Zorroargh
Years ago, I was very interested to study the sky, and, I did the observation in FH expecting that it would be the same in any country. But really I was so puzzled that I wrote my notes, and no more! (Feylin, an old zoraï womin of my friends helped me).
Now I feel me less alone :) and I can give you my more crazy idea. For me, it was a sum of mismatches job designing the Atys sky. What about if new developments make a "realistic" sky, now that Ryzom is OpenSource? Maybe we can ask to the Ryzom teams if it would be possible? What is your opinion?
OOC
It can be done technically ive looked at some of the various models including the sky box and objects in there. There are orbiting models for various things. Now it cold be that over the years they have made small changes to the various elements or removed animation to bump performance etc
Once i get these max import/export plugins and tools figured out ill play with stuff on my end see what i can come up with and send along to the devs and see what they think.
Technically speaking each zone of ryzom is a flat plane with a height field map that gives us our terrain with various objects added (buildings trees etc) Other objects are in the air above this plane the limbs of the canopy for example. Something that would be possible for the sun moon/s stars and planets is animated objects that rotate around these zones going above and below the plane. This would give us sunrises and sunsets. Having the sun moon etc as light sources could change (potentially) shadow directions and lengths. 3d studio max has this ability but i do not know if the nel engine etc does i suspect it does.
So giving us a very realistic sky is quite doable and it is all open source so if you have 3d studio max and the tools for ryzom core i say go for it see what you can do. im going to fool around with it all my self but my times fairly limited so how much i can do i do not know.