Weather Environment & Effects

I read somewhere that there was no plans to put this in but Im new and haven't found a thread about it or know where to post this.

I just think this would be a really good idea n yes understand about the performance issues but you can always have an option to turn it off in the settings for ppl with lower end machines. I think it would would not only be visually awesome but game mechanics could be pretty sweet as well, just imagine being on a lava planet and if your near say one of the poles you got falling ash which does damage to units. Or snow storms which cut visibility down on ice planets? Have rain cause havoc with nuke and artillery, accuracy goes way down.

How about have tornadoes on the more volitale planets? Would be cool to have winds affect nuke missile direction hehe........... I really hope that UBER really reconsider this because I think the idea and concept of real time weather environment would be incredible with how this game is setup......

Pls at least re think about it and see if it's still doable or not.

To any modders out there, could this be implemented as a mod?

It's depends on how you think this should looks like. Technically PA engine doesn't have any special system which can handle something like that, but you can "fake" it using subsystems which already found (units, projectiles and effects).

E.g you theoretically can make invisible unit which can fire projectile which will looks like tornado. Something like that possible right now just by modifying client content, but it's actually won't looks cool just because projectiles position isn't handled by client.

For more advanced (and any non-visual) experiments you need some control over server side and currently there no servers released, so it's not possible at moment.

Yeah figured it wasn't possible to mod right now but later on I was more thinking closer towards release if uber don't add it in or can't.... Even if u can't do any gameplay weather elements just having it visually would be fantastic.... Having it snow or rain, thunder, cloudy planets, just to add more feel to the game, would be kind of exciting..... To me anyway

It's already known that no weather elements will affect gameplay just because it's not something might be included in PA design.

In what capacity do mean though? What I decribed? or just having weather period isn't able to be in the game?

When I talked about gameplay elements, it was more about what could be possible if the devs thought it wouldn't add enough to the gameplay to warrent the time to code it.

I would just be happy if it snowed and rained with lightning n thunder just to give a little extra to the environment other then just day n night cycles

I talking about any weather elements which may affect gameplay (e.g slow down units, damage them or limit their vision), none of them will be included in game. I'll post link here if I'm find when neutrino (or garat, don't sure) comment on that.

Visual-only things are possible, but as they're really have low priority.

oh right okay... It would be awesome to have, even as a aesthetic use only, I think the game would benefit from it from a visual point of view... I can just imagine it now, a hail storm of fire ash on a volcanic planet, that would be so cool

Except for the whole "Aw man I wish I could see past these clouds blocking the vew of my units" aspect.

Mike

well you do have a zoom funtion to zoom in under clouds! lol... but aside from that just making weather and not clouds is possible, plenty of games have falling snow without needing clouds to obstruct anything, its just a visual representation of whats going on, it doesn't have to be ultra realistic weather... but you could have the potential if you wanted to...

The thing is most games don't let you zoom out far enough to see the entire planet either. Think of it like shooting a movie, you can cut the back half of a car off to make room for cameras and mount it on a rig to make it look like it's driving, but you don't let the camera pan out enough to see the rig or that the car has been cut in half.

There is also more to considering than just units, what about terrain? you can't get a full or compelte overview of terrain if it's partially obscured by clouds.

In the end, it's better to just not include any weather effects, especially given they only hamper gameplay and neer improve it.

Mike

I was thinking that, if they ever implemented weather effects, they would fade out at a certain distance so that you can see all of your units.

It would make the most sense.

Small, short-lived, biome-specific weather effects, like tornados or cloudbursts (absent the clouds) or light meteor showers probably would be nice additions to flavor the biomes and make the planets appear more alive.

Well that was what my intention of thinking about the weather effects more, just to make the environments "pop" out and come alive a bit more than what they do now. Knight you make some good points, hence my original statement as to turn them off in the options if you didn't want them, either be a server side option or client side option so if it did boggle you that much, you can just simply turn them off. Flanders yah, basically you have the zoom levels to make the battlefield visable, and if not just simply dont even have the clouds, you dont need clouds to have weather effects, its just a visual effect, doesn't HAVE to affect gameplay like I was suggesting in my original post, just an opinion if anyone felt if there wasn't enough adding to gameplay elements with weather effects and thought it would be waste of time.

Clouds I'm not too bothered about. I think it would be really cool to have rain and snow and ash fall... but it would almost HAVE to be an option you can turn off, just not just to help people who dont want it, but from a performance standpoint too........

Right up until you realize that means fading out ALL of the visible effects, at which point, one must ask, "If you don't ever see it, why have it at all?"

Mike

To provide a sort of cinematic experience when zooming in close?

Besides, this will be the case for any effect, like you said. Should they cancel all effects for that reason?

Also, if clouds were to be added, they should only be visible from very far away so that it can't obscure any major battles.

Clouds? +1

The more swirls the merrier.

But yeah, if they don't obscure the battlefield. They could become partially transparent in strategic view, and normal in orbital/celestial view. And for people who really don't like them, there should be a on/off button in the video options.

I'm think weather effects and clouds it's cool idea especially for free camera mode where such effects might add lot of aesthetics to the game.

I totally sure that part of players will be happy to turn off all models/textures/effects completely and play with gray boxes only, or run dot war game like it's usually was in supcom. But it's still don't mean that game shouldn't have some effects for people who like them.

There would be an option to disable clouds and disable all weather effects all together, its not that hard to implement really, as moddable as this game claims it will be, it wouldn't be difficult to implement an option to disable it. Not a valid enough reason "not" to have some weather effects really.

This is an example of what can be done with current PA effects system. If I met quality I want I'll release it as mod.

Weather mods would be perfect. What kind of restrictions are there on effects mods?