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I played around for a bit, snagged a starfield image off a NASA site and put it into the client. I've always thought that the night sky in Istaria was very plain and kind of boring looking. It does not work perfectly because it stays somewhat visible during the daytime. I'm not sure if that can be fixed with how the skydome works. But I like it regardless.
You can get the mod file here. Just drop it into the resources_override folder and let me know what you think.
I see what you mean by sticking around at day. It really is beautiful, though!
Looking between it and the normal sky, maybe it's just the higher contrast that makes this sky visible at day? Using /settime to make day and night zip by, it looks like the day works just by brightening and tinting the night sky into a blue. The high-contrast stars might just appear at day because of, well, the fact they contrast?
The original starry sky sticks around during the daytime but it is not as visible because the original texture stars are tiny. The other thing I noticed is that there is a twinkle effect built into the shader. It passes a random texture across the stars to lighten or darken the bright points. With this replacement texture, it appears as a regular pattern "cloud" that passes faintly across the sky.
I'm not sure why the stars won't fade completely out. I was looking and playing with the region file that controls the default day/night cycle. The alpha is down to zero which should make it invisible. Further digging into the shaders makes it look fairly complex. I'd have to mess with one specific shader to get the stars to vanish during the daytime. The shader in question has the stars built into it for some reason. Don't have the time now but maybe I'll look at it later.
I played around with the sky texture. Gave the world a different blue sky. I found some of the most vivid blue sky pictures on the internet and used an eyedropper to pull the color off of them. No stars in the day time. I'm not sure if I like this sky or not. The new files are here.
Grab both files and drop them resources_override.
They look very nice, thanks!
I likey , hey Mikey!
After trying to remove the mod I realised that my Istaria officially put it into its files and even with a clean-sweep of my C:\Program Files (x86)\Istaria\resources\textures_agh\objects\skies , it redownloads your mod. Was it implemented or something? o.o I'm getting my friend to resend me the old files now (I like Istaria's original sky, nostalgic reasons) but it'd be very strange if it wasn't added to the game yet updates my official files...
Edit: Indeed it was patched in. I'll have to look through the patch notes because I never even realised. Does Istaria even own that night sky file?
http://community.istaria.com/news/?id=566 . They redid a new sky on this patch (Under "Game Client Updates" section). I don't think it looks like this mod though. Maybe you got some files crossed up somewhere. Check your resources_override folder, which is where the mod should be.
I searched all of resources_override for 'sky' and nothing came up, so it has to be the patched in version (or this if it's the same anyway).
That's also one of the few updates I've actually read, I'm surprised I missed it. Thanks for the link though. ^^ I managed to remedy my 'problem' by copying the old files over from my laptop which hasn't patched in about a year or more.
Edit: I do find the sky beautiful by the way, just the glaringly blue day and a tiling problem at night drives me insane.
I wish I still had the old files. The day sky looks too blue to me now.
A bit late to the thread, but I agree, opaldragon.
I like the old night and day skies more, is there a way to get those back?
+1 seeking old sky files
The night sky was one of the prettiest things about Istaria.