[Removed Support] Olander's Realistic Weather for Time of Day

Olander's Realistic Weather (for Time of Day) :: Support Removed

Support for Time of Day weather is now removed by myself. That author would not support a solid weather system specifically made for his system....kept this around long enough.

Cheers
Olander

 

Time of Day: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/7316

Easy Save 2: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/768

 

Hi,

I would like to use the sound effects and lightning textures in my game, are they possible to use with my Sky Master system ?

I mean from a license standpoint.

 

Sounds awesome...thanky you very much!

 

They are freely given to the Community. The weather system will work with any light and cloud rendering system but if you only want lightning textures and audio....then I think that is your choice.

 

Thanks. I may use some of the other weather effects too, but that is what i would use immediately in my RPG.

 

Thanks, this is very generous and much appreciated.

 

Looks neat, and with some polish could definitely be a great addon to ToD. Bit of a shame the developer has no interest in working with you to make it perfect, but such is life.

 

I will support this as well as any other ideas and updates that happen from the community. ToD is excellent but this ORW can stand on its own to work with any light and cloud.

Folks! Lighting is figured and working. The light intensity varies as well in partly and mostly cloudy days/nights.
Fog....I have a very very nice solution. Unity 5's Fog is actually quite horrible. So I decided to make a Shuriken Particle Effect and adjust it with Fogginess in tandem with Global Fog Density. The end result is stunning. I was able to manually adjust Wind Velocity as well to move the Fog around on the ground. Now to see if I can automate that.
Lastly, I will try to resolve the terrible horizon effect in ToD when the the clouds are thick and dark. This also heavily affect Bloom as well.....needs to be toned down.

There will be an update later today....same link but I will update a note to the date.

Cheers
O

 

Do you know if it's good for mobile?

 

Everything is extremely performance driven. I think perhaps the only thing that will tax a mobile device is the Snow....however there is so much variety in the mobile environment that the only way to know is test it in the genre you are needing.

If anyone figures out some specs for mobile that this kind of thing will run on....I would gladly add that to the description above.

Cheers
O

 

Updated Lighting and Fog. Download link is valid.

Cheers
O

 

Please Help just loaded this in and this is what it is saying

 

Do you have Time of Day by Mod Monkeys? That is what these two scripts are looking for. If you want to use the ORW without Time of Day you will need to make a few small modifications to the scripts.
Simply comment out any => sky.******* in any of the gWeather****** scripts and this will work just fine. You will need to point the scene Directional Light to the gWeatherMaster

Hope that helps.
Cheers

 

Olander

Thank you so much for this. A couple of questions if I may

I am struggling to get the desired cloud level changes based on weather changing. I get a lot of rain while sun is shining. What do I need to do to either TOD or Weather to get the darkening clouds as the huminidy increases the chance of rain. Should I be setting the TOD Clouds to Custom? Many thanks

 

Hi @Mogulbasher

Time of Day has horrible clouds. I wish they were better but we have what we have. I just installed the most recent version of ToD v3.0.2 and out of the box the settings are different than prior. I tried the XML I provided with this and it sort of worked.....fifth time of remaking that bloody Time of Day XML.....screw it...haha!! I suppose this is to be expected.

So what I did was check to make sure Cloud Density was following the Cloud Density in gWeatherMaster. Indeed it was but the clouds were barely changing. What I had to do was change the Sharpness down to say 0.2 or so....then the clouds would blend just fine with Humidity. There will certainly be other settings you will need to play with to get Your particular feel.

Give that a try.

 

Follow up question, any idea why I am seing it rain when the sky is still mostly blue. It seems as if those cold fronts want to come through long before the cloud cover has got to the point where it would rain?

 

Rain will come when there is greater than 20.0% humidity and a cold front. Close to 20.0% is considered a sun shower. Does happen. You can configure what the lowest humidity it will rain at. Once it is equal or below this the cold front is turned off and a new warm front comes in.

