While working on my Hypothermia mod I finally launched my idea to detect when the player is under shelter to get out from the effects of "wet" rain in my mod.

My system includes tents, overhangs, small shallow caves that you can just barley squeeze your PC into, stone arches LARGE TREES that you can get under because they are leaning to the side or grow somewhat horizontal like the ones in SI. I tired all kinds of architecture and natural rain canopies and so on. It works very well with all this and uses only about 20 lines of code. I have been working on my idea for this on and off for a few years but OBSE finally came up with the one command I needed to make this a reality.

Anyway I now am changing the rain sound effect a little to give the player a clue when they are not being effected by rain (not getting wet.) But of course the rain still visually comes through the tent. Many many ideas have been tossed around on how to overcome this. None so far have worked very well.

I have one last idea to look into before I give up hope, can the rain mesh be MOVED away from the player? IS there a form ID for it to try to relocate it such as:

RainMesh.setpos x
RainMesh.setpos y

My idea is to always keep it away from the player but in view by the player no mater which way the player turns the camera. I can do this easily as long as there is a form-id for the rain mesh and it is possible to move it around.

I can only find RainLight (Editor ID RainLight Form ID 000473E0) in WorldObjects > Static > Sky, but when I take a look at the mesh in NifSkope, there's nothing.

I'm not sure if it will help you, but that's the closest to rain mesh I can find. Also, that mesh I looked at was already PyFFIed, so that might have something to do with "I see nothing"

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

I change that rain Nif to the snow nif (renamed the snow nif ) then went into my game to a save were I have rain going.
Sure enough it was snowing instead of raining!

So this is indeed the right Nif. I just need to find what the name of the reference is in the game.
This indicates it may be possible to move the darn thing as well because it is a static object.

I will write a ref walking script to give me the names of all the ref in the area of the rain and I bet I will find it that way.

thanks again!

Hate to burst your bubble, but just because there is a RainLight.nif and RainHeavy.nif file does not mean that the NIF is used in-game. In fact, it isn't - at least not in a way that is helpful. They are only used by the Weather system, and that uses a Billboard attached to the player's Camera node to make it "rain." There is no in-game mesh you can move around.

Well I discovered that you can drop the Rain nif into the game like any other object and it will rain. I made it rain indoors!

However it makes the entire cell rain OR it is following the player (perhaps somehow attaching itself to the camera as Reneer suggested.)

My next idea is to use a magic effect that looks like rain and place this in front of the player at a distance. But now it is getting more complicated than I think it should be for my Hypothermia mod. Hypothermia is a temperature mod not a rain - tent FIX mod. So I will just stick with my shelter detection system the way it is using sound effects to give feedback to the player that they are protected from the rain under a tent and other shelter. As it is now it works great and yet is a very simple system. (I am just happy my idea works at all after working on it for so long).

Maybe at a later date I will revisit this and try my rain magic effect held at a slight distance idea. For now I just want to get my Hypothermia mod done and released.

If you do revisit it, console commands generally take FormIDs, rather than editor IDs, so if you can get the formID from the CS you might be able to affect it by using the "runscriptline" command to simulate a console command entry.

I actually just released a new version of my Rain mod, which works a treat better than earlier versions. It might not work for small tents (not sure) but it certainly works when walking around the Imperial City Marketplace.

Can the billboard be changed? I apologize if this has been answered in another thread.

or can the camera node be reassigned or duplicated ?

I have a limited understanding of your mod, and I don't know if it's been recoded in ways I don't know at all, but if Duke Patrick's mod can detect when the player is under the appropriate shelter is there any sort of variable he can feed your mod to have it affect the rain appropriately? Or is your mod completely dependent on the LOS from the "angel" NPC in order to know where to place the meshes?

Greetings Reneer (great master of Oblivion guard wrangling!)

Funny how we both pop up with this RAIN TENT issue once again after many months at the exact same time. If I qualify then I guess great minds think alike (or maybe the gods of chance are just having a chuckle).

