A proper night sky for the 2.0 rendering engine.

The current night sky is, every night, randomly generated stars on everyone's client. The net result is that there are no constellations, no reference points in the sky.

While a minor niggling point, it WOULD in fact be nice if the sky had a bit more character to it.

Why not have the 2.0 client have the same night sky for everyone? Stars placed in the right places for everyone.

On top of that, please get rid of the silly "reflections" the moon does on water. It's grotesque.

LF

You could probably get the first half of this tacked on to Prop 141 - Real Time Weather. Try this thread.

Maybe fixing the moon reflection could be worked in too -- there shouldn't be a reflection if the sky is clouded over, right?

neko

nor should the sim turn night over light cloud cover

Wouldn't it be lovely if the starry sky was accurately that of earth (just the brightest of course). And if we modelled the SL land surface onto a sphere, and gave each point a latitude and longitude.

Then I could make sextants, and teach people to find where they are with real astro-navigation.

Wow
I can dream

Some people don't realize the night sky looks different from different parts of the world.

Which side would we see?

I would suggest the night sky as viewed from LL's offices.

I think Lindar was suggesting that the night sky would be different depending on the lattitude (and perhaps also longitude) of the sim. To do the longitude would also involve introducing time zones to SL, so that the sun isn't rising at the same time in every sim. If we were going that far, we might as well go for phases of the Moon.

neko

Lordfly Digeridoo:


Totally agree about the intrusive reflection of the moon. The reflection of the sun gets annoying too, when it appears on land, not water. : \

Yeah, the silly sun and moon reflections really poke me in the eye every time I see them. I think the plan was to make them twinkle like you see on real water that has texture, which would result in an effectively elongated shape similar to the way they are depicted now.

A more correct night sky would be nice. I think we decided to not make it too flashy in an effort to help keep the render FPS as high as possible, figuiring that the non-moving stars wouldn't bother too many people. There is much to the night/day cycle that is unrealistic.

i got a feeling that making a super realistic night sky with constellations and all kinds of astronomy goodness would end up with people looking up and saying it's rad then never looking at it again. it would be cool but not worth the effort since SL isn't even a planet let alone some place on earth with a realistic earth sky.


and that's a Good Thing.

I've noticed that there isn't much of a "twilight" time in SL. It goes from daylight and then BOOM, all of a sudden it's pitch black. I'd like to have a little while when there's sort of a blueish light and you can see the stars.

LL is in San Francisco. We'd see one, maybe two stars.

Excellent suggestion, I would like to add that I would like to see different constellations than from real life. We could even name some of the constellations after FIC members

Says who? I live in the city and I see plenty of stars on clear nights. Of course, it's not the depth and volume you see when you're out in the middle of nowhere.

I like the suggestions here.

Perhaps also it could take into account the surrounding light of the area. Such as if you're in a city like sim with alot of light at night, you see less stars, only the brighter ones come through, as opposed to a sim with no or little light around where you see more stars.

I think there would be alot of people who would be star-gazers in SL, there were a few observatories and some star charter groups, dunno if they're still around.

I personaly love looking at the SL sky right now, and would love it even more if it looked better. The current sun sucks, the moon often turns blue randomly, and the stars are all client side rendered. It'd be nice to see all of these fixed and replaced with better systems.

I love the currently beautifull sunsets and sunrises we sometimes get with the colors melting together and such. But it'd be nice if we could have clouds that can sometimes alter and give us more random ever changing sunsets/sunrises as such in RL, where no two are ever the same.

Yeah the clouds also suck BTW. It'd be cool if they spanned all the way to the horizon to do the effects I mention above.

I agree with the dusk thing, there should be more of an inbetween time there.

Also the sun/moon need to move smoother, currently they jump to position slightly and don't really glide.

I would like to see some of the following events in the night sky:

- shooting stars - should be fairly frequent, a few times during a single night cycle
- meteor showers - maybe once every other month?
- comet - rare event, maybe twice a year?
- aurora borealis - seasonal, maybe only viewable in the northern most sims?
- lunar phases

Nice! maybe an eclipse once a year.

Since we're already asking for the moon, I'd like to go further and ask for the ability to have additional moons (or suns or other luminaries, for that matter, with customizable textures) on private islands. Along with the ability to change the color/texture of the day and night sky. If the Lindens won't give us other worlds, let's create them ourselves. Then all we need is a scriptable teleport, and we can develop warp engines or wormholes or something to fly spaceships between our worlds....

neko

I want asteroids crashing down and UFOs too. Oh wait, we already have some of that, so combined with a more "authentic" sky, the experience will only serve to be more exciting.

:: skips to the bottom of the thread without reading ::

Yea I was wondering about the sky and if it had fixed stars or not. I had actually taken N S E W screenshots at one point to try to make some constellations from them, but I never got around to it! LOL

Random stars is silly, I agree we should have some kind of starfield, though not necessarily stars from EARTH's sky!

edited to add:
Regarding clouds/sunrise/sunset/weather engone, hell yea let's have some real weather patterns! Anyone ever seen the atmospheric effects in Anarchy Online? wow some awesome sunrises and sunsets there!

Back when I played Planetside, they had weather systems too. Rain, snow and dust storms that would make it much more interesting to do battle in!

Morrowind and Oblivion's skies look awesome. SL could learn a thing or 8 from it.

Yay! for Oblivion! I'd love to see an aurora too, and moonphase will be nice addition

eeeeeeeeeeeyesssss!!!

I want sims with llRegionCorner().z at 300,000 (low earth orbit), 45,000,000 (geosynchronous orbit), and 400,000,000 (lunar orbit). Yes, I want to be able to launch someone from the sim directly below it using my skydiving launcher turned up to about, oh, 12 or 13 (11 is so 20th century) and have them slam into the moon from below. TO THE MOON, ALICE...