On a side note....the default clouds in Time of Day are decent enough for little clouds to a clear day. Adding density does not make much difference like it used to. Now the sharpness needs to be played with to get the clouds to behave properly. Obviously decreasing sharpness ruins the clouds but it does allow density to properly control the clouds again.

So those are the two issues you describe. Hope that helps.


To All:
ON a Side note.....this is very very nice.....I just read on the Time of Day forum that ToD is getting new volumetric clouds. This is Amazing! Finally. So once that releases I will update this ORW System.

Cheers

 

Thanks again.. So can you point me in the direction of which variable I change to change the lowest humidity it can rain at and also the frequency of cold fronts. Thanks

 

Certainly. I suppose I could make this a configuration in the Weather Master Inspector but for now it is hard coded here. Line numbers will not make much sense since I have made quite a number of changes that I will update to this forum including a non-Time of Day Lighting configuration. I am also making some adjustments to automatically adjust ToD's Cloud Sharpness and Fogginess so that better blending with the ToD's Cloud Density and ambient light is achieved. This would our latest temporary measure until the new ToD system is released with the new clouds.

For now though follow this....

Script: gWeatherGameData.cs
go down to this function => public void WeatherSetFront()

inside of it scroll down....replace the 20.0f with whatever you wish the precipitation should stop at. This also initiates a Warm Front.

Code (CSharp):

1. //If Humidity is Less than 20.0% then set a Warm Front
2. if(fHM < 20.0f)
3. {
4.     gWeatherMaster.nInColdFront = 0;
5.     gWeatherMaster.nInWarmFront = 0;
6.     WeatherInitializeWarmFront();
7. }

 

Hey All. Doing the testing now with ToD v3.1

Set up is a little different. The clouds in this new ToD are much better but they also act a bit different so I am tweaking settings and adjustments so you will only need to minor tweak to suit your tastes.

Of note.....I have updated all of the variables as well as converted how some of the weather functions to make it simpler for others to make system adjustments. Much more polished now.

Update will be sometime this weekend.

Cheers
O

 

Hi All. ORW has been updated to the newest. Tested and configured with Time of Day v3.1.0

Enjoy

Cheers
O

 

Hi. I'd like to know how to synchronous the weather. There's a way to sync the time by gTime based on Server. How about weather? It seems the weather is controlled by the cycle. I think it's random?

 

@Seto Multiplayer is super easy with this. I will post how to here then update the thread header.

Firstly, the weather is not random at all. It is based upon Temperature and Humidity and that humidity is controlled by how you set up your region...in this case WeatherMaster for the scene. Temperature is determined by month in a particular season....you can see this in the Excel spreadsheet included.

Syncing Multiplayer and Multiple Scene to a Master/Server:
*the technicals of networking language I leave to you since there are many different systems.

There are two places you can determine to sync to.....gWeatherMaster and gWeatherData the same variables can be used in either place.
gWeatherMaster (Preferred) determines the weather outcome.
gWeatherData is responsible for storing data to the database

public int nInColdFront
public int nInWarmFront
public int nFrontDuration
public float fHumidityPercent
public float fTemperatureC
gWeatherLightning.bProcess = true;
gWeatherThunder.bProcess = true;

*These last two will make Thunder and Lightning happen at the same time across the network. The actual sound of Thunder and the location of Lightning is still random....but hey will not break immersion.

Hope that helps! Cheers!

 

Hi. There's a problem. But it seems difficult to solve. My game is a 45 degree top down game. The snow is following the camera. Then if I see many snow on the ground. When I navigate to other place, there will be no snow on the ground.

 

@Seto The snow actually falls very realistically. This means it takes time to fall and collide with the surface. When moving the WeatherObject is following the Object holding the Player Avatar...it should not follow the camera. There are so many ways to use cameras but I think one of the very best is this.....
- Make an Empty Object....Call it _PlayerController for example
- Make the Camera a Child of _PlayerController so that it only Follows that. You can do all sorts of things to get the camera zooming and following at the right height and pivot point. Usually just Offsetting each frame or perhaps a Gizmo....your choice
- Now drag the _WeatherObject as a child of _PlayerController
_ Now have _PlayerController follow/move with your Avatar. This way whenever animations and root motion happen everything is linked together to the root motion.

