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Xannepans creations

Started by xannepan, October 05, 2007, 06:52:11 AM

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Should the weather plugin include a version with destructive effects (e.g. associated with tornados and lightning)?

Yes
41 (57.7%)
No
30 (42.3%)

Total Members Voted: 71

Voting closed: January 26, 2013, 06:50:01 AM

gn_leugim

Quote from: josh6 on January 10, 2013, 03:55:59 PM
Hi xannepan, I love your work, its amazing.

I was just wondering if all or any of the weather/sun-moon mods can also be applied to region view

I would love to see a rain shower over my entire city and even  my city in the night.

Regards, Josh6

I dont think that is possible. I may not know the effect dir and stuff like that, but I know that what you see in the region is a saved thumbnail image of your city, not the actual city, so don't expect interactivity with it in the region view I say.

xannepan

It turns out for both city and region view you can trigger individual effects via the CTRL+X cheat mode, then typing "Effect <effectname>".

Problem is that the effects need some spacing properties which determine how far clouds etc spread out. These props are sofar only optimized for city view. But I can try to make some effects to optimize for region view. I do not know how to trigger them though besides using the cheat code.

Girafe

I checked a little bit these effects.

1. I am not able to find the center of the map with your tip and extra cheat dll. After typing the text in the box, what should happen?

2. Moon effect works nice (used it with Simfox's Darknite without problems).

3. Celestial effects (I have the sun for day + moon for night, is it normal? I thought it was only sun)

4. I was not successful with the aurora (with v2 version of course  %wrd).

Hope to see weather effects soon  :)
The Floraler

This is the end, hold your breath and count to ten, feel the earth move, and then...

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *    *   *   *   *   *    * 

xannepan

Hi,

Can you try if you can trigger the aurora by using the effect cheat

Ctrl+x then "Effect jenxaurora"

Thx
Alex

josh6

Quote from: xannepan on January 11, 2013, 08:02:15 AM
It turns out for both city and region view you can trigger individual effects via the CTRL+X cheat mode, then typing "Effect <effectname>".

Problem is that the effects need some spacing properties which determine how far clouds etc spread out. These props are sofar only optimized for city view. But I can try to make some effects to optimize for region view. I do not know how to trigger them though besides using the cheat code.

Thanks for attempting to figure this out!

Girafe

Quote from: xannepan on January 11, 2013, 08:14:52 AM
Hi,

Can you try if you can trigger the aurora by using the effect cheat

Ctrl+x then "Effect jenxaurora"

Thx
Alex

Nothing  %wrd I maybe do something wrong, was someone successful with it?
The Floraler

This is the end, hold your breath and count to ten, feel the earth move, and then...

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *    *   *   *   *   *    * 

xannepan

Mmm..I'll have to check toroughly once more. Sorry about that.

About the celestial: they include sun and moon indeed, and also the aurora (which perhaps doesn't work)


xannepan

Hello,
I'd like your opinion about a possible feature for the weather plugin I am working on. Please vote for the poll above.

Thank you!

MandelSoft

Question: are the destructive effects in the weather mod really destructive, or are they only visual counterparts of the disasters?
Lurk mode: ACTIVE

xannepan

If I include then they will be really destructive. That means lightning will cause fires, tornados demolish buildings. I think the destructiveness can be tuned, but I have no idea if I will succeed in doing so. So best is to assume desctructiveness is similar to the disasters you can trigger yourself already in the game.


Girafe

I think it shoud be 2 different package (one destructive and the other not).

Moreover the best could be to choice during the installation the weather effects we want:

- rain
- lightning
- snow (does snow could be adjust in fonction of the height for example in winter under 1000m snow is rain and up 1000m snow is snow?)
- rainbow
...
The Floraler

This is the end, hold your breath and count to ten, feel the earth move, and then...

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *    *   *   *   *   *    * 

kbieniu7

Quote from: Girafe on January 11, 2013, 08:08:06 AM
1. I am not able to find the center of the map with your tip and extra cheat dll. After typing the text in the box, what should happen?

