For environment modders only: Weather Transitions

[h.sie]

While working on the Bad Weather Fix

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=177507

I programmed a little mod that triggers a weather transition exactly every 30 minutes from good (clear sky) to bad (heavy clouds, often fog & rain) and back to good and so on. Using this little mod in the Navigation Lesson of the Naval Academy, I found out that in my private environment mod the weather transitions looked very ugly:

1. Fog appears and disappears immediately and
2. Clouds also appear/disappear immediately without any smooth transition.

This happens for most of the available environments I've tested so far (e.g. OLCE), but surely noone saw it, because weather transitions occur seldom (every 20-40 hours) and thus probably during high TC.

Now I found out how to make much better looking weather transitions by making some changes in scene.dat:

1) Set EnvSim:Fog:FogChangeSpeed to 0,001 instead of 1,0.

2) Set Node-Clouds:Clouds:Wind: CloudsTransitionTextureName=CloudsTransition.tga instead of <no entry>.

I don't know why the devs set FogChangeSpeed=1 and some modders deleted the CloudsTransition.tga entry. Maybe because of side-effects I am not aware of. So don't understand this post and my results as final truth, it's just intended for discussion and further development.

@Makman94: In the patch for M.E.P. v3 you deleted CloudsTransition.tga from scene.dat. Why did you do that? Before your patch weather transitions looked very well in M.E.P, but not after the patch.

h.sie

My Weather Transitions Test Mod can by found here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?6h7v5xkka645dgl