Wind Gusts that move across the screen visually

[Talksintext]

Basically, have gusts of wind spread over vegetation/etc and animate a "swaying" effect, but not all on screen at once (well, excluding base wind effect), so you see "lines" of wind propagating through the world, depending on direction.

 

It seems like it would be easy to do once you got a swaying animation for objects. It wouldn't work in interiors (except curtains on open windows, imagine those blowing about, would look cool), and perhaps not have it be exact lines, but slightly curved crescents that propagate. You guys know what I'm on about, right?

 

I mean, you can get crazy with it (seems like you guys enjoy taking systems a bit further than most games would, which is awesome) and calculate wind shadows from buildings/dense forest and such, and do a whole physics simulation for where the gusts go exactly, but probably a simple system is sufficient.

 

Hopefully something for the swaying can be worked into the massive animations overhaul. It's definitely a lacking visual feature that most games have.

 

Tell you guys what, I'll definitely buy a second copy if you do this. Big money on the line here, big, big money.

[trombonaught]

No offence but this sounds like a hella lotta work for a neglible (if not wholly absent) impact on gameplay.

 

I'm thinking a system like this might engage fire spread and zeds' smell ability (I think this is still a dead feature?), but I'm not sure it'll add much that couldn't be accounted for through less costly means.

 

I guess my point is this would certainly look cool, but at what cost (both working hours and performance), and is there another benefit I'm overlooking?

[DramaSetter]

They already adding it in, no? In last "weather overhaul system" video, there was something like that,i thought it's usual wind. No? At least visual, theres something like that.

Edited April 14, 2018 by DramaSetter

[Talksintext]

Dividing this into a discussion of "just regular wind animations" and "the gust system on top of that":

 

Unless I missed something, all they're adding in are weather systems that move over the map and fog and precip and shaders. I've looked back at all the recent weather vids, and I don't see any of the sprites actually swaying in the wind or anything like that. It's sorely missing in this game (gusts or no gusts), and makes the map just look so static. Understandably it's a good bit of work to execute well, but on the other hand visual wind is extremely common in games (the proposed gust system less so/nonexistent, but easier for someone like Turbo to handle since it's just coding). It would also give the artists something to do once the whole team gets banging on the NPC system once anims are done. Like, it's something new to animate while everyone's busting through coding, so it might work well with their pipeline (not sure what additional art work is planned post-anims).

 

As for how to do it (once you have animations for vegetation in place), it's really not that complicated. You create a tileable raster of wind gust patterns, then abstractly overlay it on the map, moving in the direction of the wind, its speed of course determined by gust speed, and any vegetation models/sprites tagged to "sway in the wind" will do so based on the values of the raster, such that RGB0,0,0 would be "no wind" and RGB 256,256,256 would be "full gust speed", with linear progression between, and that determines the "sway amount" for the model/sprite. Additionally, you can have the difference between gust speed and base speed affect the gamma/grey point of the raster. The additional performance cost over "just standard everything-blows-the-same-amount 'global' wind" animations would be extremely minor, and while this would take some time to code up, it doesn't look like an extreme undertaking, certainly by comparison to the massive overhaul Turbo's been on for months.

 

And yes, trombo, it adds literally nothing to gameplay other than better visuals and immersion, something you can say about an awful lot of things that are included in lots of games, so I'm not sure your negativity is warranted.

 

The benefit is it would certainly look cool/standard for a modern game.

Edited April 19, 2018 by Talksintext

[trombonaught]

18 hours ago, Talksintext said:

And yes, trombo, it adds literally nothing to gameplay other than better visuals and immersion, something you can say about an awful lot of things that are included in lots of games, so I'm not sure your negativity is warranted.

 

The benefit is it would certainly look cool/standard for a modern game.

Haha sorry, it would be awesome. I'm just finding that with each major update I'm having to turn my settings down a little, and the performance creep has me on edge

[PapayaKing]

21 hours ago, Talksintext said:

Dividing this into a discussion of "just regular wind animations" and "the gust system on top of that":

 

Unless I missed something, all they're adding in are weather systems that move over the map and fog and precip and shaders. I've looked back at all the recent weather vids, and I don't see any of the sprites actually swaying in the wind or anything like that. It's sorely missing in this game (gusts or no gusts), and makes the map just look so static. Understandably it's a good bit of work to execute well, but on the other hand visual wind is extremely common in games (the proposed gust system less so/nonexistent, but easier for someone like Turbo to handle since it's just coding). It would also give the artists something to do once the whole team gets banging on the NPC system once anims are done. Like, it's something new to animate while everyone's busting through coding, so it might work well with their pipeline (not sure what additional art work is planned post-anims).

 

As for how to do it (once you have animations for vegetation in place), it's really not that complicated. You create a tileable raster of wind gust patterns, then abstractly overlay it on the map, moving in the direction of the wind, its speed of course determined by gust speed, and any vegetation models/sprites tagged to "sway in the wind" will do so based on the values of the raster, such that RGB0,0,0 would be "no wind" and RGB 256,256,256 would be "full gust speed", with linear progression between, and that determines the "sway amount" for the model/sprite. Additionally, you can have the difference between gust speed and base speed affect the gamma/grey point of the raster. The additional performance cost over "just standard everything-blows-the-same-amount 'global' wind" animations would be extremely minor, and while this would take some time to code up, it doesn't look like an extreme undertaking, certainly by comparison to the massive overhaul Turbo's been on for months.

 

And yes, trombo, it adds literally nothing to gameplay other than better visuals and immersion, something you can say about an awful lot of things that are included in lots of games, so I'm not sure your negativity is warranted.

 

The benefit is it would certainly look cool/standard for a modern game.

I think what Trombo is trying to say, which I second, is from a developmental point of view,  "cool/standard" wouldn't really be enough to warrant the motivation to implement a wind and gusts system. The amount of time it would take for something like this, no matter how long or short, just wouldn't really be worth it to a lot of people. It would just be them focusing their time on something that has no impact to the game when they could be focusing on something else in the game that needs attention, like how in the current IWBUMS version, you can't connect through steam and have to use the direct server connect. I don't think he was being negative either, just being optimistic and real. 

[Talksintext]

 

 

Well, that swaying part at least.

 

Now... onto gusts... then, zombie raptors.

 

Anyway, looks really good guys, good job A+ would buy again!

Edited October 20, 2018 by Talksintext

[EnigmaGrey]

Wouldn't mind some examples of games that have this? I can't think of any off the top of my head. I would like to see it in action.