CoH not based on Earth?

See if you can spot what I'm talking about in this clip. Just a little proof of concept video I made and while watching the finished product, I was kinda confused and had to watch it a second time to confirm.

http://vimeo.com/12503874

This next one isn't as obvious but is yet another test video.

http://vimeo.com/12505433

I can't watch video now, but is this about how the sun doesn't rise and set in the right directions? Yeah, that's strange. But CoH is set in Earth. It's stated that Paragon city is located in Rhode Island.

I just thought it was kinda wierd and I had never noticed it in all my years of playing.

Ok which super strength / invunerable tanker with the flight travel power flew up into space and made the world spin backwards to go back in time again?

50 cool interwebz points to the person who can guess where that came from.

Superman. Specifically, the first movie. He did it because Lois died. Too easy.

I know why do you think I only awarded 50 cool interwebz points and not a ton. Plus I didn't want the nonnerdy people to bust a brain vessel trying to think it through.

When Ultra Mode shadows were introduced in Closed Beta, the shadows actually did track the sun from horizon to horizon. Given a 20 minute 'day', this made the shadows of the tall building move ridiculously fast, especially near dawn and dusk (*much* faster than they do now). Also, there were no UM Shadows for nighttime (by design).

And so, we asked that the shadows be slowed down and that there be nighttime UM shadows.

I made the suggestion that -- since the nighttime shadows would move even faster with only a 10 minute 'night' -- the nighttime shadows be divorced from the position of the moon. IOW, let the moon zip across the sky however it currently is going, but have shadows that track a virtual moon that was only going from 60 degrees over the horizon east to 60 degrees over the horizon west. Or, just give us a static moon-shadowscape. The Devs gave us the former.

They solved the problem with the fast moving daylight shadows by have a virtual sun that started 30 degrees over the horizon to 30 degrees over the opposite horizon. If you track the position of the sun and the shadows, you'll see that as the sun sets below the 30 degree mark, the shadows stop following it and simply start to fade out. And that reduced the speed of the daylight shadows, taking 60 degrees worth of movement out of the 180 degree track of the sun.

Thank God they didn't set this on Tatooine...