It was from Gamereactor magazine/article (you can't see it online). I posted the info about tracks here awhile ago. The track part he mentioned was taken from a sort of "story" told in the article. You know, a story where they describe how the game is and what happens and such.

It's hope for tracks but they might have just said it for things to make sense.

Im surprised how people in this forum think game features and technical details are just "added" in a game, as if it were a matter of simply turning on a computer and looking for "snow footprints" and clicking on it and wait for it to load into the game.

Also, the subtitle is a joke. Dynamic snow has in no way implied in itself that there could be footprints.

However, personally, I think there will be footprints that will stay there for at least a few seconds. Why? I dont know, maybe its one of the technical things they wanted to do.

Think logically, dynamic snow has been confirmed to add layers upon it, and it becomes thicker, meaning if we step on it, it drops and tracks are being created.

I'm interested to see how they handle the melting of the snow.

Same. I was surprised when I saw it in the trailer for the first time

Melting snow in the trailer?

Yes. When the dragon breathes fire :flamethrower:

Link me, where it was said. Seriously.


Easy one. You've got a texture layer, let's call it "snow". What texture is?
Well, basically - it's an info about what color tiny bit of object is. There are numerous type of textures, for different purpouses. "Snowy" one will store "snow width" value per tiny bit of object. Then, if it's snowy, you simply increase that value all over the whole texture, and when it's going to be hot somewhere - you project substraction map (think of light projector), so "snow ammount" is reducing.

There are place for some implenetation-dependent variations, but basically IF dynamic snow is one more texture layer - that's the way they're going to handle it.

However, even that realisation (texture layer) does not guarantee, that there will be footprints. Because:
- Snow textures could have WAY less detail, than diffuse - just not enough for a recognizable footprint;
- They can be: object-unique (which takes A LOT of space, in order to save footprints - hard drive space), instansed (so they can't save footprints) or may not be stored (footprint cleanup after a while);

And even so, I'm still wondering about how they are going to make dynamic snow on terrain (for those not familiar with graphics technologies - ground usually is represented as one huge surface with different height in different points, and is assebmled on-the-fly with dynamic detail spread from single triangles)

They'll involve it in some way, for a specific quest or 2, but it won't constantly be there. and even if it isn't ill still be ok with it. I remember a quest in bloodmoon, (just looked for a min but haven't found it yet), where you have to track down a bear or something, and even though you couldn't actually see the tracks, the NPCs acted like they could, which was just as good.

Just having NPC hunters crouching down looking at the ground every so often looking for tracks would be a huge bonus for me, and it would be easy to implement.

I don't see it?

Look at 0:50,the cliff has snow on it,then look again at 1:05 the snow is gone and there is fire around it.

But we don't get to see the melting mechanics. Just the snow being gone.

Ah yes,that is true.