What will happen at this point the Weather will now follow the avatar properly.

Now to directly reference Snowing. You can adjust the height of the Snowing.
- In the _WeatherObject open up _Snow to reveal the two FX
- Click on SnowFlake or SnowIce....you will see that they are both set to roughly 31m from the ground. The reason for this is my camera has a zoom out to a maximum of 30m so I added 1 m so that when looking straight down the camera could not see them spawn in.

So what you can do is decide how far/high your camera is set then simply adjust those two FX to just a touch higher. This will be the best position. Next thing you have to remember is if you have very fast moving Avatars they may be getting close to the edge of the FX effect....basically overcoming the Snow Fall rate. If this is the case then FX particles may not be used for slower falling objects like snow.....perhaps a shader based camera effect is better but also induces other issues when rendering properly.

Adding other FX copies of the snow to widen the area of effect is another option but the snow can be rather taxing on GPU resources so I would not recommend this.

Even though the FX Particle Effects look excellent this is one of the drawbacks of using it.

Cheers
O

 

No. My game is a 45 degree top down simulation game. Although, it's with a character. But the camera is able to not follow the character. So, there's no actually avatar. So the camera is able to navigate everywhere. That's why I say it's difficult to solve.

 

@Seto It is not difficult. When you use the Moving Keys or Mouse in your game you want to move an EMPTY Game Object NOT the camera. The Camera is a Slave to the Empty. In this fashion the Weather FX will follow the EMPTY and not the Camera. This is not difficult to solve at all.

Cheers
O

 

I thought you still doesn't know what I'm mentioning. From the picture, you can see flying snow is following the camera/empty object. But the snow sticking on the ground won't move. So you can see much sticking snow on the left. And less sticking snow on the right. Though there will be snow on the ground with time flying.

 

@Seto Yes of course. I understood before.

FX Particles have a Lifetime setting in them....these snow flakes and snow ice are no different. This adjustment must be made with the Height adjustment to get your desired effect. You must make the decision on what your snow does. 2 things of importance....Weather should follow an Empty moveable object and FX particles will need to be adjusted for your personal design taste. That is why I made this weather like this....so you can make these decisions and the weather will obey your commands not the other way around.

Cheers
O

 

What can I do to make the ice there even I don't navigate the Empty Object or Camera there?

 

As stated you can Replicate (Copy) and Offset the FX Particles to cover larger areas. Just make multiple _Snow and they will automatically follow your weather automatically.

This is added GPU cost though and something I do not recommend. This is a drawback of using Unity Particles. For snow and rain to cover very large areas you would need a combination Shader and Particle technique. For the snow coverage you could use something like this....
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/4144
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/37913
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/22081

 

Hello Olander,

Thanks for making such a wonderful asset freely available. I am working on a project which downloads real world weather info from Weather Underground every 15 minutes and then adjust the scene to reflect the actual real world weather. In this case I am using a picture of Big Ben using Time of Day for the sky dome. I've been looking through gWeatherMaster to sort out which variables to match to Weather Underground data, but it looks like there's quite a bit at play here and I could use your advice about how best to map the Weather Underground values and any other considerations in reflecting real world weather data. Specific questions are which variables should be mapped, which if any should be ignored, and if there's any functions that should be disabled.

Many thanks!

 

@poinyentsteve Thanks for giving this a go. There are a couple of things you will need to do to get Weather Underground Data to sync up with the ORW. The formats themselves are shown in the inspector. Floats are in single decimal format.
- Relative Humidity :: Humidity....very much a direct correlation
- Temperature :: Celsius is needed. Fahrenheit is calculated in the script automatically.
- Warm and Cold Fronts :: You can convert this using Barometric Pressure but I would actually use Precipitation as the Trigger to detect a Cold Front. This would be a simple matter to set fronts by. You would not need to decrement the front Duration if you use this method.
- Winds :: They are in m/s with angles for direction. Fairly easy to get sync'd up to Unity.

