Keeping your house dry

[grayman]

There was some discussion here last December about the problem with rain and snow falling through brushes and showing up in areas where you don't want rain/snow.

 

If a weather brush is in an area that isn't being painted, it stops producing particles.

 

Given that, you could use the solution shown in the attached map.

 

Dmap it and fire it up.

 

Walk into the shelter on the right. Damp and rainy and moldy. You wouldn't want to live there.

 

Walk into the shelter on the left. Nice and dry. You could keep your horse in there and he wouldn't get sick.

 

Mantle onto the roofs of the shelters. Rain is falling onto each.

 

Visportals box in the area above the dry shelter, and the area has its own rain patch. When you're up there, it's raining. When the visportals close, it stops.

 

At least I think that's what's happening. Whether technically true or not, using visportals in this way can give you a few more dry areas if your architecture allows their use.

[grayman]

Well, I attached a *.map file to the previous post, but I don't see it anywhere.

 

Are pictures the only valid attachments in these posts?

 

If so, how can I make the sample map available to those interested?

[greebo]

Rename the .map.txt, the forum should accept that one.

[Fidcal]

Be interesting to see this one.

[grayman]

Here's the map (I hope).

rain.map.txt

[Fidcal]

Well done grayman! This is an excellent solution. It will be interesting to see how easy/hard this will be to implement in real FMs but it looks really good. When I did Den I was aware of this effect but I didn't put two and two together! For instance I had horizontal visportals over the yard and alleys and this cut off rain so I had to put rain patches just underneath them! D'uh! It never occurred to me that this might have been used to stop leaks into the little tudor house which I had to carefully avoide with patches all around.

[Fidcal]

I'm now getting one of those faint retro-active (?) hindsight memories that maybe we did vaguely discuss something like this internally at one time but nothing came of it.

[Tels]

Excellent work, greyman! Somebody make a quick rain tutorial on the wiki!

[grayman]

It will be interesting to see how easy/hard this will be to implement in real FMs but it looks really good.

 

 

I've already used it twice in my Vert map. It holds up well.

 

In Cleighmoor, where I'm using snow, I've had to architecturally work around the "snow falling through brushes" problem, but now I'll revisit the "faked" spots to see if the visportal box gets rid of some of the hoops I jumped through.

 

 

 

 

[aidakeeley]

A quick question that'll'mebee (I think) go a long way towards explaining to me what these "particles" are (I'm still obviously just trying to get a grip on all these terms and concepts and such*): Are you telling me that weather, say rain, actually causes a volume of water to manifest when it hits the "world"?

 

So you could have dust creating dirty floors in which tracks could conceivably be laid**?

Sparks to ignite flammables?

Snow to cover tracks**?

 

Long-winded, Am I?***

 

*Why, just yesterday, I took a look at just exactly what "patches" are... more useful than I'd thought. The name tells little about the major use, it only describes what I suspect was the initial use (decals?) -- the idea I had of them until looking further.

 

**Would tracks be possible in this (closed-source) engine?

 

***I suppose by now I could have just googled or wikied, but if I can just get a quick answer to the quick question I will have some idea if I'm on the right "track" at all...

[Fidcal]

The quick answer is no. Snow and rain are described in the A to Z guide and just cause the effect of rain or snow falling. It doesn't settle. It doesn't wet the ground (you have to use wet-look textures on the ground.) You can't leave tracks. With rain you can use splash particles but they are independent of the actual rain particles.

 

Particles are a special feature of 3D games. They can be different sizes and colours and single or many. They are set up to be still or to move in certain ways and within a certain area. They are extremely varied in type: smoke, rain, snow, moving leaves on trees, etc.

[aidakeeley]

Okay, thanks much.

 

I was quite taken aback to think that it might work that way... I guess I'll have a re-read of what is being discussed here and actually dl the map and see what is being discussed here. It just seemed that that (my misconception) was what this whole discussion was about...

 

From the organic (or, IOW, just hearing about it and seeing what "they" demostrated in promoting it) way of "learning" (not learning) about particle effects, I just thought: "Oh, dust... dust in light beams, cool... sorta cool"... but way over-hyped and, if you ask me, in general way over used in particular ( ) where dust particles are concerned... there isn't that much dust in the world (and certainly not in space {see recent vidja somewheres around here}). More often than not a "looky look!" thing.

 

Long-winded you say?

 

Yes.

 

I.

 

Am.

 

Anyway thanks for the short answer and especially the bit more to clarify exactly those other bits I was obviously beginning to confuse my self about.

[Fidcal]

Yeah moonbeams tend to be a bit 'overheavy'. Funny, I was watching the cartoon movie Monster House yesterday and the torchlight beams were almost solid. Good fun movie though; scary for young kids I'd think.

[Tels]

So you could have dust creating dirty floors in which tracks could conceivably be laid**?

 

Technically, yes, but we don't have any coder who could work on this. (It involves: have a variable that says what and which kind of tracks player should leave, add script interface (or whatever) so that the tracks can change, track player position, infer footstep position, spray paint decal on floor, decal will automatically vanish after set time just like bloodsplats. Doable, but might take a few days implementing properly.)

 

Sparks to ignite flammables?

 

Uh, probably. Might be scriptable, but complicated to create.

 

Snow to cover tracks**?

 

Snow doesn't pile up on the ground, making it do that would be quite complicated. However, *if* you made the thief print "tracks" (see above) then you could use "inverse tracks", and fade them out after a while, so snow covers track (albeit in a fake way).