Changes To Red Sector Lighting/Weather

This seems like an opportune time to suggest making some permanent changes to the setting of the lower half of the city that I think solve a lot of structural world building issues that often come up, and improve upon the derelict have/have-not theme considerably while opening the door for cool mechanics.

1. Remove the holo-sky and artificial weather cycle from Red Sector permanently.

The sector's artificial holo-skies have had serious world building baggage compared to what they bring to the game and introduce frequent contradictions and inconsistencies. For almost situations it's better to just treat them like they don't exist because of how non-comformant they are with the rest of the city's events, descriptions, gameplay mechanics, and setting. Removing the holo-sky entirely from Red Sector doesn't solve some of the issues on other sectors but those are much easier to ignore or handwave away.

This should require very few or no long term alterations to room descriptions in Red Sector because almost everywhere in Red is written as though it's dark out by default and nothing can be seen in the sky except smokes stacks and pollution, buildings disappearing into the darkness and aerial traffic. The underside of the Gold sector plate is expressly not illuminated and so should introduce no description issues to no longer be hidden, since it isn't really visible anyway.

Red Sector's weather can be permanently set to drizzling acid 'rain' as runoff from the sector above, which is extremely keeping with the theme and makes logical sense and agrees with tons of room descriptions. The other three sectors can retain their weather and skies and simply have their severe weather options disabled, because why do we even have that lever?

2. Set Red Sector to 'night', permanently.

Many parts of Red Sector are lit as described by their surrounding environmental, buildings, street lights, glowing signs everywhere, but being made permanently 'night-time', from there no longer being an omnipresent skylighting, allows for introducing more widespread use of the newer darkness mechanics. Right now only a tiny handful of outdoor areas are actually ever dark, and this would be an opportunity to flag some more alleyways and rooftops and other places as not having bright light sources which would bring this mechanic more into gameplay relevance for far more players. Not to mention making the whole sector much more dark and dangerous and in keeping with how it is implicitly portrayed.

No longer having skylighting also opens the door for making roaming streetlighting failures an on-going evergreen feature, without them being contradicted by the setting or by other mechanics, which I think opens huge opportunities for interesting gameplay just as roaming SIC blackouts have done.

Otherwise main streets could be still lit by default, except in roaming blackouts, though as noted by some players vehicles would need to have their illumination flag put back in when they're running, unless they're one that explicitly doesn't have exterior lights.

Just one last thing, while I think the city was built the way it was and we should embrace the possibilities of that design instead of sidestepping them… it is only fair to say that there is a potential half measure that acknowledges the past and embraces current events while not too too much changing the status quo.

That would involve dovetailing from current events to say that the artificial sky existed, it will continue to exist, but it won't be maintained so that it enters a perpetual state of functional disrepair: For example sections of the sky fizzled or glitching out showing the sector plate above, a dim misshaping sun that falls out of schedule sometimes, loss of detail and total power failures at night.

This opens a partial door to more darkness but only at night, dimmer days and darker nights essentially so a few more rooms potentially getting flagged 'isDarkAtNight=1", more evident presence of disrepair and depiction of the structure of the city. This would be somewhat more consistent with parts of the city that are described as dark (even when there's a bright noonday sun visible above) while also not requiring the entire sky to be 'deactivated' for resource savings.

To be clear I think the original idea is much better and more overall consistent with the city and the story, but I'd see the latter as a reasonable compromise of intent if there was just too much opposition to something too hard cleaving to the cyberpunk setting.

Personally I am a fan of treating an illumination blackout much like a SIC blackout. Have it be rolling and random. I understand that Withmore is not wired the same was as say, Los Angeles, but I feel like with the events happening in the game at the moment, this being a permanent fixture adds nicely to the desperation of living in the mix. I also feel like it's more opportunity for criminal acts in non-traditional criminal forums. Oh look, the lights went out in imagined safe space cuz, time to turn on my night vision and grab this sucker.

There wouldn't be anything to worry about like that Aida. If you've ever played past 7PM PST/10PM EST you may have noticed the city turning to night but that doesn't actually mean the areas are dark since almost all areas of the game (something like 99%) are perpetually lit and players can see in them even if they're thematically dark.

There's only about 30 rooms out of thousands that have dark gameplay flags on them when night falls, and due to isolation and number and the hours involved, most players never even know they're there.

This is why players are often so inexperienced in dealing with darkness because it's an extremely niche mechanic, but it's one that has relatively recently been redesigned and having more types of illumination and interaction with that mechanic should (at least in theory) be a lost easier because before it was very computationally heavy to check for darkness and so mostly avoided, and now it isn't.

Does it really not seem completely inexplicable to anyone else that the control of the corporations is going into wiping themselves out with artificial hurricanes and floods and other natural disasters, inside a weather-sealed dome, for the lulz?

Like I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here that this is a credible system that players buy as realistic and immersive. There is limits to taking sci-fi elements seriously and trying to sell that bread and lighting power is being rationed but there's plenty to go around for city-wide fine grain weather control beggars belief.

There could be more rational versions of the system that's there, but it's not what happens.

As was pointed out in the discussion over floods not forcing doors open, Blue floods just like Red and permapads there were being popped open for free access just like ratholes in the Mix were. I feel like players and staff as a whole sort of try very hard to pretend this isn't occurring and re-occurring (disasters getting retconned in recollection to only effecting Red) but to me that is revealing a problem in the system that players and staff have issues engaging with it, rather than actually embracing it.

Like many of these elements are very old and sometimes this stuff starts to disagree more and more with the stories that are being told and the world that we want to represent in that storytelling, and I don't think it should be such a big deal to adjust things so that things that players read are consistent with the story being told.

The parts of Red that would be perpetually black in eternal night would probably mean those parts would flood into the rest of Red. As in, those people would more likely permanently move out, as most wouldn't be able to afford nightvision chrome and things like that. Could add some interesting flavor and event to it, but it would also maybe render that whole area obsolete for no good reason.