Is the rain glitch fixable?

[aeroflow]

Hello everybody,

 

Im not a modder just a happy consumer so please dont roast me for bringing up that question.

Is the weird rain clipping "bug" fixable? :confused: Apparently is has been raining through solid structures since Morrowind when youre outside but it never could be fixed.

Is it true that this is due to a limitation of the engine?

Or is maybe somone already working on that?

 

Cheers

[eltucu]

As far as i can tell, Skyrim uses sort of a global setting while dealing with rain and snow, that means its applied in the entire exterior cell (i think in interior cells you can set up trigger zones with special kind of FXs like flying leaves, dust and that kind of stuff), and the game lacks a way to eliminate raining or snowing locally.

 

For example, if m not mistaken, GTA IV used sort of boxes below bridges and constructions that eliminated rain FX in those places, you could tell because some times they were misplaced :D

 

So for Skyrim, it either it rains all over the place, or it doesnt rains at all. If there is a way to make a trigger zone to make rain disappear in certain parts of the scene, it would be a pretty hard work placing those by hand on every city and wild zones.

Edited March 19, 2012 by eltucu

[SinderionsBones]

Alas, rain doesn't collide with stuff. Can you imagine how rough it would be on your computer if the collisions of thousands of raindrops had to be checked constantly? It's rough enough with 5 -10 things fighting at once lol. Short of just setting the weather to be nice out when you enter a room, there is no fix I know of. If you're going to spend a great deal of time in this place (a no loadscreen house or the like) you may want consider doing just that.

[scrivener07]

I would kill for that special no rain box. well, maybe not kill..

[eltucu]

Alas, rain doesn't collide with stuff. Can you imagine how rough it would be on your computer if the collisions of thousands of raindrops had to be checked constantly?

Yes, that specific method would be taxing BUT you got the whole rain FX thing wrong.

 

A rain FX its just a 2D transparent texture, even the tiny water waves are just 2D textures pasted over the water or other surfaces. No game ever calculates each rain drop (not even collisions, there are no "collisions" cuz there arent any physics calculations behind all that) cuz a simple transparent texture gets the job done.

 

What they would need to do is to make the FX clip with every static it comes across, pretty much the same principle behind soft particles (and yet you see CoD4 with soft particles on working at 300 fps on a mid range card), though this clipping would be extended vertically.

 

For example, raining in Oblivion was just an animated texture pasted in the screen, it wasnt even located along the scenery, it was as complex as a blood splatter FX (and no, those dont calculate the trajectory of each drop of blood when the axe impacts the head of the NPC or some non sense like that).

 

The most fancy thing you can come across is rain FX with some sort of deph thing, it works like smoke, it paints 2D textures at different dephs of the camera, very few triangles are used, so its very fast, so when you run around, you can see the rain drops pass instead of being a static thing on the screen. Hitman Blood Money (or Contracts, cant remember) had that FX with snow in one of the levels, again, very fast and very simple stuff (and OLD! )

 

Rendering a 2048x2048 texture is more hard on the GPU that the simple rain FXs that Skyrim uses. And now that i think of it, the only game that i can think of that didnt had any sort of soft particles is Counter Strike 1.5 lol

 

Every graphics technique used in videogames must be simple, otherwise devs would not be able to make real time things, the only place where you will find complex stuff is pre rendered things or tech demos, videogames are watered down a lot to meet a minimum of 30 or 60 fps on common hardware.

Edited March 19, 2012 by eltucu

[SinderionsBones]

Alas, rain doesn't collide with stuff. Can you imagine how rough it would be on your computer if the collisions of thousands of raindrops had to be checked constantly?

Yes, that specific method would be taxing BUT you got the whole rain FX thing wrong.

 

A rain FX its just a 2D transparent texture, even the tiny water waves are just 2D textures pasted over the water or other surfaces.

 

That was my point exactly but yeah lol. Was more for illustration.

 

Yah, woulda been nice if they made another type of roombound type thing, but was more for those effects.

 

Would probably be pretty simple to explore this page for possible solutions:

 

http://www.creationkit.com/Weather_Script

 

On enter a trigger (encompassing house interior)

 

GoodweatherObject.ForceActive(true)

 

On trigger exit

 

GoodweatherObject.ReleaseOverride()

 

 

Though since I haven't heard of anyone doing that maybe it's more complicated. Obviously the sun would probably spontaneously come out and that may be disorienting. There are methods in place allowing a transition by default.

 

You could make a more complex script to, depending on the current weather, force a similar version with no rain, then, possibly transition to a lighter sky one(or not). Then reversing the process on exit. Forcing rain the moment you leave.

 

I'm already seriously considering making a default advanced encounter resource pack. That would be a cool miscellaneous addition if it works at all.

 

To be honest I know nothing of weather objects or how happy they are to be manipulated.. or if only one weather form is in control at any given time.. but not that terribly interested, just tossing out pointers to possible solutions to anyone who wants help helping themselves :D

[DemonMaester]

I wonder if we could get in touch with the people who fixed it in TES III.

 

Here's the patch that fixed it:

http://www.fliggerty.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=1008

 

Do a quick search for "Rain/snow" and you'll see that they were able to fix it.

I know we're crossing to a much older engine but I would assume we could at least use it as a starting point.

As far as I know the issue was engine related in TES III as well.

[AxlRocks]

I wonder if we could get in touch with the people who fixed it in TES III.

 

Here's the patch that fixed it:

http://www.fliggerty.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=1008

 

Do a quick search for "Rain/snow" and you'll see that they were able to fix it.

I know we're crossing to a much older engine but I would assume we could at least use it as a starting point.

As far as I know the issue was engine related in TES III as well.

 

Wow, I had no clue they had fixed that for Morrowind. Thanks for the link. Even though the engine is old, I'm sure the right person could figure it out in Skyrim with some insight into how they did it, so that seems to be the best bet. Perosnally, in Oblivion, I always had the idea of setting up "no rain zones" under/around meshes in so that once stepped into, a script activated and turned off the rain weather, applied a weather that looked identical but without rain, and then enabled fake rain around the mesh you were under. The fake rain would be similar to the droplets of water you see in caves occasionally, but more dense and faster falling of course. It would also need to reach out far enough to convince the player it is raining until they walk back out of the zone and rain is reenabled. In Skyrim, since "enable" and "disable" can both fade the object in or out of view rather than just *POOF!* it's gone/it's here, the change between real rain and fake rain could be made far less noticable. This is definitely a tedious way to do it, but I'm almost sure it would work if worst came to worst and the Morrowind fix couldn't be worked out for Skyrim.

 

EDIT: My idea is pretty similar to what SinderionsBones said already. I got excited to post my old theory and didn't even see his nearly identical one lol Anyway,

 

-AxlRocks

Edited March 28, 2012 by AxlRocks