I have the same problem. Typing this cheat does nothing, both with and without all other plugins installed. However aurora, as well as sun and moon, works.

Thank you for visiting Kolbrów, and for being for last ten years!

xannepan

Argh...I think I know what's wrong. I shared some fsh texture between the jupiter and the aurora plugins. They started out as a single file, but when I splitted them of, I forgot to duplicate the shared textures. Same happened to the FSH textures for the aurora effect...
I'll try to fix it. In the mean time you can use the terrainquery "cheat" as suggested in on of the previous posts.

By they way: the marker won't show up if there are buildings covered the terrain surface. It should display on roads etc though.

Mack The Finger

Hello xannepan,

I am not able to find the center of the screen either. Tried it with a fresh installation, too.
The cheat just doesn't do anything for me. Tried it on a new large tile.

Is there any other way to calculate exactly where the lots should be placed?
Like how many tiles from West to East, and then South to North?
Counting tiles is very tedious but if you use the road tool, which costs 10 simoleons for each road, so then 100 is 10 tiles, 700 is 70 tiles. etc. It could be counted fairly quickly that way. 

I know it's amateur hour, but that's all I could think of.

kbieniu7

Road tool is good idea, but it costs more, if there is a hill or anything to destroy on its way.
Xannepan mentioned better way: type the cheat "terrainquery" and then with query tool try to find a tile which coordinates are: x=127,y=127 for large cities, x=63,y=63 for medium, or x=31,y=31 for small ones.

Thank you for visiting Kolbrów, and for being for last ten years!

Mack The Finger

Quote from: kbieniu7 on January 13, 2013, 08:29:55 AM
Road tool is good idea, but it costs more, if there is a hill or anything to destroy on its way.
Xannepan mentioned better way: type the cheat "terrainquery" and then with query tool try to find a tile which coordinates are: x=127,y=127 for large cities, x=63,y=63 for medium, or x=31,y=31 for small ones.

That worked quick and perfectly, thank you. That was a great idea. 

I was now able to test the mod. I'm using simfox's day'n'night, and the moonrise/moonset and the sunrise/sunset are working just like in the video. However, during 4 January months the Aurora did not work, but the cheat worked fine.

This is an awesome innovtive mod! It's already gave me a hundred ideas for pictures...

xannepan

Some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that I have managed to balance between performance and acceptable rain and snow effects in such way that a rain shower now doesn't generate more particles then the waterfall/stream effects that were unlocked by jeronij some time ago already. On the maxis large city tutorial performance for the weather mod is really acceptable. If the shadows are turned off performance is actually quite good. No guarantees for mega cities with much traffic though...

Other good news is that I can reduce overall game brightness during rainshowers and snowstorms etc, which give a much more realistic atmosphere during storms. The sims are stupid though so they won't turn on the lights...
Also the snow cover now works fine, albeit there is no way to control height nor avoiding placement of snow on steep terrain.

The bad news is, that I still don't know how to position the sun/moonrise effects in the middle of the screen. So the aurora mod lots will still need to be placed in the middle of the map. Other than that controlling the timing of the effects remains difficult, as I have trouble finding out how the timing properties in the effect dir relate to the game clock. An finally, I don't seem to be able to create tornados above water, but lets agree that is a minor thingy...

I am currently defining the spec for seasonal behavior of the weather effects, and random chances etc.

All with all despite the few hours I can spend on this these days. it's progressing really well.

-alex





xannepan

Last time I presented Aurora, goddess of the dawn, renews herself every morning and flies across the sky, announcing the arrival of the sun.

Today I present Jupiter god of the sky and thunder.

http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2883

Only with your feedback I can improve this plugin.

pagenotfound

Excuse this outburst BUT:

THIS. IS. FREAKING. AWESOME!!!!!1     &hlp &hlp

Seriously actually seeing weather for sc4? Never thought I would see the day. I haven't a clue how you did it but you just blew my mind. Wow.
Im back baby! Everybody do the Bendah!

andisart

Xannepan, wow...... :o :o :o
First let me get off my chest that I am in absolute AWE of your work! I mean, wow, this is what the community has dreamed of for soo long! This has always been one of the most-asked-for mods since the game's release 10 yrs ago, so it's a big deal. This is probably going to become one of the most favorite SC4 mods EVER. That Aurora video gave me showers of goosebumps!