My system works for any shelter that is made correctly even shelter from other mods and all small tents. No need for room for any thing but the PC. I have been working on my system for years (I started trying to do this when I released my first version of the Hypothermia mod. There may still be old thread on this. How long do they keep old threads?) My problem has always been 3 things:

- Primarily that the mod was suppose to be a Temperature mod not a tent rain fix mod so I did not focus my attention at that issue as mush as I have on other projects.

- Second that I need a way to “cut a hole” in the rain effect. I tired many ways that always seem to not work for various reasons. Although I have hope for my latest idea of using a magic effect that looks like rain. After playing with the Rain Nif last night I think this has the best chance to eventually work for my purposes.

- Last that my shelter testing probe was too slow. When the PC moved around too quickly the probe would often not see the PC and think it was because the PC was under shelter even when they were not.

OBSE finally solved that last issue for me, but then you started working on your Tent rain fix mod so once again I put this project on the back burner. You may remember the last popular thread in the mods forums on this Rain tent issue months ago where I said as much.

After a while you seem to drop the project, and I did not want to use invisible NPC as you were doing so when I finally got around to working on my new release of Hypothermia mod (to include “hyperthermia”) I decided I had to pull the trigger on my rain shelter system.

To my surprise my system worked very well, for ANY shelter as long as it has collision.

You see the secret to my system is not to use LOS with invisible NPC watching the player but instead to use a “rain cloud” activator that sits over top of the player and shoots a ultra fast probe spell at the player every once in a while when rain in the game has started.

The way I am doing it proved to have little to no impact on frame rate. It works extremely well for what I am doing, which is determining if the player is getting wet from rain or not.

My system is not specifically designed to work for stopping the rain from coming through the tents, so their may be little details that may need to be worked out for that. But I am guessing that would be minimal or not really any trouble at all.

But if my system will work for your mod then maybe we need to combine what we are doing because it would be a shame for players to have to run TWO different systems to see if the player is under shelter or not even thought we are using that information for two different goals.

I do not expect you to throw away your system completely as I would not do that either with my system. I have worked way too long and hard on my system and it is fine tuned for my mods purposeless. But if you can give me 2 variables in your mod to do the following I will give the players a choice to either run your detection or just use my detection system.

Then if they chose my system I will change the first variable in your mod to stop your detection system. Then when my system detects shelter it will change the second variable in your system (both off and on) to kick in your mods rain fix effects for shelter.

Effectively your mod will still be needed to do the RAIN through the tent visual “fix”. But then this way the player is not forced to run two different shelter detection systems
if they choose not to.

Or, if you just want to use my system in your mod you are welcome to (credit for it would be nice) and we will just let people run both. As long as there is not a big impact on the players CPU then it is not worse than how players run several Location Hit systems at one time because they are combing several combat mods together in their game.

The funny thing is is that I also tried using an activator casting spells at the player - the problem I ran into was that certain statics don't have proper collision / if the player is running the spells won't necessarily hit him. My system isn't terribly CPU intensive at all - and I don't think there is really any need to have our mods "switch off" regarding the detection, unless you really have your heart set on that feature.

Sorry it took me a while to reply. I am involved in politics and was busy with the elections.

If you do not think it is not necessary to prevent both systems from running at the same time that is fine with me, I consider you the better modder and trust your point of view on this. And anyway as I said I do not see how it can be any worse than how many redundant systems run in separate combat mods many players mash up in one game.

I was able to overcome the issue with missing the player as they run around. The answer was to hyper accelerate the spell projectile speed and find the optimal height for the activator. In the dozens of tests I done with properly collisioned structures it works like a charm without fail. And only once did I run into a structure that did not have proper collision. Besides almost no system will work 100 percent of the time. So if you change your mind and want to use my system the offer stands. You have helped me in the past and I would like to return the favor.