Custom sky / alternate sky grid

It would be very awesome if more than the default sky / stellar objects were available.

Imagine:
- Flying through the clouds of Venus
- Hopping around Mars or the Earth's Moon
- Exploring a totally foreign world with different moons and suns and maybe rings or space stations (death stars?) floating in orbit
- Comets & shooting stars
- Sky plastered in flames and darkness as all residents in the sim burn in the afterlife
- Psychadelic colors, shapes, groovy textures sprawled horizon to horizon
- Undersea scapes


- Private estates could upload skymaps / textures.
- Multiple moons enabled, allow estate owners to set how often they orbit, allow uploading of satellite textures (moons, comets, space stations)
- Allow changing of how long day / night exists (perhaps this may need a seperate grid of some sort
- Maybe LL could open alternate areas, just like with snow sims / etc.

refer to the end of page 1 and into page 2 here:
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I endorse this idea, to add on some things to it:

- Allow sun/moon textures to be changed.

- Allow multiple skybox "layers" or "textures", so you can create layered moving clouds or some simular effect.

- Changeing position and orientation of where/when the sun/moon rise and set (i.e. have your sun(s) rise in the north and set in the south).

1. I said that
2. YES! EQ had this effect, and they totally underused it until later expansions.
3. Not a bad idea, either.

Nice! OK!

Agreed w/ above and add to the list...

LIGHTNING/Thunder/Rain/Snow/windstorm effects too!

some of the very best weather and day/night cycles I have ever seen was in the MMORPG Anarchy Online. I have taken tons of screenshots of them over the time I played there, a lot of them just to have an awesome sunset/sunrise pic.

Arti

Endorsed 100%.

All suggestions so far endorsed.

Would be nice to have "pressure zones" too... like a mysterious Planet Z that revolves around the simsun and gets set ablaze every so often hours -- so the planet is only accessible at certain times (which could be shifted to be fair to all international users), or you'd have to get a rare sort of protective suit to prevent being lit ablaze and vaporized slowly. Maybe a planet of treasure. Treasure planet?

The Jedi fans are going to eat this up -- two suns for Tatooine and all that.

I was just at Chip Midnight's, and he has some really nice ambient SFX going on like one of those nature-clock doohickeys. It adds to the atmosphere of it all, including the subtle snow falling down. I figure we could have more of that... not just the howling wind. Acid rain in a gritty, dystopian cyberpunk city would r0x0r. So more environment types, period. BRING ON THE CACTI!

Also, I've noticed that in some -- a lot of places -- with water SFX, the water loops, which are the same, seem to be resampled incorrectly and played at 2x, making them squeaky-weird. I figure this could be used beneficially... some sort of settings for additional sound mixing which would allow feasible yet intuitive control, to aid in the design of ambience. Monsoons, typhoons, lava flow, longer and varied loops for crickets and ducklings, and maybe even one of those Japanese weather supercomputers. I semi-jest on that last one. But seriously, what sounds real psychologically looks more real.

You mean I could add a happy sun to go along with my happy clouds? I'm in!

Got my vote. I'm kind of surprised private sim owners can't already do most of this stuff.

Good ideas, I like!

OMG! Goodwrench, you make great avatars!

And you remember in SMB3 where there's that initially happy sun that gets mad, and chases you around the desert? That would have to be another creative use of the technology.

Dealing with your paragraphs, respectively in order:
1. Um... interesting.
2. Exactly, yes!
3. Yes!
4. Ambient noise could be improved by Linden Lab setting the default "roll off" setting to about 10% so the sounds wouldn't fade after a couple meters. I think the real solution to universal sim sounds is either streaming it or for Linden Lab to allow 10mb or so for an mp3 to be uploaded and looped. This would open up a whole new field of expertise in SL. *opening up a new thread just on this idea*

VERY true. Thanks, you brought this up before, and yes, I do concur. I haven't changed my roll-off setting yet. But now I should.

The cutoff is sharp right now and even me, hearing-impaired, can hear the jutting cut-off when you take a few steps. Okay let's lead off to the next great idea!

saw a similar suggestion on the Linden hotline, so /bump

Somehow as soon as I saw someone mention alternate textures for the sun, I had a vision of Apollo's chariot crossing the sky pulling the sun.

All of this would be way cool.

Yes please!

neko

(I can't believe Philip thought we needed further discussion/polling on this.)

I was thinking some more about this.

The question in the Linden Hotline was about "texturing" an island for space, with no water, land, etc. Philip pointed out that they could turn off gravity and land/water texturing, but you'd still need to restrict where you build/move due to things needing to function within a horizontal band.

Ok, sounds to me like this sort of sim would most reasonably be stacked above the existing grid. You could theoretically fly to it, or use a rocket, a chariot drawn by swans, or teleport. Some kind of tools like "property lines" or the way no-access bars look would help during building, so you stay in the "orbit" you're supposed to be in. The difference between this and what we have now is:

a) land rights would be sold over again at the new altitude -- but you can't build at this altitude over existing land, so I don't see this as a problem

b) no gravity when you get there (would this just mean turning off that part of physics? Would we want things to go spinning around the way they really do in a free-fall environment?)

c) I think you should also be able to show the Earth (or whatever planet it is that we're playing on) in the distance, below everything. Maybe the existing grid map could be used to generate a rounded surface to look at from afar, with somewhat different (more naturalistic) color mapping, weather overlaid, etc. This should be an option.

d) speaking of the map, this would add another layer to the map. There are a couple of ways to handle this, including a layer toggle and a transparent overlay (and both could work together).

This would be a good next step. Naturally, we'd like to be able to go to Mars, but Earth orbit seems like a reasonable next step. I'd buy a chunk of space if I could.

neko

Is "water" in secondlife represented by a simple semi-transparent flat blue heightmap?

If so, I propose that since we are already using 2 heightmaps in sims (one for water, one for ground), that the space sims be permitted to re-task these two heightmaps if they choose for two Ground heightmaps, which combine to describe the upper and lower surfaces of an object, floating island, asteroid, whatever.

Just like custom texturing for the ground, I shudder to think what some people might put in their skies.

That said... I wish they'd hurry up so I can get on with all the shuddering I'm looking forward to doing!

And yes, I desperately want a landless, zeegee space sim... or a bunch of them. Imagine how nicely the vehicles will work there.

/bump

Discussion in Terra Nova:
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/10/state_of_play_v.html#comment-10383551

GREAT! I've felt the same way for over a year.