About this mod What is this, a crossover mod? Permissions and credits Credits and distribution permission Other user's assets This author has not specified whether they have used assets from other authors or not

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Decided to add an iconic sunset from a galaxy far, far away



Due to how "the sun" is handled by Oblivion it is only possible for this texture to look realistic at sunset.

Since the real sun is just a circle and all light coming off it does so evenly, it exhibits a property known as circular symmetry. This allows the default sun texture to be a static 2D sprite, because there are no visual references on it for us to see that it does not rotate or exhibit perspective in the same manner as the rest of the 3D world. This saves a small amount of performance and would have been a legitimate decision for Bethesda to make back in 2005. What this means for us, is that any normal sun retexture mod will always have it's texture pointing a certain direction relative to your display. This looks fine for certain styles of lens or sun flare but causes our binary system to seem to spin around at will, and seem upside-down at sunrise compared to what a binary system would actually look like.



By the way, installing this mod can be a useful psychological tool to understand some more difficult concepts regarding dimensions, perspective, relativity, computer science, graphics, maybe even physics. This is because of an interaction between computer graphics and psychology. The dual sun texture provides a powerful and familiar reference to "normal" because we have seen what a dual sun system looks like and approximately how it behaves. When this game does something that is unrealistic it breaks the 4th wall, pulling us out of the fantasy and drawing attention to flaws in the simulation. Here's a good example - go to a forest and wait until noon so the suns are directly overhead. Look up at the suns through the leaves and start rotating your character around. The suns appear to rotate relative to the trees, according to the in-game perspective this would mean the suns are flying around at millions of miles per hour relative to one dude looking up at them. But get this - the suns are not rotating at all. Hold your finger on the screen and rotate - now you see the suns stay in exactly the same position on your screen, but it is all of Mundus that rotates in demand to your mouse.



This is because the game draws the suns on-screen first, just like a boring picture in an image viewing program. Then the rest of the world is drawn on top of the sky/sun "box" that surrounds the character. If you paint the red sun lower, it will look exactly that way in the game. A 2D picture in a 3D world like this is known as a 'sprite' and they are very important for improving performance. 2D objects can look great and cost very little compared to fully rendered 3D objects. Other examples of sprites in Oblivion are distant LOD trees, they are known as "billboards" for a reason, as well as flames, leaves, and most spell effects. Lets focus on leaves because they are small enough and usually positioned in a way so that we can see them from all perspectives, unlike the sun. Everybody who has walked through a bush has seen that weird 2D-ey kinda look the leaves have, very flat looking up close and they always seem to point straight at you. This is an optical illusion - again, put your finger on your screen beside a branch, and move around a bit. You will see the leaves are always pointing the same way just like they are pictures put on your screen. Since they do not move while the rest of the world does, our brain (especially the optical system) latches on to the moving 3D world as being the appropriate perspective and the unresponsive leaves appear to totally compensate for any mouse movement and always be pointing flat towards you. When in reality, the 3D world is warping and twisting to simulate the illusion of perspective while the leaf textures merely change location and size relative to the camera.



This apparent movement is all a matter of relative perspective, Einstein decided to apply this relativity to the entire universe and realized that many of the strange things we see can be explained by putting our finger beside it and watching how everything else moves around. There is nothing quite like sprites in our reality but we get to experience reality bending through technology. I believe sprites (in the computer graphics sense) are analogous to, and actually simulate a form of "time crystal" which is a 4-dimensional structure manifesting itself in 3D space. Time crystals "change perpetually in a fixed pattern in time" and "they possess 'motion without energy' - their apparent motion does not represent conventional kinetic energy" described succinctly by Wikipedia. Sprites appear to be 2D manifestations in a 3D space but the problem is that they appear to move and rotate relative to an observer. We can see what a truely 2D object in a 3D world looks like, they are everywhere in Oblivion. Cobwebs are 2D transparent textures - they have a height and a width but simply do not have a thickness - this would be impossible in real life. But cobwebs are quite static despite having an orientation in 3 dimensions, so they are best described as 2D. Compare this to sprites - they have a 2D appearance that pretends to have a 3D perspective, by changing over time relative to the in-game perspective. By incorporating time-dependent orientation, it becomes elevated from a 2D object to a 3D one. Sprites are 3D objects that display rotational spherical symmetry in a time-dependent fashion. This spherical symmetry creates an "apparent motion" relative to an observer, though we know that this object actually is not moving thus is not creating or consuming any energy. Just to confuse you further, relative to our observing screen the sprites never actually move or change, but it is the absence of movement in such a dynamic and transformative world that makes them stand out.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_crystal