I wish I could support you with mod knowledge, but this is way beyond me I'm afraid. I will, however, do my best with testing and giving feedback.

Now, for the mods, I just spent a couple of hours with them and here are my first impressions and thoughts/ideas:

- The rain and snow animations look georgeous and realistic. It was a really cool and exciting moment to see them appear the first time!

- The seasonal timing of the different effects throughout the year worked nicely as it should

- Performance was only lightly affected with shadows turned on full. However, this was played in an empty (tho large) map. Shadows turned off there was no more performance impact. I play on a 4 yr old laptop (Intel Dual Core P8400, 2.26Ghz, 4GB Ram, GeFore 9600 GT)

- I spotted on several occasions rain, snow and also cloud effects moving fast over the map, as if they were dragged to the place they should appear. I have the impression, this appeared only at the start of an effect.

- clouds and thunderstorms seem to have gathered in a cove-like mountain valley. was that coincidence or on purpose? If so it would be really cool for it would be realistic.

- the rate of lighting strikes during thunderstorms seems to be set too high atm. Especially on smaller storms it appears a bit more like "rage from above" than a natural occurance (this is also important to consider in regards to the destructive mod option). Also I noticed that lightning often strikes far outside the actual stormclouds which looks a bit odd. Similiar to the above point, sometimes the lighting moves fast in one direction when spawned, but not as far as the above.

- just as an idea: to add variety maybe add storms that only have lightning inside clouds, but no actual strikes. This occurs in nature too. (not sure if you've added this already)

- the snow on the terrain builds up nicely, but what sticks out is that the whole map terrain texture is then covered at the same time, no matter where the snow storm occurs. I know you said you had run into issues with this point. Maybe instead of the idea of getting the texture to change only where the snow actually falls you could add just more snowstorm spawns. If there are, say 4 or 5 spawns on a large map it probably looks more convincing when the whole terrain turns snow-covered.

- the effect with the darkening during storms is really cool, but it appears a bit odd on Zoom 1 and 2, if possible I would restrict it to Zoom 5, 4 and 3. The reason is that only on these zoom levels you are actually under the clouds. On Zoom 2 and 1 you are above cloud level. And as we know, the sun is always shining above the clouds 
:sunny:

- the rainbow is a wonderful idea, but I think a realistic or convincing execution of it will be difficult. In reality a rainbow is of course always closely tied to the direction of the rays of the sunlight. In the mod the rainbow is always in the same angle and also appears when the sky is dark from the storm and there is no sun (some sun is required for it to exist of course), which looks odd. Also, if combined with the celestial mod, the rainbow would need to allign with the movement of the sun in the sky. Otherwise it might look really odd if you can see the sun in that corner and the rainbow in a physically off angle to it in another corner. This might not bother others, so it's just my 5 cents  ;)

- celestial movement hasnt correctly alligned with the day-night cycle of the game for me. I waited 3 or more full cycles with no improvement. Mod usually was a bit behind game cylce (terrain was fully bright before sun started rising)

- not sure if that's what you meant in an earlier post, but the texture of the sun setting is getting red way too early. It should be much closer to the horizon before starting to turn its color

- not sure if I noticed correctly, but is the moon rising in the same spot every day? If so, could the path be altered to bring more variety and realism

- probably for a future idea: the full moon should cast light on the terrain at night. Also different moon phases would be desirable for the future (more realism). I guess you could also think of different sun phases, as in angles of its way (high in the summer, low angles in the winter)

- none of the ctrl+x commands worked for me in either mods. I can use other cheats like "weaknesspays" or the terrain query

Note: I tested with otherwise empty Plugins folder