The snow effect

[grayman]

A few questions/remarks about making it snow.

 

1) Does the engine generate the same number of particles regardless of the patch size? It seems that a small patch set to "flurries" looks like a blizzard.

 

2) I think the tutorials say to have the weather texture on the bottom of the patch, but when I created a snow patch it tossed the particles UP before they started falling. I flipped the patch upside-down and now the snow comes out right. So the snow texture needs to point up at the sky.

 

3) In long, narrow snow patches I see ranks of particles descend together, all in line, like tiny soldiers on a parade ground. Line yourself up properly and you can look straight down what ends up being a waterfall of evenly-spaced particles all lined up nice and straight as they march toward the ground. Is there some minimum patch size we should use to stop this behavior? (Seems like the random particle generator isn't doing a good job of spacing the particles around the patch.)

 

4) Do visportals break up weather patches? If I have a patch that crosses a vp and the vp closes, and part of the patch is visible and part isn't, will the engine still produce particles in the non-visible area?

 

Thanks.

[grayman]

After further testing with snow, I can answer 1 and 4.

 

1) Patch size makes no difference. It looks like the engine creates a constant N particles per square unit of patch.

 

4) Visportals split weather patches. If part of a large patch is in an area that's "off" due to visportals, that part of the patch will not generate particles.

[Mortem Desino]

2) Yes, that's the right placement.

 

3) Right. That's something wrong with the particle definition. I'm taking a look at it, perhaps fix it in SVN darkmod for next patch..