Voodoo4''s original question is really 100% based on the KIND of game, and why the designer wanted weather effects:

Examples...

Silent Hill - Snowing and foggy all the time (though the fog was really just to cover up pop-up). It was totally for atmosphere, and didn''t affect anything. But for atmosphere it was definitely powerful.

Metal Gear Solid - If you walked on snow, you left footprints, which guards could see and follow ... same if you walked in a puddle you would leave wet footprints. This made the player THINK about their surroundings, which was essential for a survival/sneaker like MGS.

Well, I have no conclusion, so I''ll just stop typing ........ NOW!

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Changing the future of adventure gaming...
Atypical Interactive

A lot of sports games have weather that has an effect on the game. ie. world cup 98, fifa 99, a lot of driving sims...

- Daniel

Okay, this *might* overcomplicate things, but if you''re doing a global-scale game (you''re working with more than one small area) then maybe the best idea is to design a second weathermap that will randomly make clouds and their depths. That way, you can say at ''x'' depth, these clouds will be "rain clouds". It might make things complex, but at least with this, and a time constraint, you can give your world *fairly* reasonable weather patterns. This could be developed further - add motion to the maps, dissipation schemes, etc. - as well.

-Jaemes Weare

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The designer''s one tenet:
Beauty is truth; truth beauty.
Hold to your own truths, and the player will see the beauty in your creation.
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quote: Original post by nicba

And what if you had to do something which could only be done at night? Like break in to a house or talk to a ghost at the graveyard? Then you actually have to turn on your PC and just sit and stare on the screen for 12 hours until it becomes night again?

Of course if it is a single player game you could just press the "accelerate time" button. But if it is a multiplayer game then you are forced to do the waiting.

Or what about this situation: You are a hero on a fantasy-quest and you just found out that you need to talk to a character on the other side of some mountain range. Only problem is that its in the middle of the winter and all passes are blocked by snow. Now, if the game has real-time day/night and wheater systems you must wait several months before you can progress in the game!

Regards

nicba

Dunno about having it completely real time, but I am incorporating a time system in my game, that saves when you exit and start back up teh game. It doesn''t run on real time, and depending on what part you are in teh same and what your doing the time runs slower. It''s a simple variable.

Basically bout 10 minutes real time is bout an hour game time. Fatigue and other things come into play too, But thats not really a weather condition. Day and night is very useful in my game, as some things are best done in the dark then during the day.

Magical Inns that restore 100% health, I dont think so.

Another thing I was thinking about to incorporate into my game was wind. But as of yet I havent seen a effective and realistic way to incorporate this, I can have things like wind conditions that slow the character down, but effects like tress blowing in the wind and such, is to much calculations for me right now.

Also I was thinking about including win in the deserts in my game which blows the sand around, but that was just getting way too crazy.

Also, though I am against having bars to determine human health and such, (but theres no better way that I can think of in my game) I have the stamina, and desperation meters, these are directly affected by the weather, (Heat waves, Deep freezes, etc)

Well thats about as much as I can think of top hand

Regards

Pingh
Maxim-Eccentric Interactive
www.m-ei.com

So basically what you''re trying to do is approximate weather systems on a synoptic scale, right? Do a random Bezier curve (your jet stream) at the begining of your game (keep track of it), and then generate ''hills'' (I''ve always imagined weather as a series of hills --high pressure systems--, followed by bowls --for low pressure systems--. So then what you could do is have your randomizer generate a series of hills and valleys (nothing too complicated) and have those ''surfaces'' follow the jet stream''s path. Depending on where your character was you could check how high or low the pressure was and feed that into your weather machine. Your weather machine could be as simple as saying that there are more clouds (and with more clouds there''s more potential for rain) when there''s a low pressure system (bowl--and have you ever noticed that low pressure systems seem to spin, even on land--) and less when there''s not (absence of a low pressure system usually means the presence of a high pressure system).

That seems like a doable solution to me, especially for a text-based game.