This Twitter bot tours Half-Life skyboxes to brighten up your timeline

rockpapershotgun.com:

The second-best way to make Twitter palatable (after simply unfollowing sources of bad tweets) is to follow a load of curated and bot accounts which trickle niceness into your timeline. Today I'd like to suggest adding Skybox Satellite, a Twitter account which shows glimpses of the skies wrapped around maps in GoldSrc games like Half-Life and Counter-Strike. It's sometimes pretty, sometimes nostalgic, and sometimes impressive.

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The bot is made by Suzanne Will, a level designer and environment artist who's currently working on Blendo's immersive sim Skin Deep. The account is masquerading as a "lost probe, drifting through forgotten dimensions", slowly spinning and looking around as it appears in the skies above many maps from Half-Life and its engine kin.

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In Half-Life engine games, the sky beyond the 3D geometry of a level is a series of six low-resolution 2D images. These are essentially treated as the inside surfaces of a cube, with the level hanging in the middle to create the illusion of a world beyond. In Half-Life, these skyboxes are mostly red deserts and mesas against blue skies (plus some colourful alien spacezones), but other GoldSrc games and custom levels have explored all sorts of places. I'm glad to idly visit them in my Twitter feed.

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I always liked that skyboxes were often built with technology far fancier than the game could do in real time, but this fanciness was rendered in images smaller than a texture which might cover a single wall. This low-resolution prerendering created a fascinating mix of "This looks amazing!" and "This looks bad!" I like how seeing them in low-resolution videos on Twitter, rather than hanging huge