You know, I wonder why it took me so long to finally decide to install this wonderful Weather Atmosphere object made by Chris at MTS2.

I decided to download because the plain blue sky annoys me to no end when I am making screenhots and machine cinemas and I don´t want to spend hours and hours photoshopping, I want my game beautiful without retouch.  I decided to test this object. I liked so much that I decided to make new textures to this file to better fit what I had in mind.

I wanted something like these ones:

(it´s an aurora borealis)

Some technical explanations:
- The original object was made eons before Seasons and it was updated by the creator so it works with no expansion or any expansion. I have all up to BV.
- Basically this object adds a layer over the sky, so, while using this you lose the stars, the 2 moons and the daily sky. This effect is not automatic, since is an object, you have to manually add the object to each lot you want. The good part is that you can have the regular skies at the same time you have this object in your game in different houses.
- This object is categorized under lightning under walllights and looks like a blue half globe. It´s a little tricky to make it work. You need to buy and put somewhere outside the house (don´t use inside). After this, you will be able to click anywhere in the sky to change the sky color. To delete, click on the sky and press delete.
- The menu have the 12 months names because the original object was meant to create different “weathers” changing the sky color. You can use in automatic mode or manual mode but since I replaced the original colors with completely non-sense colors I believe the automatic mode makes no sense also.
- To make the sky appear you need to configure the hood to “larger view”. If you don´t do this you won´t see the effect.
- The final result also depends of your graphic card and your configs. I use everything at maximum so I see what you are seeing here. My graphic card is a RADEON 9600 256 Mb. I have no idea how it will work with other cards.

If you have a lightning mod you can get effects like these, this is the same sky in 3 different times:

day

dawn

night:

To complete remove from your game, remove the object from your downloads folder. It doesn´t affect the seasons.
I didn´t made anything but the images, so all credit goes to Chris.  I just changed the pics inside, so if you already have Chris´original, it will update that one.

I will ask to not repost this anywhere. I got no permission to make  this because I have no idea where the creator is, Chris haven´t log into MTS2 for almost a year and there is no TOS posted anywhere. I mailed him about this retexture but got no answer so far, I´m posting at my own risk. I hope he don´t get mad at me, I love this object.

DOWNLOAD HERE

ETA to add: Destin gave me an idea, put here the link to download the lightning mod I use. It´s much more easy to install than that one at MTS2, is just one single file and the original Maxis comes in the same zip. Download Spookymuffin lightning mod at Insimenator.