I've noticed that none of the planets have a time of day cycle, or weather change. Seeing as that may be hard to implement, I devised an alternative. What if we could change the time of day, and weather in our strongholds? We could chose between times, and weather, or put our strongholds on a personalized cycle. Weather could include: Aurora Borealis/Snow/Rain/Hail/Cloudy/Partly Cloudy/Fog/Lightning/Starry Night/ETC.

 

In addition to this ambience change. The ambience machines simply do not work. They are quiet, and they do not comply with matching themes. Adding a list of ambiences to chose from would be terrific. Of Course many strongholds have many themes in them. So being able to chose an ambience for each room would be needed.

That'd be awesome

It won't happen as you expect as the engine cannot do main source lighting changes.

 

I just hope we get a new stronghold with Kotet, but I very much doubt it, I think, like GSF, they're done on Strongholds now.

I've noticed that none of the planets have a time of day cycle, or weather change. Seeing as that may be hard to implement, I devised an alternative.

The time of day on planets is fixed for story reasons, not because the game engine is feebleminded (it *is* feebleminded, but that's not actually why they fixed the time of day, or so they say).

 

And the weather does change, sometimes. On Dromund Kaas, sometimes it is raining, sometimes it has just stopped raining, and other times it is about to start raining. On Tatooine, sometimes it is sunny, and at other times the suns are shining. (And would you *want* to be on Hoth in the night-time?)

This is one thing I miss from SWG. The planets had their own weather cycles, day, night, rain, etc. and each planet was different. You could leave Naboo and it was night and arrive on Tattoine and it was day light. It would rain on Naboo or dust on Tattoine, etc.

 

I miss the difference in the weather here.

I would absolutely love if the strongholds had time of day and weather... but only if everyone experienced the same weather. In some other MMOs, the weather seems to be randomly determined on the client side, so half our group would have a sunny day while the rest were avoiding the rain. (Even in SWTOR, the jukebox music is client-side random and not everyone in the room hears the same song!)

 

As for the Ambient sound generation decorations, did they get a stealth patch? I don't see anything in the notes, but I swear they're louder than they used to be. I was just playing with the Rain, Birds, Casino, and Party sound FX yesterday. They were louder than I remember.

Edited July 27, 2016 by Xina_LA

This is one thing I miss from SWG. The planets had their own weather cycles, day, night, rain, etc. and each planet was different. You could leave Naboo and it was night and arrive on Tattoine and it was day light. It would rain on Naboo or dust on Tattoine, etc.

 

I miss the difference in the weather here.

 

i LOVED that about SWG really wish they could find a way to do that in this game

Edited July 28, 2016 by kaitoichika

This is one thing I miss from SWG. The planets had their own weather cycles, day, night, rain, etc. and each planet was different. You could leave Naboo and it was night and arrive on Tattoine and it was day light. It would rain on Naboo or dust on Tattoine, etc.

 

I miss the difference in the weather here.

 

100% Agreed. The devs actually addressed this before launch. I'm sure you could find a comment about it on archived episodes of TOROCast or maybe even Oootinicast, since they started before beta. Don't know if you recall the original screenshots of player/npc lightsabers long before closed beta was even a thought -- they looked huge and, imo, cartoony. That, plus the absence of day/night and weather cycles, was all intentional. They call it "stylized realism." The feedback on the sabers was so terrible that they downsized them to what we have now.

 

"Stylized realism" ... In other words, they were implying that spending time on a planet that, you know, obeys the laws of nature and such nonsense, somehow distracts from the experience of being in a starwarsy adventure. Yeah, I don't buy it either. They just wanted to distinguish themselves, while at the same time pull from a large potential audience. They wanted to appeal to KOTOR players, SWG players, and WOW players simultaneously. This would have been an ambitious goal but unfortunately it was nerfed due to budget and time constraints. Consequently the game, at least at launch, lacked elements that made each of those games independently successful in their own right.

 

I'm sure I could go on and on about this but I digress.

I agree, some kind of ability to change the weather and time of day would be very welcome in my opinion. I really want to see my Coruscant Skyrise Apartment at night, and my Tatooine homestead at some other time than right at sunset where everything's that annoying orange I'm beginning to grow extremely tired of. I mainly want to see most of my Strongholds at night though, and I don't really care if they just reuse assets or cut corners in this as long as I can have my day/night cycle and not have any huge issues. I would even settle for static skies that kinda fade into each other with some quick little effects and edits to make it look reasonable and passably realistic. I mean I'd prefer being able to see the setting sun flare between the trees in my Yavin Temple Grounds, but I'd be happy to compromise for virtually anything at this point. Please Bioware, please add this. At least add day/night cycle or toggling skies.

Yes please! I'm tired of it raining on DK. And it always being day/sunny on Coruscant. Even minor changes to this would suffice for now.

 

Oh and I love the ambience decorations but would like them to stay on once activated and not go off unless you turn them off.

Edited August 26, 2016 by Sazigirl

i LOVED that about SWG really wish they could find a way to do that in this game

 

yeah that's what I miss as well.... I love the idea of having a day night cycle on each planet

It would be cool if when you enter the Stronghold Edit mode, that there were hooks for invisible decorations that would affect these aspects. For example, install the Night or Day or Twilight deco to choose time of day; install a Weather module (cloudy, snowy, rainy, aurora visible at night mode, etc). They'd be buyable from the decor vendor or maybe sold in packs.