Realtime Weather

[KroKoDyl]

Hey!

Lately I've been coding in stock POTC and I achieved some cool effects with weather.

I know that weather in POTC Build Mod was rewriten a couple of times, but probably we won't settle at this. I hope that in future weather changes won't be instant but rather smooth.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

That looks pretty cool! How did you do it?

And.... more importantly.... how could we put it in the Build Mod?
Indeed the system has been thoroughly rewritten so that the "jumps" at least aren't 100% random, but have some consistency to it.
Still, actual smooth transitions are obviously much better.

It would be especially cool if "trade winds" could be incorporated like you have in the real Caribbean.
And perhaps other wind effects being calculated from your position relative to a storm's worldmap coordinates.
I do believe something like that must be possible in some way.

 

[KroKoDyl]

Well I don't really know how Build Mod weather works, but I guess that your generator generates some variables, some functions add new rain sky etc. and everything is updated after some time passes by.
I approached to that from a different way. I writed function to do update once a sec and continuously endeavor to values from next weather with small steps. Anyway it still have some problems.

The worst part was to achieve smooth updates (as u know when the weather changes in stock POTC and Build Mod you have something like lag), it is caused by reading default values from wave arrangement on the sea. For now on I commented wave updates in my files, so I don't have that problem. I didn't figured out yet how to change in real time wave direction and height without that lag, but I'll be working on it. Of course smooth weather changes have some issues that we can't get around like sky texture changes, but I hope we'll come up with some good ideas to get over it.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Personally I don't mind the hourly "reloads" so much; that is also required for DirectSail reloads and encounters anyway. But it would be great to have stuff changing smoothly inbetween.
For example have the code already "decide" the wind direction and fog level for the next hourly change and work towards that during the hour.

Looking through the Build weather code, there are only five sky textures in use anyway:
"Blue 3" between 10:0o and 18:00.
"Sunset 1" between 18:00 and 22:00.
"Night 4" between 22:00 and 24:00.
"Night 3" between 00:00 and 06:00.
"Twilight 1" between 06:00 and 10:00.
So if there is no island/ship encounter due and it is not 10:00, 18:00. 22:00, 24:00 or 06:00, then the hourly reload could be skipped.

Why are you working on the stock game anyway? Especially now that Build 14 Beta 3 is nearly ready for release, it is sooo much better!

 

[KroKoDyl]

Why are you working on the stock game anyway? Especially now that Build 14 Beta 3 is nearly ready for release, it is sooo much better!

I agree, Build 14 Beta 3 have great fetures that I'm looking forward to, especially new Worldmap. But I have something like "sentiment" for stock game and I like to try new ideas in it.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Problem though with trying new ideas on old game versions is that they're REALLY hard to put to work in the new game versions.
I would know; I've been fighting these past several months with doing exactly that: updating code written for Beta 1 for the Beta 3 release.
NOT fun and something that really should be avoided if at all possible.