/rain

[Jabantiz]

Forgot to post about this last night but didn't do anything productive and in my screwing around I figured out how to make it rain, I set this command up to just screw around and figure values out but Zcoretri wanted me to submit it so here it is.

/rain <float>

It takes a float value however for best results use 0 to 1, going up by .01 there is slight changes to clouds, (barely noticable), anything after .75 it starts to rain or snow depending on the zone you are in. 1.1 is rather dark but works, 1.2 and up stuff gets screwed up. This is only for the client using it, this will not effect any other client in the zone.

[John Adams]

This is only for the client using it, this will not effect any other client in the zone.

Yet!

Awesome. You have no idea how hard I worked trying to get Weather to happen, just had no idea what I was doing. Glad you "stumbled upon it" Now we can get it on a timer, use some Rules to govern min/max weather per zone, and push the weather updates to all clients.

AND! Weather was on the 0.7.2 cycle, so this is a great head start for when we get there, to complete the system. Thanks, Jab!

[John Adams]

It's RAINING in Emu. I could tear up. It's a beautiful thing.

Quicktime Vid: http://files.eq2emulator.net/media/EQ2Rain.mp4

Rain.jpg

[John Adams]

WTF? It's raining in Frostfang Sea.

Shouldn't it be snowing?

[John Adams]

Something else to consider when we implement world-wide weather, we might add a field (flags? or bool) to the zones table to enable/disable things like Weather at all. I am in Sundered Splitpaw, and it's raining inside the cave. Interesting effect, but probably shouldn't do that

Maybe all zones have no Weather by default, and ones you want enabled are only done so via the Rules System (per zone) which we have yet to define. Thinking of some Rules, as I said above, min/max weather density, frequency, etc.

[Jabantiz]

WTF? It's raining in Frostfang Sea.

Shouldn't it be snowing?

There are snow flurries, thought that was odd at first too but it makes sense with the lore on live.

[John Adams]

Hmm, I did /rain 1 and it was thundering, lightning and pouring rain. No snow. I didn't go into New Halas to see if different grids in the zone contained different weather patterns.

[Scatman]

Weather shouldn't be zone wide right? It's zone location dependent? I know in Kylong Plains it only snows in certain areas. Maybe we should allow 2 or more zone locations to "link" together to allow them to have the same weather patterns?

[Jabantiz]

I believe how it works is a value is just set on the char sheet and the client does the rest, so in kylong if you have it set to rain and run around it should change on its own when you get to an area where it should snow. I know it rains no matter what outside karnors castle. Gonna go test this out now.

Edit: ok tested it out in Kylong an no matter what it only ever rains. There are some locations that it will look like it is snowing but that is just effects that are there no matter what. In other zones like everfrost it will snow instead of rain, not sure we can force it to be one or the other.

[Scatman]

Yeah but the server needs to know when to tell the client it's raining/snowing right? Server will consider, "if player in location x, send charsheet with rain, else, send charsheet with no weather"?

[Jabantiz]

Can only certain parts of the zone have weather on live? (never noticed it) we could certainly set it up that way though to make it feel like a storm is slowly moving in across the zone, probably be a lot of work though.

[John Adams]

Whatever we do, I would think it needs to affect ALL clients in the zone, no matter where. You don't want one client getting rain while the other is in sunshine.

Furthermore, moving from one side of the zone to the other and watching weather "change" is likely just a coincidence. I cannot imagine the world can tell a zone "boundary" that it's raining >just here< and step outside that, and it's perfect weather. Was it Kylong that has City of Mist? I think without any of our efforts, it's misty in the middle of the zone even without weather activated.

As Jabantiz said, the zone itself throws snow flurries around (Frostfang) when you are heading up the pass to New Halas. Again, just zone magic (like the birds in T3 Guild Hall that happen to react when players come in boundaries). All speculation, but makes the most sense to me.

[Jabantiz]

Rain is now zone based and not per client, this means the /rain command will effect every one in the zone, and players logging in or zoning into the zone will see the weather. Currently on Dev SVN.

[John Adams]

It's the little things that put a smile on my face.

[Jabantiz]

This is probably as far as I will go with weather, all that needs to be done is let the zoneserver control it on its own, as simple as that may be I find myself thinking of complex solutions that are just not practical so will let some one else do a simple solution.