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Why has noone made a dynamic seasons mod?


Lazauya

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Obviously there is a seasons mod, but why no dynamic seasons mods? I mean, it wouldn't take up more ram as you could just load the models when you need to, and there wouldn't be that much of a performance hit as it would happen slow. Skyrim already renders landscape under snow on mountains (correct me if I'm wrong). Obviously there would be some transitional weirdness with snow building up in the winter then receding in the summer, but it wouldn't as bad as it would happen slow, no? A project like this would be a feat, but haven't even larger project been undertaken before? Also, again, please correct me if I'm wrong about any of this.

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Here is what would make it hard. You would have to load, if you were talking all 4 seasons, 4 different sets of objects... all over the world. For seasons to change, you would HAVE to be in an interior, because if they changed while you were outside you would see almost everything disappear then reappear, you might fall through the world and your game would most likely freeze and crash. Then, in the construction kit, your entire world would have to be modified, and would have 4 different types of trees, 4 different types of ground textures, you would have to tie all of these things to an xmarker that would have to retrieve the date and enable/disable based on that, and ultimately this would probably be incompatible with almost every single mod out there, as no one could work with it due to the mass amount of objects to go through. This is why no one has made a mod that dynamically changes seasons.

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Here's an idea that might work instead of trying to load four season's worth of texture resources and dynamically swapping them out over time while the game is running. This method assumes the player won't have very long play sessions though.

 

While the game is running, count the elapsed time in days/months/whatever. Every 3 months, update a season variable so we know what the current season is. Now, chances are we only need to load one season at a time during each play session. So when the game loads, first check the season variable, then load the appropriate texture pack for that season. The season never updates dynamically in-game; each play session will determine what season gets loaded instead. I'm not entirely sure if conditionally loading textures/plugins like this is possible since the logic would have to occur before any scripts get loaded. Maybe an SKSE plugin could toggle the active season in the load order just before the game loads.

 

Animated textures might provide a method for dynamic season changes.

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