I've been playing Skyrim for around 30 hours now (on the Xbox) and have a question about the weather engine.

I remember reading/hearing about how Bethesda put a load of effort into making it possible to tweak how much trees move in the wind, even down to branch level, however despite all the snowstorms and blizzards I've been in up tree-less mountainsides, I have yet to experience the gusty/stormy atmosphere that was part of the Oblivion weather engine where trees and plants were swaying around greatly making a stormy night really feel like you wanted to be indoors. Yet I've not seen this effect on any of the forests/tree-lined areas of Skyrim.

Is this because I'm playing the game on Xbox? Is the same degree of 'gustiness' still prevalent in the PC version?


//Waywatcher

thats because it wasnt windy at the time you were there skyrim has a proper weather system oblvivion didnt

you havent seen it because it doesnt happen
smaller trees blow a little ocassionally

the snow and blowy effects are cool
but no it doesnt seem to storm like it did in oblivion (with all the blowing and raining and lightning and whatnot)
the worst storm i saw in skyrim was distant thunder with some dim flashes of lightning, very mild rain, and a gentle (at best) breeze

also ive yet to see the wind 'stir up the surface of the water'

i think the rain effect on the water is really great though
one of the best ive ever seen


is there a video of this somewhere? because it doesnt happen in my game

I was in a MAJOR blizzard last night. It was practically white-out conditions and the wind was howling hard.

This requires an .ini tweak, see here:

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1272621-ini-compendium/

toofew:

This is exactly what I mean. I have been in a 'thunderstorm' and experienced lightning etc, but it wasn't as dramatic as it was in Oblivion.

Leachman: Visually there may have been a loss of visibility and the wind might have *sounded* fierce, but I bet the trees/plants weren't gusting and swaying around much.

fragonard: I had a look at the page you linked to and I'm not sure which .ini tweak you are specifically referring to, but those will only work on the PC anyway. It looks like console players just aren't going to get the same weather effects as Oblivion.


Sadly, it seems the more I read about and play Skyrim the more I feel that Bethesda have just pulled the wool over everyone's eyes with the 'whole new, improved Creation engine'. It just seems like the latest version of the Gamebryo engine to me, with a few shader tweaks and allowance for higher resolution textures... and very little else.

//Waywatcher

You are probably right. I was in the mountains and the landscape was barren.

i finking dis proveded Blizzard scammeded mi.

i see what you did there
but were not really complaining about this, were just making an observation

its more confusing than anything
one time in oblivion i was standing in a forest and there was an intense thunderstorm
the trees were swaying/ fog was blowing/ rain was heavy/ loud wind/ and it was night so every direction looked the same
it was what i would classify a "storm"

i suppose we expected to see something like that but better? they claimed it would be better- but its really nothing like that at all

i really love the blizzards but that only happens in the mountains
is there no equivalent storm at sea level?

in morrowind= didnt people hold their arms up to their faces when the storms came in? or was that a mod?
even those storms were better

thats because oblivion used speed tree to generate there world. Speed tree makes things react more life like, but everything can look the same. Oblivion all looked the same

If that is indeed the case, and Bethesda would have us believe that the 'new' Creation engine features their own bespoke trees/foliage, why is the following a section of the Skyrim.ini file (as shown by users in fragonard's linked thread above):

[SpeedTree]
fLODTreeMipMapLODBias=-0.7500
fLocalTreeMipMapLODBias=-0.2500

And I disagree about Oblivion all looking the same. That's like saying the United Kingdom or France all looks the same because of its climate and landscape. Skyrim looks bleak and snowy for about 90% of its terrain. That's pretty samey looking to me.

Probably reached some sort of limit on weather effects due to consoles. If they added swaying and rustling leaves, etc, then something else would have to be taken away.

And that is why we have things like degrading shadow quality if you max out shadow distance.