VOLUMETRIC CLOUDS SHADER Blank Skies
By: ShulShagana (https://www.nexusmods.com/users/178891560)

T.O.C
1. What for?
2. How does it work?
3. Hasn't this been done before?
4. What do I need?
5. How do I install it?
6. How do I uninstall it?
7. Credits
8. Permissions

1. WHAT FOR?
Zesterer's Volumetric Cloud & Mist Shader for OpenMW is a must-have for me, but
it requires either using its built-in "Replace Skybox" setting -- which gets rid
of all sky textures, including the night sky -- or custom-made blank textures.

2. HOW DOES IT WORK?
This is a pluginless texture replacer that overrides all of vanilla Morrowind's
weather-specific skies with super-tiny (4x4 pixels, 136B) wholly transparent
textures. You get to keep the stars and constellations while avoiding flat,
texture clouds cluttering the sky.
And also? Improved FPS from the super-tiny textures.

3. HASN'T THIS BEEN DONE BEFORE?
Yes, by:
* A fellow known as PopeRigby over at Gitlab
(https://codeberg.org/PopeRigby/skies-for-clouds-shader), who made the very
puzzling choice of having all the blank textures be 4K(!!). This implies a heavy
performance hit for no real reason. I've long used them, but felt that they
didn't need to be so big at all. I finally put the effort on making my own :-)
* Cloudless Sky Textures for Zesterer's Volumetric Clouds Shader (OpenMW)
(https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/55870) by NexusMods user pandastic4. I
haven't checked that mod personally, but the per-texture filesizes are very
similar to PopeRigby's, so they might be 4K too.

My mod is the tiniest possible texture that displays properly, at a grand 4x4.
The textures use BC1 compression, to shave some precious extra bytes :-)

The visual effect is exactly the same.

3. WHAT DO I NEED?
Nothing. It's intended to be used with the above-mentioned shader, but nothing
bad will happen beyond perpetually clear skies and cloudless rain and storms.
It might also work on the vanilla engine, but I don't see why you'd want to
use it.

4. HOW DO I INSTALL IT?
Instructions for OpenMW:
https://openmw.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/modding/mod-install.html

Make sure it overwrites sky textures, i.e. have this mod's data path load
after any replacers or the original assets, as required.

5. HOW DO I UNINSTALL IT?
Remove the folder.

6. CREDITS
Zesterer, for creating such a wonderful shader.
PopeRigby, for being the first person (AFAIK) to have made public his version
of blank sky textures for zesterer's volumetric clouds and mist.
The OpenMW team and contributors, for a wonderful FOSS engine reimplementation.
Ivan Kutskir, for giving Photopea (https://www.photopea.com/) to the world,
a fully-featured online image editor that rivals the likes of GIMP and Photoshop.
It was used to create my version of these textures (no assets from PopeRigby or
pandastic4 were used or modified for this mod in any way, shape or form).

7. PERMISSIONS
Do whatever you want forever.