Weather

[Klear]

I nice effect would have different kinds of weather. Such as Rain, Snow, Hail, Hurricans, Tornados, Floods, Mud Slides, etc. If you had more than just rain it would make it way realistic and set it apart from other online rpgs.

Also:
Hail- It would bring down health little by little and would cause the char to run for a shelter such as a tree or a town. This is for a realistic touch.

Hurricans/Tornados- Show trees falling over and basically thing flying everywhere. Dunno if you could do this but it would be kinda neat.

[Lordosis]

A weather system with that level of realism would be incredible, but I don't think today's hardware is quite ready for it in a real-time, internet based application. Give it a few years and you might see that in Arcanity, Arcanity II, or some other game.

[Wrentia]

Well hold on a sec. It might be possible with todays graphics cards. Rain and Snow are easy easy enough. Perhaps showing the snow getting seeper is out, but there could be effects....Light rain, heavy rain and snow could effect movement. Since I do not know how your stat system works I will give general examples. Light Rain would subtract 10% from movement rates....Heavy rain and snow would subtract 20%.

Also it could be possible to portray cataclysmic weather as special role play events. Wipe off the side of a mountain in a large mudslide....Perhaps a very dry season in an area could lead to a fire and players would have to be recruited to rescue a small village about to be destroyed....

Just some ideas....

Wrentia

[Lordosis]

Yes, simple rain and show effects aren't too bad. Having snow stay on the ground and grow in real time would be tough, indeed.

Yes, it would also be easy to have weather affect movement, but I'm not sure we want to do that. Might just be more annoying that anything to the players.

The problem with real time events isn't as much the graphics card as it is sending all that information to people. If we knew everybody was was on broadband, a lot more becomes possible. But a 28.8 modem (or even 56k) is a very easy pipe to overfill.

The other problem is the potential size of the files that hold the landscape data. We have to put certain restrictions on the lanscape (that would make things like a mudslide hard to do, but not impossible) that we can take advantage of to decrease the file sizes. I don't want Arcanity to take more than a gig of disk space if I can help it. Hard drives are getting really big lately, so maybe this won't be an issue by next year, though.

[Wrentia]

I can see the pipe problems....basically I'd just like to see a little differences. Instead of one kind of rain like in EQ, have light, regular, and heavy. Same with snow.

Also, I don't want to see drastic movement rate changes....but on the light/med/heavy scale how about movement rate decreases of 5/10/15 percent? Or even 3/7/10 percent. Just something barely noticeable.

Again, the mudslide idea would be a "one-time" event. I don't want to see a hurricane every week, but its a decent "event" that can change things in the world. One of my beefs with EQ is that nothing changes What is will always be (unless it needs to be nerfed). Then, every once in awhile, something totally new just happens to sprout for no apparant reason. (Like all the recent new NPC additions and racial forges). Although I could only stand AC for a week or so back in its beta, the ongoing story ideas are good if done right. Anyway, now I am babbleing so I'll end here...

-Wrentia

[Cynycal]

i think that like if you're gonna go out int he snow when its cold n' stuff and u dont have very many clothes on that u could freeze to death or something...i'm juts saying that weather (and the enviroment around your character in general) should have an effect on your character...

[KirosBlade]

i think if u wish to play a realistic game such as this there's gotta be at least a little weather in it. like cynical saying that you could take damage/freeze/frostbite form being poorly dressed in the snow...that just makes sense...like other weather should

[Kymeri mac An Iolar]

I have to agree with Rich on part of this having weather affect the player even a little bit might annoy the players. I do like what I have seen in AC with weather changing with the seasons. I also agree with Wrentia one time drastic weather events could be interesting. Again AC has done this with great success IE: the catacylsmic ending of the worlds in beta testing was awsome, they have had towns burn, meteor showers, shooting stars leading to a new dungeon and so on

[BelDragos]

Dont forget about tornados dropping houses on people.