Well, well, well! The sound canvas is complete nowfor my map, Blood Creek, with the exception of a few minor glitches. Did I tell you I found a solution for the small sample bug in OGG format sounds that go into loops?

What's in store for this map in the future is going to be phenomenal. I intend to simulate real world conditions for the most part. As you may or may not know, there will be a truly dynamic time system (DTS) now, provided someone is willing to help this come into fruition. No longer will we need killbip switches and BSPs and vehicles to "do the dirty work". Instead, there will be a hard-coded sky with moving dynamic lighting (sun) that sheds light across the sky where and as needed. When the sun is down the light also dies and when the moon comes out only pale light is seen.

The sky will consist of three layers.

1) Sun and Moon layer: This is the layer where the sun and moon reside (planes that can move according to animated graphs).

2) Sky layer: This is where the sky actually exists, as in the blue or black part for day and night. This part will move as needed and darken at the appropriate time to become night.

3) Clouds layer: This layer will have independently moving clouds that come and go at their leisure. This will allow for a somewhat random cloud formation with light cumulus clouds, medium thicker ones, and heavy rain clouds. They will be able to come and go but not too often. The variety of clouds is yet to be determined.

So, with that in mind, let's discuss the next part of the map; the weather system. Raising the "ceiling" of the BSP is easy, so we'll do just that. We'll raise the ceiling of the BSP and then create another plane below that for a "false ceiling" that puts the true in-game ceiling at the level it is now but still allows people to place materials above this (i.e. particle systems and what not). The point I'm making is if you place a particle system under the current configuration it will only be as high as the "game ceiling". When you fly to the top of the map you will notice that the rain "stops" at the top, which is NOT what we want. We want you to see the rain regardless of whether you're at the "top" of the map or not, which is why we will be raising the real ceiling and putting in the fake one to emulate the current height so that the thing will work properly.

Scripted events

At certain points when the clouds are heaviest (preferably requiring a timed cloud interval for this to work properly), rain clouds can be "turned on and off" via scripts. This will avoid BSP switches and overall portaled events, which I'm trying to avoid albeit the sound environments, such as reverb in rooms. There will be three layers to the weather grid in the main map. There will be light rain, medium rain, and heavy rain. Depending on the types of clouds there will be appropriate rain when needed. Since random weather is too difficult to get working correctly, timed weather is our best bet.

Let's say two days go by. On the third it might rain for a whole day, then again on the sixth for just a few hours or so of daylight, quit, then rain again during the night after a spell of clear weather. Then there would be another day or two of intermittant cloudy weather with clear weather, followed by more light to moderate rain.

Most of this is already known but I'll just put it here anyway for the heck of it. The average game time as we all know is 20 minutes, unless you disable the game timer, at which point the game will last forever until the map is changed or the requirements for termination of the game are met (i.e. scores in CTF, kills in Slayer, minutes in the hill in King of the Hill, etc. etc..) The average day will last ten minutes and the average night will last another ten minutes, making one complete cycle in a "normal" game. However, for those that prefer long games or just want to "open her up a bit", you can disable or modify the game timer to start allowing this timed sequence of events. If we can get good enough at working with scripts we might be able to go for random weather. The problem is avoiding rain during sunlight (which does happen in the real world I know).

Anyway, enough about the game for now. I just thought I'd let you know all of how it's coming for now. Tell me what you think of these ideas. What I need is help here, guys. We need help in order to make this happen. GRUNTS and Bubbles are working on this with me but we need additional help. Here's what we need.

Bitmaps for clouds, sky changes, etc.."
Possible modeling help.
Possible scripting help if the sky requires it

We want to hardcode the sky into a way that will not require scripting to get the light right. In other words, we don't want the sun to be a piece of scenery whose light goes through objects. Rather, we want the sun and the moon to bounce off objects and go around the map as a part of the sky.

Please help us, or at best, give comments / feedback.

Thanks.

~Rambo
Edited by Rambo on Mar 11, 2008 at 03:41 PM