Weather Harshnes?
 

If you guys remember some of the zones on LIVE had far worse weather than the other zones.

For exmaple while it could rain in both BlackBurrow and West Karana - but in WK the rains would go non stop for DAYS!

Snow storm wise- Iceclad while could have snowstorm very rarely seen one, but EverFrost had A LOT of snow storms.

Is there a way to control this on Emu?
I examined zones table and I see that I can set weather betwin none, rain and snow, but I don't think it is posible to set the kind of diffirences as I described above

Also on live you could notice how weather could chain from light rain/snow to a VERy strong rain/snow and visibility would drop accordingly.

I think this could a worthy thing to consider


PS. How come SOE never made sand stoms in desert areas? DOn't you think that would be appropriate?

There is no functionality now, but I don't believe it would be hard to add it. I'm sure weather has a chance modifier. Instead of that being a static value (which I assume it is) it could simply be changed to be a dynamic value, which is called from the zone table of the database (add a new column weatherchance or something such) That way, when zone checks to see if it's time to change the weather, it'll use its own chance modifier, instead of a global one.

While we're at it, may also want to see about fixing weather so that certain zones can have a chance to rain or snow. Right now, the zone only does what you tell it. If set to rain, it only rains, if set to snow, it only snows. This is fine for zones like Halas, or the Karanas. However, some zones namely Rivervale for one, could see rain or snow. That would simply be a matter of adding a new "Any" variable. That's also assuming I'm not blind and am just missing it :P

As for your P.S. Yeah, I agree, I would love to see sand storms in the desert! I'm not sure how we could accomplish that, either. More than likely, it would require some sort of client hack.

Some of those things, like the non stop rain for days, I understood where actually bugs in the client that finally got ironed out. You would actually have to wait for a GM to come in and stop the rain.

I actualy liked the non stop rains - made Wk feel special =)

aye, I can think of number of palces which qualify for both rain and snow. Stonebrunt Mountains and Dredlands for exmaple.

Perhaps we can make that value of "3" would mean it could both rain and snow with equal chance, "4" would mean its more likely to rain than snow, and "5" that ist more likely to snow than rain


And as mentioned before I distincly remember from LIVE while it was allready raining you would see a message: "The Rain is getting stronger" and intensity of rain woudl increase and visibility drop even more. Same thing for snow - you could see a light snow fall at first for 20-30 min and then it would change into strong snowstorm with very short visibility

and I guess we will need an extra collumn to set up a % chance for rain/weather to start and continue. So let say we have Wk set to 65% chance of rain. Then every 15 min (or whatever time intervals set at) it will roll a 65% chance to stat raining. Then after 15 min have passed it will have another 65% chance check to continue raining - in which case rain should get stronger, and so on.

yeah sadly - i guess we would need an actual displaying graphics for the sand storm which eq doesn't have I guess

I am bumping this as I have saw today that KLS has added $zoneweather perl into the source

So whats up - are we going to see some fine tune weather control per zone? Its about time it started raining in WK :cool:

Consider my old proposition from above:

It's an export so I'm sure it is for a charm that is dependent on weather.

well if charm supose to activate when it rains or snows- its prety much gona be ULTRA useless since chance of weather going bad in Emu is like 1% :D

Well, with $zoneweather implemented you can use Perl to control the weather. We already had quest::rain(1/0) and quest::snow(1/0) to make it rain or snow, and now with a way to check to see if it is raining, snowing, or not an elementary Perl script can be written up to increase the chance of bad weather. Just make sure it's not raining/snowing, then acquire a number from the random generator (use that to specify the chance), then if the number is one you like, have it rain/snow. Set the whole thing on a timer with the time period of your choosing :) I could be wrong, but quest::snow(1) might also be able to make it snow in zones set to rain, and vice versa. That'll need to be tested. Likewise, it's plausible that you can set the weather column of a zone to 0 so that it doesn't rain/snow and use Perl to completely control the chance. Again, that'll need to be tested.

As much as I am on the Live Like mission, I feel stuff like this shouldn't be hardcoded because Perl is perfectly capable of handling it. Perl gives the OP freedom to do as they wish. Perhaps they want the weather to have a better chance of being clear at night, or perhaps a certain NPC in the zone increases or increases the risk of rain, etc.

I was hoping for something like that cavedude :cool:

BTW did you guys by chance have a way to make client to produce the FOG like its raining/snowing but wihout actual rain or snow? Just the fog?
I know I can set zone istelf to have low clip plane, but it would be nice to have just "fog" as posible weather codition

What args does $zoneweather return? 0/1/2? or Rain/Snow/Clear?

It returns the current weather condition which yes is 0 for none, 1 for rain, and 2 for snow.

To sum this up, if I wanted it to rain constantly in a zone, what would the perl script look like?

i haven't gotten myself to using this but try

quest::rain(1);