Yes! great tie-in. Swamps are the perfect breeding ground for malaria/mosquitoes.
<b>Weather patterns in 3D sailing mode</b>
I've recently been doing a lot of watching of the weather in PotC. I think my earlier hunch about it being a global setting, covering both on land+ at sea sections of the game at the same time is correct.
I say 'i think' because occasionaly you do get a completely different weather pattern after boarding your ship(this noticable change seems to happen less when going from ship to shore though?). Which could just be chance that i board when the hourly weather change is taking place, but i'm not 100% sure.[see NOTE:1]
Mostly you get the impression it is global. I've been watching the way grass is blown about in the land section, coupled with watching out for rain and seeing that this can be used to get a crude 'reading' on the weather state you will most likely find when going to sea at that time. The amount of grass swaying, and how violent it is can tell you how strong the wind is, and if it is raining you can more or less get the wind direction. I quite like using this method now - its 'boy scout' fun <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
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Anyway onto the main topic of this post. I've been thinking more about just how exactly to model changing weather in the 3D sailing mode, to be used in conjunction with the port-to-port sailing mod. It needs to be reasonably realistic, to improve the sailing aspect of the game, but also gamer friendly so it wont constantly frustrate the player.
So how about something like this:
We have a certain weather state each game hour. As mentioned before we need to store the current weather state in a different variable, like 'previousweather' or some such.
The game will use 'previousweather' as the control that determines the most likely next range of weather change.
The attributes of the weather, knots+direction, will have a bearing on the next hourly in-game change. I thought about numbers a little for this, i'll use % to illustrate the degree for a reasonable framework for these changes.
So lets make a current weather state of 12 knots blowing in a NW direction - that state gets saved as the new variable 'previousweather' On the change a few more calcualtions are done to get the next weather state.
I'm thinking something like this:
on the lower end of the scale:
If previousweather less than 10 knots have a 60% chance of there being an increase in wind speed
If previousweather less than 5 knots have a 80% chance of there being an increase in wind speed
on the higher end of the scale:
If previousweather greater than 20 knots have a 60% chance of there being a decrease in wind speed(+5% chance of 'Storm')
If previousweather reater than 30 knots have an 80% chance of there being a decrease in wind speed(+10% chance of 'Storm')
On both these higher-end conditions this is where i'd like to tie in a possible 'storm trigger' that could load the player into one of the 'storm screens' - so along with the above check it also runs a storm event check. All these example percentiles will need testing+changing untill we are happy with the in-game effect.
For the mid ranges between 10 knots and 20 knots i'm thinking a simple 50% change for the wind going up or down will be ok? Again something we would have to test and change as needed.
This method will(i hope) tend to favour the mid range of weather speeds - so you will more likely be sailing in those ranges. I am trying to add an element of realism, BUT this is a 'game' and i want to try to avoid causeing frustration - who would really like to sail from Oxbay to Redmond in 3D mode with half the journey spent be-calmed?? probably not many of us.
Wind direction would take a simular tack -
If previousweather NW(blowing towards) then say a 70% chance it will change within the parameters of North and West on the compass, so it would come down to checking against the actual degrees of wind direction. So if blowing from south east with a wind heading of 300 degrees( i needed to check my compass on this!) then that 70% would be in favour of the next change being within a range of between say 240 to 20 degrees?
Now along with all these kinds of checks etc it also needs to be entirely possible for the weather to just 'flip-out' and do something completely random(like it works currently). So i'm thinking that we could maybe have a constant 10% chance at each weather change, that it might be completely random? something like that?
i hope i'm getting the idea across well enough! The whole aim is to create a smoother transition from one weather change to the next, being able to include storms within the model, and also keep a certain amount of randomness to the whole thing - you never really know what the weather might do while at sea(well not without radar tracking and modern forcasts!).
Overall it would be great to have this in the port-to-port mods framework, i think it would greatly enhance the 3D sailing aspect of the game.
[NOTE:1] - I've also noticed a weird weather change when visiting the captains cabin. Doing this will 'always'(90% sure?) change the weather pattern. I think its because time passes when you go to your cabin, i'm guessing 1 hour?
Along these lines you can get some 'odd' effects e.g. if in the storm screen, go to the captains cabin and come back - the weather wont look stromy anymore even though the storm music is playing and your still taking storm damage. Odd - but not a huge concern, something to be aware of.
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