With those four bits of data above you can sync the ORW to any type of external weather data and come really close. Clouds of course in game will be different because I have them coupled directly with Humidity....which they should be.

See my notes in the description to sync weather to Multiple Scenes and Master Server.

Cheers
O

 

@Olander Thanks very much for the speedy response. This helps a lot - I will give this a go and let everyone know how it goes.

 

@Olander So I've been playing with integrating weather underground info into the system and I've got the temperature, humidity and wind coming in nicely.

I am assuming that I should be setting nWeatherType as static/0 as I won't be pulling from the database, I'll be assigning humidity, temperature, precipitation from weather underground data every 15 minutes. But let me know if that's an incorrect assumption

My question is on barometric pressure and warm/cold fronts and precipitation intensity. Specifically, right now as I write this, the weather in London shows:

Temp: 14
Humidity: 94%
Precipitation: Light rain

If I use precipitation to trigger a switch to a cold front, I get a thunderstorm vs light rain. Cold/warm front seems like a pretty binary expression of barometric pressure. Is there a better way to express or tweak this in your system?

Many thanks,

Steve

 

@poinyentsteve Right. So based upon the numbers that you have you are correct there would be a Thunderstorm. This is because Humidity is dictating the 'Simulation' of weather in a game engine. However, you can do more of a Broad Based control style to relate it to Real World events.

This would be done in the nWeatherType. This integer is controlled by Humidity but is very easy to decouple. Since this Integer represents close proximity to real world weather event levels it is a simple matter to attach Weather Underground's description to what the integers mean. Sorry I am work and not looking at the script right now but there are 6 weather types there you would match up to. Should work straight away.

One other thought while we are discussing this. Humidity is also controlling Cloud Density and does a really nice job with this...however...the caveat here is that there will not be a direct match to real world. Close enough should be good enough but you may have to play around with Fogginess as well to get the lighting to match a bit better.

Let me know if you need anything else.

Cheers
O

 

Hello Olander,

i donot have time of day and easy save2 assets.i made some changes to scripts but i am getting errors again.

so how do i get this asset working?

any additional scripts required to get it working?

 

@akhil96 You will need to figure out your own cloud solution but you can swap out the skyboxes based upon nWeatherLevel to do a decent job of showing proper clouds. This is exactly what I was doing privately while ToD had the previous clouds. The database portion is fairly easy to convert to Prefs but I really despise using the registry to save settings. You can do what you wish however.

So let's start with Time of Day first. Since you will only have 1 Directional Light to control you will need to change the color and rescale the lighting so Day and Night look properly....if you are just doing weather in one light scenario....much simpler.

gWeatherMaster.cs you will need to fix these two areas.

Comment Out Line 332:
//Sky = GameObject.Find ("Sky Dome").GetComponent<TOD_Sky>();

Comment Out (Change) all these: Line 480 to 489
//Time of Day Specific
//Sky.Clouds.Coverage = fCloudDensity;
//Sky.Clouds.Sharpness = fCloudSharpness;
//Sky.Clouds.Brightness = fCloudBrightness;
//Sky.Atmosphere.Fogginess = fLightFogginess;
//Sky.Day.LightIntensity = fLightIntensityDay;
//Sky.Night.LightIntensity = fLightIntensityNight;

//Non Time of Day Specific
Light.intensity = fLightIntensityDay;


As stated...if you want a database such as SQL, SQLite, Prefs....then re-code the internals if the database functions. If no database then....simply disable it.

Open gDatabase.cs now everywhere you see..... ES2. those need to be commented out or changed to your own DB code.

Good luck.

