Weather - done better

Generating random weather in RPGs never works that well because random tables are …well, random. One minute it's sunshine, the next it's a blizzard.

Using a 'Weather Hex flower' allows you to generate weather that is more consistent, but still allows for some surprises:

Example image of a Weather Hex Flower:



In the Hex Flower example above you can see 7 days of weather indicated by the red path.

Link to PDF [Link removed - PDFs from an unknown source are a security risk.]

Well, it depends on what weather you want to simulate Swedish weather is very random, there can be snow, sun and rain at the same time, or many many times during the same day.......

I like it. I like rain and fog and such in games like Skyrim, but as you say, weather changes from extremes at the flick of a switch and it's completely unrealistic.

I think the thing with weather in Skyrim and in many other games that have weather systems is that it is a completely visual effect (unless you mod the game) and having the realistic weather (i.e. same weather for a prolonged period of time) just doesn't showcase it well. Having all four season change over the span of several hours has a much bigger "wow" factor which I think they were after.

Remember time moves faster in most games, too. The sun can make a complete cycle in an hour.

What really irks me with weather is that it just… shows up. I'm used to seeing clouds build up over the course of hours. Even a fast moving front takes a good half hour to go from the horizon to where I am. In a game, though, that's likely to be sunrise to sunset!

So what's a game to do? Having clouds zip by at roughly the speed of sound would be insane. So the clouds just build up over the course of a few minutes then rain on you. Or it cheats and waits for you to sleep or go into a building for a while, then changes the weather while you aren't looking.

Of course, another option would be the slow the friggin' sun down. That would have the added benefit of casting shadows that move at a sane rate, too. Unfortunately, it also means that, once that sun goes down, you're looking at several hours of gameplay before it comes back.

Zloth said:

Of course, another option would be the slow the friggin' sun down. That would have the added benefit of casting shadows that move at a sane rate, too. Unfortunately, it also means that, once that sun goes down, you're looking at several hours of gameplay before it comes back.

Click to expand...

I suspect that's probably why the day/night cycles are so short in games. I think devs perceive that many players don't want to deal with longer nights or don't enjoy playing in low-light conditions as much.

One of the first things I always did in Bethesda's games was either install a mod that lengthened the cycle or, if that wasn't available, use a command line to edit it myself. To me, there are few things more immersion breaking than the sun going down 30 minutes after it came up.

What I'd like to see is for open-world games to start including a slider so players could adjust it themselves without having to mod it.

I get the point about avoiding extreme transitions - but I don't quite grasp the point of this "hex flower". Using a simple table, you can define probabilities for transitions between any two states, and also forbid them entirely. Is there any advantage to having exactly six allowed transitions from any state?