The moons are the the remnants of Lorkhan, the creator of Tamriel, they fade and reappear because they have been eaten away and as they spin, they appear to become crescents, but instead, it is literally that the moons Masser and Secunda are disappearing and reappearing, because these holes are holes in dead Daedric Planes, and thus, you can see right through them and into Oblivion and the holes to the Aedric Realms called stars.

I've always interpreted the lore to be more like http://images.wikia.com/starwars/images/e/ee/DeathStar2.jpg. I don't think that the moons are transparent, but are solid, and as they spin you see holes right through the moon because of the decay.

Awesome work

I really like that you make your beta available for download, wish more modders would do that, (at least for purely graphical mods).

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=24842

already been done!

Lol can't get the moons to work as intended. I just get a big white box instead of the moons..

How goes your progress on the skies? I'd love to see how the new textures are coming out

Yeah, I know, the existing fix is beta, and is just a proof of concept, once I'm done, the moons will have translucent areas as shadows, and unlike this beta, you won't be able to see tons of stars through the moon that's supposed to be solid.

Are you running Bloodmoon? If you are and are still getting the problem, I'm afraid I can't help you, try installing the transparency fix and beta moon textures again.

I've been taking a break from modding the past week so I can concentrate on RL and making music, if you simply can't wait to see new stuff from me though, subscibe to me on http://soundcloud.com/markelius and Youtube, I'm likely to post updates of what I'm up to every few days or so there.

So are the transparent moons going to be optional?
I haven't really decided, but I'm worried I might not like them.

Yup, the archive package will be set up the exact same way it is in Skies v3, it'll just have a few extra options, like lunar transparency, a cloud speed fix, maybe the marslike sky and blue starred system settings I never finished from v3, and some other worthless garbage I'll call content.

SWG, you may not be able to do this but it's worth asking. What about the clouds and skies from the first two minutes in the movie "The Neverending Story"

Particularly this one at the 0:38 mark.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlpdXPtn-88&feature=player_detailpage#t=38s

I'm guessing for it to look right, you would need to have volumetric clouds and not just a painted canopy. But I'll let you decide if it's doable with just a textured sky. Thanks! Love your work!

That's correct, at the LEAST I would need to do dual layered clouds like in Oblivion, and I've tried doing that, the game just crashes, we'd need Hrnchamd, and he's rather busy at the moment.

So no, I could make a texture that looked slightly similar, but it wouldn't look 3d at all, and kind of ruin the effect.

I'm curious, how did you try doing it? Does the engine just scroll the texture across the mesh? If so, what happens if you sort of wrap the edge of your sky mesh under itself to make a second dome inside the first, but still part of the same object? Then flip the normals on the bottom half.

That's an interesting way of doing it, I'll give it a try, but if it does work, it'll most likely end up scrolling the SAME clouds over themselves twice in different directions.

The way Oblivion does it is it has one skydome on top of the first which uses a separate texture, and I believe each layer of clouds also moves at a different speed, modifications to the engine would be required to make this possible in Morrowind.

One other thing I'd like to see done is 20 or so *blank* weathertypes added to the game for modders like me to fool around with and make new weathers, stuff like blight overcasts, clear skied snow, clear sky rain, ash *snow*, stuff like that would be fun to add.

It seems like a texture made to fit a mesh like that would be a long rectangle (or the part UV mapped to the mesh would be) so it would be opposite ends of the texture on top of each other. With a lot of differentiation in the texture it could look really nice, if this works.

I'd also like to say that I've been using Skies V3 for a couple days and it's awesome.

Well that svcks. If OpenMW or Project Aedra were finished, I'm sure there would be lots of new ways for you to make weather, like even cyclones and real storms where the clouds move with it and swirl around. By then you'll probably be at SWG Skies V26

V26? Geez, I was hoping by the time we had a new engine I'd be able to put in the ulitmate sky/cloud system with volumetric clouds, dynamic sunglare/rays, particle storms and all that, and be over with the darn thing.

Besides, someday I've got to work on MaDW among other things, and I still have loads of other things I want to do with my life other than mod...

Like actually playing the game!

What is this I hear? Is that even possible?

I've been having trouble with the replacement raindrop mesh only appearing in menu mode, whenever MGE (3.8.2 rev 178) is enabled. I solved it by unchecking Enable Testing in the flags for the NiAlphaProperty node.

Strange, I don't think I've ever had problems with that mesh, and right now I'm running MGE XE.

It's probably some kind of obscure driver problem, but I was able to find posts from people having this problem with replacement raindrop meshes. Something to keep in mind if anyone else asks.

>I've been having trouble with the replacement raindrop mesh only appearing in menu mode, whenever MGE (3.8.2 rev 178) is enabled. I solved it by unchecking Enable Testing in the flags for the NiAlphaProperty node.

I had that problem with MGE. I'm guessing when the rain is drawn the renderer gets stuck with some DirectX alpha-related state variable from whatever random thing rendered most recently, and the rain doesn't properly reset this variable so you're stuck with random visual results depending on where you are standing and facing. IIRC when you look upward the rain often reappears, probably because other visual things aren't changing the render state variable and interfering with the rain's rendering.

I was using MGE 178 (or maybe 186) and standard rain (not a replacer) and the problem just kind of disappeared one day for no discernable reason.

FWIW, I have never seen the problem in MGE XE, which seems to have much less flakiness overall.

Edit: based on your fix I think maybe it's http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb172599(v=vs.85).aspx or D3DRS_ALPHAFUNC that gets messed up in MGE

I actually couldn't see the rain mesh at all outside of menu mode, aside from a small part of the screen for a split-second after loading a save. I found the fix by comparing the replacement mesh to the original node by node, and my understanding is that NIF alpha testing only tests against other parts of the same mesh, which is unnoticeable with something like this, so it seems safe to just disable it and leave it at that. FWIW, the other discrepancy is that the mesh in this mod has collision flags set to Bounding Box rather than Triangles. I doubt the engine does any kind of collision testing with rain anyway.

It does when your using the MCP...

http://i55.tinypic.com/5mbaqf.jpg

So yeah, after finding this out, I looked through my sky textures from version 3, and realized the textures I had made completely negated the point of my UVmap edits to the sky mesh. Most of the textures were either one big cloud formation stretched across the entire sky, or one cloud formation repeated across the texture, and that made my mod completely and utterly useless.

The whole point of the UV edits was to allow fully unique and increasingly detailed skies, instead, the skies stayed repetitive and blurry/pixelated/rasterized. So, that being said, I'm remaking ALL my sky textures from version 3 with better, non-repetitive, sharp, detailed new ones, once I'm done, it'll be what version 3 was supposed to be (hey, that should be the version 4 tagline!).

Last night I started working on the http://i54.tinypic.com/35bxoht.jpg, tell me what you think.