bk. Otherwise your whole effort to make it seamless will not pay off at all :)

I received an email several days ago from D. Logan in which he told me of a software called Universe Image Creator, a program only invented to create starfields, universes and other spaced out space stuff. I haven't tried it yet but from what I saw in the Gallery pages, it looked quite impressive.

If you like you can also create the top tile of the 'box' (sky_tp.bmp), but it will not be seen very often. I always choose to play it safe: only choose a color from the top of your surrounding bmp and fill a 256x256 bmp with it. This keeps the file small when stored in your zip afterwards. You do NOT have to create a bottom (sky_bt.bmp) for your skymap because all custom tracks alerady have a ground texture and you won't see it at all.