I've been working with the weather in the game, trying to come up with my own version of Fellout, and I think I'm getting a fairly good grasp of how it works. But there's a lot of weather patterns I see listed that don't seem to be used anywhere. For instance, ones like MegatonCloudy01, and all of the gWasteland patterns. Am I missing something or are these simply not being used anywhere?

Actually the game has quite a bit of things in it that were never used in the game. There are alot of tile pieces for each type of room, there are sounds, voice clips, weather patterns, and even a few NPC's. I have slowly found alot of stuff. I guess they were using it, but decided not too and just didn't manage to delete it from the geck before releasing the game. So they probably just aren't used anywhere. But that can be good, as there are a few sounds that I am using in my mod, and they will be 'unique' because they arent used in the game, but everyone has them. The perfect modding resource.

Well that certainly seems to be the case for weather patterns. I'm seeing at least half a dozen settings that don't seem to be used anywhere. There's actually very little in the way of different weather being used in the default game from what I can see. Now that I have a bunch of clouds to work with, that leaves me alot of room to add my own stuff. Especially since I think I've figured out how to add some default weather to some of the Wasteland Regions. Rather than try to have varying weather in a particular area, I can just attach a specific pattern to a bunch of them around the map. One thing I've been wondering, does anyone know what the difference is between the two horizontal layers? Or are they just there so you can attach both horizontal cloud types at once?

Yea I think the two layers are purely for both cloud types to overlap and move at different speeds or something if you want them both.

A rather large (and time consuming) mistake I made when working on my Darker Nights (and one I think Fellout also makes) was to make changes to all those unused weather types. :rolleyes: I think if a particular weather type doesn't have a full day/night cycle (there a couple that seem to be broken) or doesn't have an ImageSpace Modifier attached, then it probably isn't used in the game.

Edit: Actually, I did ask this question some time ago - http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1016364-which-weather-types-are-used-by-the-game/page__view__findpost__p__14703639

There's also a couple named InvertedSomething - I wouldn't touch them, as I think they're for the insides of buildings when viewed from outside - ie, the lights you see coming out of the windows of Tenpenny Tower at night. Or something like that...

The two horizontal layers seem to display the clouds at different heights (and possibly even stretch the texure over a wider circumference) and you can use either cloud texture in either layer (or use both layers at the same time). Also, the horizon clouds shouldn't have any speed defined as I think the effect maybe a little odd.

~Xeph'

Yes, I just recently discovered that. They don't move on the horizontal plane, they appear to be traveling towards you, so you end up seeing this line where the top of the horizon zone ends. It's too bad they didn't think to make them move across the screen instead of up into it. Thanks for the advice on the unused weather patterns. I was already leery about using those inverted ones, but I'm guessing the ones named with a "g" have something to do with that Grant who was making all sorts of test files in the game and so are fair game. If not, it will be easy enough to revert them back and create my own.

BTW, does anyone know if rain, snow etc. is built into the game or does it have to be scripted in somehow. I'm guessing if I tell a particular weather pattern to make it rain that it will, since that was in Oblivion and many of that game's functions are still in this one. I have some good thunderstorm graphics from some Oblivion mods I can use to add some particularly bad weather to the game.

If anything those unused weathertypes would make a good starting point for any new weather types you want to create. I used a couple in Dynamic Weather - so they're not entirely useless if you don't mind fixing them up a little first. :hehe:



Uhh, me again.

Rain and snow isn't built into the game, even though there are a few relics left over from Oblivion (? - did it rain in Oblivion? I don't know, I never played it.).

Anyway, http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=6170 is the only mod that successfully integrated rain into Fallout 3, and is what I used to integrate Rain into Dynamic Weather. It involves a tiny bit of scripting and would depend on mesh and texture assets from Enhanced Weather Rain. There's a readme in the download for EWR (modder's readme.txt) that outlines what you need to do to achieve this - or, you know, feel free to anolyze what DW does in FO3Edit.

~Xeph'

Fixing them up? I'm completely redoing all the weather in the game. I'm doing a softer, warmer version of Fellout, with weather that most people would see if they walked out the door. I didn't care for that Mad Max/Sahara look that Hattix was striving for and decided to do my own thing instead. And it's coming along quite nicely. I'm taking a different approach from most people when it comes to variable weather. Rather than relying on a percentage chance in Climates, I'm attaching different weather types to existing regions on the Wasteland map. That gives me alot of control over the progression of different weather patterns. I'm working on Suburban Cloudy right now, and I have several pockets within that region that has a slightly heavier version of that pattern.



Oh yes, sometimes in buckets. Sometimes you'd encounter a severe thunderstorm where you could barely see a thing around you. It snowed in certain areas as well, like up in the northern mountains. I wonder why they didn't add that to Fallout, it was already built into the engine.



I'll probably just skip it then, I svck at scripting. I just can't seem to wrap my brain around it. I can do some simple edits to existing scripts, but I couldn't do one from scratch if my life depended on it.

BTW, what's the DDS format that game uses? I have some really nice clouds pics from an Oblivion mod I wouldn't mind trying out but they're way too big. They're 2048 X 2048 with a file size of 5 megs each. I'd like to bring them down to what the game is using but I'm not sure what to save them as. I tried the default format that came up in Photoshop, but while the graphic size was reduced the file size was exactly the same.

The original cloud textures are at 1024 x 1024 in .dds format, and if you use BC3 / DXT5 compression (at least this is what it's called in Gimp), you should end up with a file size of 1,366 KB.

:)

Yes, that did it. Thanks. I now have a bunch more cloud graphics to work with.

I think they probably thought it did not fit into the game/era very well so they did not add it. Perhaps if we are lucky it will rain once in a Blue Moon (See the reference to the trailer? *nudge nudge*) and we can have that environmental effect back into our game! I love it when it rains in Oblivion, if your in the middle of the forest it can be so peiceful, so why not in the middle of the desert whilst killing giant mutated animals, right?

Well I can't really see it happening in the Wasteland but there's some areas in DC with some pretty dense climate where it would have been appropriate. It would have been cool if they would have added a percentage chance for a weather type to allow it to rain once in awhile. Like a 40-50% chance it will be raining if you go to the Mall.

Yea, rain really could have added a dramatic effect to parts of the game. Like when you attack PP with Liberty Prime, if it were raining that would have be sooo much more epic.