Seasons in games

Hi,

I personally don't know any game which has dynamic seasons. I wonder if this is because of technical difficulties or some other reasons?

How hard would be to implement dynamic seasons with Unity (without making same assets 4 times for each season).

 

Pretty easy... you could just at runtime change some textures, add some fog and change the particle systems.

 

I wonder if it's so simple, why there is no games with full seasons implementation that I know of?

If you start changing textures for tree leaves, then in winter making leaves totally disappear, then covering ground, trees and objects with snow, wouldn't that impact performance a lot especially on big open maps?

Would be awesome if someone skilled here created demo landscape with dynamically changing seasons as a proof.

 

it just doesnt fit within the scope of some games i suppose (like the whole game is supposed to take place within 1 month or something)
but yeah you're right why hasnt there been a game we know of with it??

probably just because its extra work thats not 100% needed.... and even a game like skyrim, where u might play long enough to see the season change...

really... i played oblivion ALOOTTT .. and i think i only played it for like 2 years game time... thats not really worth the trouble to go thru to make it (to them) ... you could play the whole game within like 6 months of game time... heck less than that... i think i just slept alot... maybe even to skip nights sometimes or something.
i see every season twice... although it would be AWESOME!!!! .... they totally couldve done it..

... yeah, change the textures on trees and the terrain

harvest moon had dynamic seasons..... not sure what other game.... lol, secret of mana had that forest where each area is a different season, some magical forest...but that wasnt dynamic

 

Something like this you mean.

Only a proof of concept and for using Substance to generate the different textures on demand for the required season. Never really progressed with it at the time as I found it would crash my gpu and never got to the bottom of it. In fact i've pretty much stayed away from Substance since.


Below is a more interesting version with various improvements including the water freezing over, but for some reason its only SD quality. Which is a shame as I fixed the stuttering from the above video which was mainly due to bad capture software.

However i'm pretty sure there are games that featured changing seasons, though i'm having trouble recalling any that actually did it dynamically. As you say one drawback is potentially doing 4 sets of textures, however procedural texture generation and effects easily solve this and that level of tech ahs been around for decades, so its kinda surprising that more game don't do it.

 

Regarding the demo I was more talking about full landscape with trees/forests etc where trees change leave color and then drop leaves in winter, grass turning brown in autumn, ground gets covered with snow and in some places lots of snow, like 1-2 meters deep.

I'm still confused, if this is really simple and not taxing on GPU, how come there is virtually no games with seasons? I understand that it doesn't always fit the story/world of particular game, but for so many years no one have done this? Not even a simple awesome demo? I find it strange.

 

Yeah that's just in the details though, nothing to prevent that from being down, although deep snow would be more problemtaic, but there are some gpu solutions for that.

Because it takes time to do? Because although I could add some trees, simulate leaves falling in the demo above in a few days, actually having it robust for a real game and to the quality needed would take time and I guess on many projects its just not much of a priority. In fact its only really MMO's where it would make much sense for dynamic seasons to this degree. All other games happen across a short time frame its easier just to re-model or re-texture specific scenes than invest in what is essentially a procedurally generated world.

 

.




You mean something like this?








Just use the ats Snow Suite - its free too!
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/4144

 

If you're worried about failing to create the features for a game because you think you'll hit a technical Unity/Game engine roadblock along the way, don't. I highly doubt it's impossible, it may be difficult, but it depending on how detailed you want it to be. But as with any nice looking game it takes a lot of work and optimization. Seeing few examples of it being attempted is a good sign in my opinion, it'll make your game that much more unique. I'm not going to bother to search for one, but I'm pretty sure I have seen an example or a game with the feature. I've been working on including this feature in one of my projects, haven't gone far at all since I have aspects that are more important for me to work on.

Anyways, Good luck with whatever you're working on.

 

Most games tend to want to save the different seasons for different zones. It is easier to define zones if season is one of the defining factors EG Desert, Snow, Jungle etc

 

Skyrim is multiplatform and must fit a console. Long, long ago, when there were pure PC games it was different. Think about TES2 Daggerfall for example ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT-JycJv5CM ). Also: passing seasons means generic gampley. And it not fit the idea of interactive movie.

 

My fishing simulator has dynamic seasons.

 

Totally possible and actually pretty simple to do.
Grass, ground and leaves color can just be changed depending on what time of year it is.
Leaf "fall off" can be simulated with some clever use of alpha and same with leaf growth in spring.
Dynamic snow is also pretty easy and there are already free solutions for that as "I am da bawss" said.

The reason why games don't use it is not technical, but more gameplay oriented most likely.
Im planning dynamic seasons in my game and have some basics going already, seasons are controlled using a yearly temperature curve.
Its still pretty crude and still missing a lot of features but it looks kind of nice already.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/141522-Age-of-Settlement-(reborn)/page7

 

Take a look at Oliver&Spike. It's not really about seasons, but the different dimensions change the whole style of the scene. There are some dimensions that look like spring, others look like fall. I'm not sure how this is achieved on the technical side, but it looks just great. One of the most promising unity games in development.

Oliver Spike

 

The thread is a bit old now, but does anyone know if there have been any updates on this...? I am looking for exactly that, all seasons changing in one timeline.

Cheers