I decided today that what we need are some sky tiles, that will follow the Norrathian day/night schedule and show light or dark accordingly. If you are trying to lighten up one of the houses that you can't break out of, it would be nice to create a faux "outside" area. With sky!
I'd like that myself; the "Starry Squares" nowadays are obviously carpet squares (or ceiling tiles or even wallpaper, depending on how you put them) with stars printed on them. What I would like to see would be a dark background, not necessarily black, could be a really dark blue or blue-violet (night sky color), with something like the flowing sparkles from the Sparkling Water Tiles. Maybe even the existing background color for the Starry Squares, only replace the silly obvious dye job with a "current," like the Cloudy Squares, with the sparkles. Something. :-/ Uwk
In another MMO I played a while back, they had a feature for housing where could set the time of day. That would be awesome for housing. Also, they had effects you could turn on that would make it snowing or raining in the housing zone. These might be viable options to having a static tile that ends up looking like a tile, for weather purposes.
My last post didn't seem quite clear. I meant these might be viable options as opposed to have weather on a tile, that doesn't end up looking like weather at all and instead looks like a tile.
You can create some weather: \aITEM -1841578636 -825186042:A Foggifier De-Foggififer 5000\/a \aITEM -1014695383 -379532124:Blanket of Fog\/a \aITEM 39206865 -1072055414:Thick Blanket of Cold Fog\/a \aITEM -38604280 1601035107:Thrice-Polarized Frostrotron\/a \aITEM 486386567 -905422433:Gigglegibber snow generator\/a \aITEM 935077994 681401303:Rainy Day Knoll\/a
You can still use the starry squares to simulate night outside. Look at the swap house I did for Allasandrey on AB. I put them behind a window and they make it look like night outside.
I want tons of options for night sky and lighting/thunder too for decorating, but the problem with sky tiles is they will end up looking like the same pattern repeated over and over instead of a real sky.
I had an idea once, to modify the housing zones, so that if you right clicked the walls of the home, you could introduce a tile and make it "eat" the piece, like the wardrobe for our appearance gear, so that if you wanted that tile all over the home, it would reskin with that appearance. However, it wouldn't block out architectural details of the home like we sometimes do. That, and it'd probably be a huge coding nightmare, and quite frankly, updates to other things are more important.
Yep, I've done that, too (once wallpapered an entire room in a 2-room Freeport place; recommended that folks turn OFF their personal torches); there are all sorts of tricks you can do to make it look better, but it'd be nice to have one tile, rather than 2-3, and lighting, etc. steps. Uwk