127 replies to this topic

[Site Bot]

Ambient Temperature

Lets you check the air temperature, dew point, heat index, and relative humidity. Adds to immersion, and will be incorporated into mods to effect things like dehydration and equipment overheating. The numbers are based on real Las Vegas weather statistics.

[QorakSOS]

This sounds SWEET! More more please!!!

[sativa420]

Hey Imp! I hope we see PPA for NV ;P

[Dark0ne]

Out of curiosity is this pulling information from some sort of online API?

Is it within the realms of possibility to make a mod in conjunction with the Nexus that could tell you if the mods you had installed had new versions or not?

Note: I'm not asking you if you'll do it, only if the concept is plausable!

[Imp of the Perverse]

I pulled the numbers from weather.com and other online weather sources, plugged them into Excel, did curve fits, and used the equations in the script with gamehour, gamemonth, and gamedayspassed. It's a port from my Fallout3 mod, so the script and a number of the equations were fleshed out already.

Regarding the mod update notifier, could this maybe be handled on the Nexus end by tracking which mods a user had downloaded in the past, and emailing them when one of them is updated? The .esp and .esm names and dates don't usually change when a mod gets updated, so I don't see an easy way to check if the currently used version is the most recent, unless all modders agreed to put it into the file's header info.

[Dark0ne]

Indeed; imagine an opt-in system where the author adds the file ID and the version of the file downloaded in to a header or text file with their mod.

When the user starts their game it queries this information against data pulled from a special page on the Nexus that returns the latest version of a file based on the ID given in the header info.

The mod then checks the version it's using against the version on the site and if it's different it informs the user there's a new version of the file.

PS. sorry for derailing this comment topic. Want me to move this in to a discussion thread instead?

Edited by Dark0ne, 21 October 2010 - 01:12 AM.

[Imp of the Perverse]

That would be pretty cool. Email would be good because it could provide a link to the download page, and gives you a record of what's available. But people will be more likely to get the message if it pops up as soon as you start playing. One issue, I could see someone stepping away from the game for a while, coming back, and getting hit with 25 update messages at startup. The mod should probably generate a text file version of the message so that the player doesn't lose track, and maybe just prompt the user with "Several updates are available. Check the log file." if there are more than 4 or 5.

I'm not too familiar with the I/O side of it though, FOSE was required with FO3 to read and write from the .ini files and UI xml files that you'd need to keep track of everything. It might be worth moving this to a discussion page to get some more expertise.

[TWillard]

Do you mind a few suggestions for when you have the time to expand on this?

Can you put rain that cuts down on visibility and makes everything the same muddy looking for a few hours or minutes till it dries after the storm?

What about heat shimmering on extremely hot days?

Adjustment on how often you need to drink in hardcore mode?

Have it so a few NPC's comment on the weather?


And, this might be tougher: When I was looking through my iron sights on hot days in the desert, sometimes the heat distortion threw off my aim, and with a scope I noticed that a few times, on really hot days, I'd look through the scope and the target would vanish. I'm not sure what caused it, probably something with magnifying the heat shimmer. Think you could replicate that?

Anyway, I love the idea of this mod, for immersion if nothing else.

[Imp of the Perverse]

Good suggestions. I'll initially be releasing temperature dependent dehydration as part of Imp's TimeScale Adjuster. That mod's out, and the latest release is set up to make it easy, so I will probably release it tonight. I have to update Ambient Temperature though - I noticed the heat index calculations are about 80 degrees off on cold days. Also keep an eye out for Imp's More Complex Needs, which I'm in the process of transferring over from FO3. It's an absurdly over the top realistic needs mod that I'll be meshing into the Hardcore mode HTS.

I haven't tackled a weather mod before, but when I made this mod for FO3 I was hoping Enhanced Weather or Dynamic Weather would incorporate it.

Heat shimmering would be nice, I might be able to use the gas effect to make something similar, but hand placing the gas all around the Mojave would take time, and I'm not sure what impact it would have on performance. Breath fog would also be good.

NPC comments require voice acting, which would probably sound tacky (the voice acting for NV is great, I'd have trouble matching it). Maybe there are some stock phrases I could use though (there's that NCR phrase about patrolling the Mojave making you wish for a nuclear winter, it would be pretty easy to restrict that line to hot days).

I'm pretty sure the vanishing is caused by a sharp boundary in air temperature - the air closer to the ground ends up hotter, and therefore less dense, meaning it has a different index of refraction. Light hitting that boundary at a shallow enough angle will bounce off of it, obscuring what's beneath like a mirror would. If your target falls below that boundary, they'd vanish until the air shifted. I could probably disable distant actors randomly on hot days, but I think most people would find it extremely confusing, it would be tough to get right.

[BladeFireLight]

Have you considered adjusting the sleep based on temperature? I doubt you get a good night sleep in the cold. Expectantly outside.