I do agree, I think that it is confirmed that the weather will be able to act like particals so it will react when it collides with an Object. As for the intense weather, Morrowind destroyed Oblivion in this, I do want it back, Oblivion weather wasn't bad, but one thing about Morrowind and Oblivion is when it rains it always rains 1 way, there should be a few different weathers for each, I dont think it would be hard

I think GI said that, they said something about the wind affecting the trees, it may have been when they were talking of havok I forget

If it affected archery, it would either be INTENSELY HARD AND FRUSTRATING or awesome.

Why?

Those two things are not at all related. Accumulating accurately means it appears to have fallen the way it would naturally fall. Not "it fell, physically landed on the object, and stuck". That is a particle simulation and is impossible to run in realtime. The particles we see in the air will not in any way translate to the snow we see on the ground. Implying this connection implies a vast particle simulation with millions or billions of snow particles. I've replied dozens of times to this, in the near-dozen threads that have cropped up solely about the snow effects.

HOWEVER, I have no doubts they simultaneously fixed the overhang issue. The "snow" in Oblivion wasn't even in world space. It was in camera space. The snow would move with the camera. That meant there was literally no way to prevent the snow from falling through things as it was not in world space! Like I've said a hundred times now, I assume they will have moved the snow into world space, like any proper game should, and the improved ground snow shader will be a bonus.

But, for the hundredth time, the shaders that show the "air snow" don't have anything to do with the shaders that do the "ground snow". There's no way to connect the two without a particle simulation. Even in world space, the particles will likely only terminate once they reach "0" on the Y-axis, passing through most objects, or hit a collision plane/mesh. But just because they may have some collision meshes to prevent the overhang issue doesn't mean the particles that fell are going to hit the overhang, land there, stick, and accumulate.

I didn't know about the points you brought up, but haven't been to concerned with it anyway - i'm not expecting them to have gradually falling snow, it won't be necessary to make the game. My main concern is the overhang problem, which has unanimously been decided as in need of help

Right. Long as thats fixed, it would make immersion miles better than Oblivion.

Like others too, I also would love to see weather effects from exteriors somehow play an effect in interiors with sounds and lighting. I've seen this done in a few mods, and it has never gotten old yet.

Well it has already been said that weather will affect your character so everything you said is within the bounds of reality. I think BGS already put in a nice weather system because it's 25 inches of snow here at my house...



That's not true at all. You can have snow accumulate in real time. Having billions of individual flakes rendered is obviously not going to work, you have to have displacement mapping and as the snow falls you have retroactive increase in the displacement mapping making it seem like snow is actually accumulating. You can have accumulating snow without actually having it accumulate, the thing in graphical design is to make things LOOK real and not actually have to be real.

Me too.

there may be an option between the 2 it could just die at 0 for people who have lower level systems, but for ones that handle it would have a die on hit modifier on it and however the accumulation of snow is calculated

Also, another thing which I brought up before, the Sims 2 (some hate it, some don't, but the fact is) had a working snow accumulation with depth, footprints, ect. As snow fell, the snow on the ground periodically got deeper. It wasn't the falling snow that actually made the snow deeper, it was a separate event, but the two coincided and worked well.

Basically that is what I described above except they used bump mapping. Also, due to the way they did it and they graphics in the game they could get it to work in their game because it wasn't truly "falling snow that accumulated" it was basically snow and what affected the ground was a time based effect and not an actual weather system effect on the ground. But they did pioneer the closest effect to what is true snow accumulation in game, let's see if skyrim actually will be the first game with accumulating snow.

I don't know much about gaming and graphics engines, ect, but would a system like that be plausible on Xbox and PS3 hardware, at the least?

Edit: nevermind

i agree it would be nice to be under a bridge and not see the rain right in my face

Oh god how i loved roaming around in oblivion when i first got the game. I just walked around to be awed with the beautiful graphics (wasn't used to much back then ) and when bad weather started to pour on me i hid under a tree or a near structure until it passed. Sadly i still got wet even when standing under the stones of a fortress :s. This really bothered me and took a large chunk out of the reality factor for me. The one thing that bothered me more was the crappy (yes, crappy) combat system .

