An effect like in WoW is also very nice, where night/day is like in the real world. If you play in the evening, its slowly becoming night.
islands light up with little torches and lamps and windows shine light out onto ground... was one of original goals for game (or visual aspirations anyway)... anyone flown over a city in an aeroplane at night? same effect but on smaller scale, warmer lights...

you know the sailing ships with the lamps hanging from the back? wanted same style for gliders, they have a small lamp hanging from each wing tip, at night it will reflect from water, and light land if close enough.

day/night already works in an uncompleted platformer i was working on. (probably why unfinished...). Was based on real-user time... the idea was that they could play the game at different times of day and get a different set of enemies and dangers etc... want to visit the towns? go through the day... want to get nearly killed in the forest? wait til night.... some missions would require you play at different times...

anyways... side tracked....

The other option is to have the sun move in a circle for day amd the moon for night. Grade the background based on time of day/night. Adding clouds and cool sunset/sunrise images would make it really nice
very viable option... this is basically what i first wanted....


Draw the top half of the sun/moon texture onto a quad (128x64). Now draw the metallic frame (I suck at drawing metallic frames) over the top. Ok, so that gets you a sun. To change the time of day, use a texture matrix to rotate the sun/moon texture.
And this is almost perfect. almost. i will work with this one...

THANK YOU ALL!![/quote]