User Defined Atmospherics

I was browsing though some Everquest II screen shots, and I began to realize the importance of atmospherics on the mood of a location. In SL, nowhere can you escape the perpetual sunny days and clear sky nights, which is great for the welcome area and most entertainment venues. But how does that affect the perception of the DarkLife castle, or some people desire for a space sim?


So, here is my proposal: Every land owner should be set a number of parameters that coorespond to the atmospherics of their region. Some examples might include day/night sky color/lighting, cloud/fog height/density/color, weather tendancies (perciptation!), sun/moon size/color, star brightness/density/saturation, default ground color/pattern/variation (moonscape?), shooting star or rainbow likelyhood, vegatation health/density, etc. Ideally, there should be as much variation as the avatars already have.

Of course, we don't want to break the continuity of the landscape. A visiting avatar should be able to gradually transition from one atmospheric to another without any discontinuity, ideally being able to evaluate distance atmospherics by looking at the horizon. To accomplish this, these parameters are essentially votes weighted by the size of the plot owned. Most of these are averaged with the values of some surrounding radius, but other might have more complicated influences, such as the weather tendancies setting localized parameters into the celluar automata weather system.

Not only is this a road toward a richer and more varied SL, but it provides another means for communities to build identity. And in that identity building process, community leaders will need to articulate goals and coordinate efforts. To this goal, the atmosphereic parameters of a plot should be visible to surrounding land owners (withing the area of influence), if not everyone.

In a related manner, one might want to include a few local physics parameters such as gravity and air viscosity.

And this whole proposal implies a complete range of LSL functions to access local values (both physical and atmospheric values), and possibly even functions to tweak the land of their owners (imagine an SL game where the atmospherics changed to reflect your succes: slay the dragon and suddenly the clouds part for the princess scene).

As complcated as this proposal is, I believe it necessary for the long term appeal of Second Life.


Anm

We used to be able to set the viewing distance (fog) on our land but this was cut in 1.1. Uncutting it would be a nice first step but even better would be something like you propose. They advertise that SL has a "realistic weather system" but this really means the sun rises and also sets. The moon is apparently in a fixed position opposite the sun because it follows the same track in the same amount of time and has no phases.