31 May 11, 10:16AM
Feel free to stop me any time (I haven't even done so much as take a peek at AC's source code), but from what I know about AC's engine and general game design, it seems completely feasible for AC to support weather effects. The engine already has a working particle system (i.e. blood, sniper trails, bullet impact sparks, etc) and to add another system that uses a map.cfg-defined sprite doesn't sound too far-fetched.
One low-overhead way to simulate weather is to simply have a bounding-box around the player that generates the particles. With that method you're not wasting precious CPU rendering particles you'll never see that are on the other side of the map. The size of the bounding-box and the overall volume of weather particles would have to be a player-defined option (as well as the option to turn off weather completely), because it's pretty obvious what would happen if it was up to the map creators to determine the size, volume, and area of the weather particle systems.
One caveat of this method is that you'd still see the weather effects around you while you're indoors. There's a lot of solutions to that problem, ranging from total CPU-hogs to monstrous amounts of coding for a simple effect we didn't even notice we needed up 'till a couple days ago. :P
All that being said, I'm all for a weather system in AC. If an efficient, low-CPU method could be written, sounds like a great idea to me.
One low-overhead way to simulate weather is to simply have a bounding-box around the player that generates the particles. With that method you're not wasting precious CPU rendering particles you'll never see that are on the other side of the map. The size of the bounding-box and the overall volume of weather particles would have to be a player-defined option (as well as the option to turn off weather completely), because it's pretty obvious what would happen if it was up to the map creators to determine the size, volume, and area of the weather particle systems.
One caveat of this method is that you'd still see the weather effects around you while you're indoors. There's a lot of solutions to that problem, ranging from total CPU-hogs to monstrous amounts of coding for a simple effect we didn't even notice we needed up 'till a couple days ago. :P
All that being said, I'm all for a weather system in AC. If an efficient, low-CPU method could be written, sounds like a great idea to me.