We were promised snow accumulation in this game but i have yet to see this happen.Is it bugged?

I dunno but I swear Ive seen it 'wash away'. It was raining and I could of worn the snow texture was fading revealing grass underneath.

Come on guys this isn't working and it was publicized to be in , I have been around all province from eternal snowy areas to temperate ones during snowstorm and I have never witnessed anything even leaving the player days under the snow .....


This is how would look the effect if anyone will be able to see it , then if you do make a picture or a video , and show us once for all , so far nobody could provide the proves so it simply is not implemented in ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWpqwVQYosw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otedqKHET1w&NR=1

did you want to make a snowman?

I get the feeling it would work like shadows, it moves in chunks. I never see the shadows move in real-time in the game, but instead (This is weird) they jump after a certain amount of time passes.


If you do a wait time for like 12 hours and watch the shadows move, they move in chunks. Does anyone else notice in game-real-time that when your running around you will see a shadow just move a huge chunk over?

I have actually looked to see if I could find where snow is "piling up", but I can't really tell a difference on anything before or after a snowstorm. It pretty much looks the same. Perhaps I'm not looking in the right place?

Yes. I guess the light source in question (the sun) isn't moving continuously but instead, jumps from one location to the next in certain time intervals.

They could decrease that interval enough so that its movement looks fluid.

It's there. It's dependent on the normal maps, and since the normal maps are low-res (like all the other textures), the dynamic snow looks ugly up close, which is how I know it's there.

Light source is moving, direction shadows are being cast isn't. They didn't want the movement of the sun to be too obvious. Still, you'll probably want to decrease the timescale to make the shifts less jarring.

I was noticing this the other day , the effect is present also in modern games like cryengine , but the difference is that in cryengine happens when you put fast foward the time to make lesser calculations , here instead happens in real time or am I wrong? was like that also in older tes games?

I thought the snow accumulation was basically that objects get snow-covered automatically?

Because i've seen that ALOT.

This reminds me of Peter Molyneaux's claim that trees would grow through out the game in Fable. Then when that didn't happen people cried foul, but reality there was a lot more wrong with that game than lack of plant growth. Snow accumulating and realistic trees add nothing to the game play, it's just the case of the lead dev getting over excited about his product again.

It would have been nice to see your character leave footsteps in the snow...

Yeah I've been thinking the same while walking at the snow-covered docks of Morthal

The snow accumulation is there and it is fugly. All it is is a different low-rez texture added on top of something and/or your character's feet disappearing under the snow (which comes across as looking more like a bug than a feature).

Honestly, most of the complaints about this game are petty at best, but some of them are real. A game released in October 2011, when 1080p monitors/televisions are increasingly the norm, should not have textures that look as bad as some of what we have. Fortunately, the bad textures are not a constant and you don't have to look at them all the time (and, no, unlike what some people claim you do NOT have to be standing inches away to see how bad they are).

In fact, now that I think of it, snow accumulation may be responsible for the worst textures since they do involve snow.

Older TES games didn't have these kinds of shadows. Oblivion had tree shadows and creature shadows. The creature shadows were so insignificant that they didn't have to add this kind of optimization and the tree shadows were... well they weren't really shadows as we know them. More like slightly animated decals. The shadows they cast were independent of light sources. You could even be hovering above a tree and it would somehow cast a shadow on you.

I honestly haven't seen anything that suggests snow accumulation (it might be in there, but I haven't seen it). I pictured watching snowflakes blow up against the side of rocks and trees and fading if there was rain... but it all looks the same to me.

I am finally happy they added shadows , but come on, snow accumulation is one basic shader nowday as well , if I am not wrong the engine still misses ambient occlusion , a proper material offset parallax mapping working , the normal maps usually look all like having a shiny surface wich looks odd and weird , no Subsurface scattering , and a lot of other things , but the snow shader ( done in its simplier way of flat texturing involving only the z top flat surface shoduln't be a problem , now look at the shader models in openworld like red dead redemption that is even bigger , when it rains small pools of water pop out , mud comes , and dreis out , look at the snow , the footprints ... and if you want to go even higher look at uncharted 2 snow effect ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tILaq47iX4s&feature=related or the sand effect in the 3rd chapter ...

for nottalking of the flat water , the water looks nice but honestly are just couple of morphed geometry with a rolling texture scrolling one over the other to give the illusion of water movement and is not really a shader...

But is there any soil erosion?

Believe it or not soilerosion was implemente dtogether with great fluid and metafluid dynamics in the game From Dust ...

I amactually thinking that their " snow accumulation " may be just a static feature like , you take a rock and you put in a cold clmate zone and it has the tag for freezed wich makes the whole object look snowcovered ... when you place in a warmer zone the tag gets unchecked and the object looks snow free .. may be this is the maximum I can think of for their snow accumulation , but honestly I think that the 3d snow pieces that they had in oblivion looked much better than the simple white texture ... or morrowind's skaal village ...

http://www.skyrimworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/skaal.jpg

notice the 3d snow ...

It jumps because when you wait for 12 hours you are not shown as the game passes by second by second, but hour by hour, so when you watch the sky and wait a few hours you will see the moons jump from position to position, but if you just wait normally without using the wait feature (which I have) you will see the moons move slowly millimeter by millimeter.

What Bethesda claimed was that when it snowed objects would be re-textured into snowy counterparts basically. I have seen snow on my characters eyelashes (either that or a terrible graphical bug) now and again but I can't say I've noticed any ground changes.

They never said snow would pile up and basically alter the geometry.

Go to the Mage's College. It is, in my experience, almost always snowing up there so you won't see it in action, but you do see extensive examples of it. The texture on the bridge (the ground, not the handrail) leading up to the college is the "accumulated snow" texture. If you have the patience, you can see this for yourself by then going into a snow-less area and waiting for it to snow - almost all objects have this texture overlaid on them.

Ther is none, it's just procedurally applied to objects, seemingly based on the texture they put on the ground beneath it. Observe Dawnstar for example, snow on all the houses and stuff except the dock which is on a snowless ground texture segment. It's dynamic only in the sense that it is not prebuilt into the object, but rather made with a shader.