Okay, I've mentioned this in the improvements thread. I would really like to investigate it, and see if it would be possible to do.
In Uru (and most games), the skies consist of textures applied onto a plane or dome of sorts. Now some are static (the cleft during the day) and many just have simple textures that scroll (Relto, and pretty much everything else).
My idea is something a little different. Most of the user ages I've seen so far the sky dome just has a single texture which doesn't move (yet). They can look really good if you spent time to make them look good, but they have no life in them. Just a painting of a sky.
Now imagine if we could apply a movie (bink, avi whatever) to that same dome? Like the static skies, if you spent the time and effort, you could make it look rather nice and convincing. However, it's has a few problems. Say you wanted dynamic lighting? (day/night stuff). Then you might be stuck. Unless you wanted to render an ungodly amount of animation... X-P
What I really have in mind is that we could apply dynamically generated images to the sky dome.
Take a look at these:
List of cloud research
SkyWorks
Imagine if we could us something like SkyWorks to generate clouds while the game is running. If you try those demos, you may find that it runs sluggishly. So instead of having those 'volumetric' clouds actually being in the age's sky, it would be somehow separate (maybe somewhere else hidden in the age) and not directly visible to the user. The clouds and lights would be set up and rendered every second (or every few seconds), and then output to an image that can be used as a texture for the sky-dome. The texture is updated when a new version is rendered. It would be like having an animation applied to the skydome, but without the pre-rendered space-taking files. It wouldn't actually be in 60-100fps real-time, but it doesn't have to be.
But since this process would be going on while the game is running, the clouds can change as the environment changes. So if your age has day/night cycles, the clouds would be lit according to where the sunlight is coming from. Of course in reality the light in your age's scene would have nothing to do with the appearance of the texture on the skydome. They would have to be synchronized. Much like voices synchronized with live action footage.
Plus unlike pre-rendered images which you end up stuck with, the texture changes on-the-fly. So they'd never have to look the same or like they are looping. And you can have different types (big billowing clouds, or teledahn-like overcast grayness).
Now of course, this assumes a few things:
1.) Being able to integrate something like skyworks into Uru so that it works while Uru is working -- this is the most important (duh)
2.) We can figure out how to set-up the sky's scene properly (synchronize the lighting, where in the scene it will go)
4.) Rendering a panoramic image for the skydome, and output it to .png or something
2.) Being able to have an object use a texture not in a prp file (kinda like the link-panel images)
3.) Being able to update that texture
If you want to get really advanced (maybe Im getting ahead of myself!) it would be cool to output the sky data to alpha-channeled .png's that could be partially transparent so that elements like the sun/stars/moons can be normal objects in the age's scene, rather than being part of the texture. (makes it easier if they are objects so then you can properly set them up astronomically)