weather

From: yorkaturr
Date: 2002-01-09 12:35:50

The biggest problem when considering weather is the coding part. It's something of a quick-hack in meteorology to code a system that renders formations of conditions that trigger special weather effects, especially since it should be expected that they do not abruptly just appear or vanish out of the blue (literally). Luckily, since this is Majik, we can come up with our own rules.

There should be a list of available weather conditions and how they affect the player. The players can protect themselves against different weather conditions in ways that I have mentioned in the following individual descriptions.

• Cold. Cold weather affects the character's endurance. After it has finished gnawing at the character's endurance, it starts affecting health. The colder the weather, the harsher the effect. A character can protect himself by dressing warmly (wearable equipment should have cold/heat modifiers, as well as some variables that define if the piece of equipment is waterproof, whether it will rust or not etc). The character's limbs start to take the damage first. The character will get hungry easier.
• Heat. Heat affects the character in a similar way as cold, except it has no specific damaging effect on limbs. The character will get thirsty easier.
• Rain and water in general. Now this affects a character's equipment more than the character itself. Certain items may get wet and dissolve in the water (like scrolls or books), and other items may rust if they are wet for a long while and left untreated.
• Storms. Moving during a storm will tire a character easier. Lightning bolts have a small chance of hitting the character.
• Other effects. In very special areas such as those that have lava lakes and such might have sulphurous rain and such. I'm leaving these undefined as of yet.

From: beregar
Date: 2002-01-11 13:54:54
In-Reply-To: 143

Hmm, Do we need to define all weather types or just some stacking system? If it is both quite cold and rain those effects stack though the rain appears as snow but snow in itself wouldn't have an effect.

Actually I would like to see some automatic scaling system in this. It would be nice if there would be some basic weather types like: rain, cold, heat, storm, wind etc etc and each of them having a value between 0-10 where 0 is a non existing or an "optimal" condition and 10 is the ultimate. Each of these could have a base effect that causes more penalties the higher the value is. Then we could simply mix these weather types and define that if rain level is 2, cloud level 3 and cold level is 5 it would snow slightly. If those values were 4, 7 and 5 it would be snowing heavily and if wind level would be something like 7 we could call it a severe snowstorm.

Base weather types which I can figure out right now could be: cloud, wind, rain, cold, heat. Things like sunlight etc need not to be defined since sun is anyway always present, clouds just obscure it. Rain types again depend on temperature. I would like to see this system done in this way because it would make also weather magery possible in base level. So weather mages could affect regional base values and see what they get from their unique mixture. A lot more fun to find weather effect combinations than just to cast a "rain" spell... or what do you think?

Beregar

From: yorkaturr
Date: 2002-01-11 13:59:57
In-Reply-To: 143

Sounds good. It would be easier to code that way also, because we could just express things in such straight-forward numbers. We just need to define exactly what happens when several different weather effects cumulate. Who wants to do this?

From: beregar
Date: 2002-01-11 15:26:11
In-Reply-To: 143

I could do it but I'd like to know more about principles of weather engine in general. Like what are the limits?

Beregar

From: yorkaturr
Date: 2002-01-14 14:43:21
In-Reply-To: 143

The biggest limitations are in the visualization, but you shouldn't be concerned about them. Just write things down, so we can get this over with. We'll modify your suggestions and designs according to the possibilities in the code.

From: raeky
Date: 2002-01-27 00:50:03
In-Reply-To: 194

The planet being flat doesn’t have a equator? And should the planet have seasons, like its winter everywhere all at once, and summer everywhere?

From: Archantes
Date: 2002-01-27 13:24:20
In-Reply-To: 345

IMHO no. This prevents the climate from being different around the world. See, if the winter is as long as summer both in the north and in the south, there would be no 'cold, much ice and snow everywhere' -regions, and so the flora and fauna is to be same as well. If I got this right...

From: darshan
Date: 2002-01-27 13:37:14
In-Reply-To: 345

There's no equator. If we assume that the sun does circle the flat planet, the sun's light reaches all parts of the world at the same time when it rises.

I'm not sure if we should have full-blown seasons; I think it would suffice to make the weather patterns develop through the year. Eg. toward the end of a year the temperature starts dropping and the chance for rains gets higher, with thunderstorms (this would correspond to an autumn but we don't need to state it explicitly anywhere), and at some point the rains drop a bit and turn to snow... as the new year progresses, the weather would start warming up again and we'd get rid of the snow.


A related question: how long are the seasons? IMO one game year shouldn't last more than two months; But the worldbook says we have a 384 day year, and consequently if we use 1:3 time our year would be over four real-life months long which is way too much. I'm going to address this in a new thread soon, and in it I intend to rip apart the current worlbook calendar.

From: yorkaturr
Date: 2002-01-28 11:59:58
In-Reply-To: 345

What makes you think weather works in the same way in Majik as it does in the real world? The Sun, for example, is Aluna, and Aluna is a God, and being a God means that she has a personality, and since she has a personality, she can at times change the weather rather whimsically.

However, I think there should be seasons, but season changes, and their effects, could simply be defined by the north/south axis on the map. No need to make anything more detailed.

From: raeky
Date: 2002-01-27 16:14:41
In-Reply-To: 347

well we can define something like an equator, except its not the center of the planet, its where the sun is directly above. If that is arround the center of the map, or even better a little south of the center, that means the northern snowy climates will always get indirect sunlight which is alot colder then direct (indirect being what causes winter, because the light waves had to travel further through the atmosphear and lost alot of there energy bouncing off of the air molecules). That will cause weather patterns to be constant, tropical in the southern, and temperate up northern, and then winter in the extreme northern.

That would require some map changes since the tropical belt will be extended southern more.