Thats what brought this topic on, I fired up Oblivion tonight, walked for a while, and the downpour (plus tornado sounding winds) kicked up. I hid in an old cabin, because hiding under a rock wasn't enough - and I couldn't tell it was storming outside.

I think the new engine will make this happen. They've said continously that the physics will be improved, ot something in that direction. I'm positive about this.

To the "That's not true at all" remark: What I said is 100% true, you must be reading it wrong. Faking snow accumulation as you say is still separating the "ground" snow and the "air" snow into two separate systems, with no connection. In fact you agree with me in your third sentence ("obviously not going to work"). Making things LOOK real and being real is clearly different, you're correct, but note that the implied connection between the air snow and ground snow is what I was remarking on, since nearly every person without much knowledge of realtime rendering techniques makes this implication. ("We're going to get to watch snow fall and land on the ground!" ... No. you're not)

However, you say "You can have snow accumulate in realtime". Yes you can have a mesh which displaces over time, but it's still a crude approximation based on some arbitrary snow fall rate per hour. You cannot have snow accumulate realistically in real time. Meaning taking wind, temperature, the convexity/concavity of the area and all kinds of other things, because I still think talking about accumulation in three dimensions implies something more than mesh displacement. I'm not trying to argue semantics, but if you state something like that as fact, you need to be aware of who reads it, and misconstrues it. But about semantics, *seeming* to accumulate != accumulating.

Furthermore, the actual possibility of them building up meshes over time to simulate "accumulation" is probably nil. Extruding the vertices of the kinds of meshes in game that have snow build up on them would be a nightmare. There aren't enough of them (vertices), this is a realtime video game after all, and polygon counts are super low. They would instead have to place a more even mesh over top of ALL objects in game, by hand, and displace these. A mesh with more edges toward the edges to help the snow "round" as it builds up. The meshes in game don't have this kind of edge detail to round the snow like that. And this kind of technique goes directly against what has been said about their new snow system, which was "we built a system that takes the surfaces into account and procedurally generates snow on them, with minimal artist direction to keep snow cover from being too even".

Plus I've only seen very poorly done tech demos of this kind of build-up, and it looks pathetic to be honest... Uniformly rising and uniformly falling. Sublimation of show should be very uneven. I haven't seen a shipped game do this, and I'm not counting the Sims 2, because I'm untrusting of a few pictures I scraqed up and the few claims in this thread. The tile-based system in Sims 2, and the fact that it probably only happens on the ground and building materials (roof, walls, shrubs, etc) tells me they probably created snow meshes by hand for only a handful of objects, that could then be applied to all the dozens of variations of those same building tiles. Also, note that it's completely absent in Sims 3, a newer game that is cross-platform. Not to mention their http://www.lillyblossom.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/sims2_seasons_winter.jpg from having good-looking snow.

Besides, talking about the possibility of 3D accumulation is wasteful. They clearly aren't doing this based on the photos, which already highlight the snow shading technique as described in the articles. I'm actually critical of the technique so far. It has http://www.gameinformer.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Components-ImageFileViewer/CommunityServer-Components-SiteFiles-imagefeed-featured-bethesda-elderscrolls-elderscrollsv/dragonshoutfeatured.jpg_2D00_1680x0.jpg (look closely at the snow on the closest arch), which I think may be from the blocky DXT5 compression. I will settle for the Lost Planet/Uncharted "deep snow" terrain effect out in the wilderness. I don't care about watching the snow accumulate, I just care that it looks good once it's there.


Be prepared to be disappointed. I haven't seen anybody who knows what they're talking about agree that the heralded "snow accumulation" is a physical effect. I also chuckled when I read a foreign magazine translation. It said "water physics". Yeah, no. Having the effect of flowing water (finally) is not a physical effect. I'm just glad they have fake water flow.