 

@Olander Just wanted to report that I did get this working with Weather Underground data. My approach was to index different weather conditions to certain humidity levels. So Partly Cloudy is = 40% Humidity, Mostly Cloudy 50%, Thunderstorm = 85%, etc. And I tweaked the nWeatherType levels a tad. If rain or snow occurred switch the cold front on. Playing with the brightness of the clouds gets it pretty well dialed in. This way I pretty much leverage the dynamics you have built in. It's close enough (I compare to a webcam view of Tower Bridge) and it's a hell of lot easier than trying to work out weather math (http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/LawrenceRHdewpointBAMS.pdf). It's been fun to see the scene change with the actual weather in London over the course of the day. Thanks for contributing a great asset!

 

@poinyentsteve You are welcome. Thanks for the interesting read. I had a similar read when I made my original weather system for NWN1 which relative humidity was the obvious choice (in game characters cannot 'Feel' the stickiness). Weather was extremely important to a more realistic type of gaming rule set, hence, it was tied into many other things....Camping, Resting, Hunger, Thirst, Fatigue, Combat.....on and on.

You made this work in a method I did not expect, brilliant. I am pleased the design was flexible enough to accommodate. I hope that your application is used by many.

Cheers
O

 

Thanks @Olander, I'm continuing to work on it. It's amazing how obsessed one can becoming in terms of tweaking weather settings.

I had put in a performance question in this post, but took it out as I am seeing an issue in my code that could be the culprit. :}

 

Hi Olander,

I wanted to give your package a try, but when I download and Import the package, all the prefabs seem to be corrupted. Could it be that the package was made for Unity 5? I'm still using 4.6.2.

Thanks for the package!

G.

 

Yeppers, Unity 5 (personal or pro). It will work in Unity 4.5+ but you would need to update a few things to make them go. I am not working in Unity 4 any longer so I did not take the time to install it and make a version for it. There are no plans to go back to U4 either. If you did make a 4.6 version and have it working and want me upload it to my FTP and link it here for others please let me know in a conversation.

Cheers
O

 

Hi Olander,

thanks for the quick response!
Well I have no problem adapting things but I can't get the prefabs to work, simply because they don't show up as prefabs - only "White boxes" in the project tab; and I can't drag them to the hierarchy. I would basically need to know which scripts I have to put on the different game objects to get it working and to replace the prefabs. Furthermore the prefabs for rain etc. (which contain the particles I believe) aren't working either.
Maybe a few screenshots of the working components/scripts would be helpful? Or do you have some more detailled documentation where to put which script?

Thanks in advance and I'd be glad to give you the package - when it's working. ;-)

G.

 

To be a little more precise: I'd need the setups of the following prefabs:

_GameData, _WeatherMaster, _WeatherObject, SkyDome
GroundFog, Lightning 1-3, Rain, Snowflake, SnowIce

G.

 

@Sybaris

Soon as I returned from work I did some digging. It appears Unity 4 will not read any Unity 5 stuff. Scripts will mostly work (I think my code should work fine....nothing crazy exotic)...models, textures, and such will work as well but must be re-imported into U4. The particles also do not seem to work going backwards as a prefab but some have had luck with the particle itself.

If you are truly stuck in 4.6.2 I can take some Inspector screen shots of each to help folks who are stuck in Unity 4 get the weather working. I shall add the pics above shortly.

Cheers
O

 

@Sybaris

Okie. Uploaded a 7Zip file with the pics inside of it as well as updated the top info regarding Unity 4. You will find the link right under the download link above.

Cheers
O

 

Hey Olander,

thanks a lot for your effort!
I downloaded the pics and I'll give it a try.
I'll be back...

G.

 

Just a short update:

Working:
Rain (Particles and Sound)
Thunder
Clouds

Not Working:
Lightnings
GroundFog (just strange black circular clouds around me...)

I didn't test snow and wind yet although they are setup.

I'm leaving for a weekend trip now and I'll be afk till tuesday.

Have a nice weekend.

G.