Snow!

I logged into Qeynos today and noted the sound of rain. When I headed outdoors, this is what I saw!



Yes it's snowing in Qeynos!

Now I know it's just a graphical glitch due to the shiny effects of rain. But still, I hope the deves can see this and realize how easy it'd be to make snowy conditions. Just tweak the rain condition and bam! Snow! It even fell around the trees so it looked real.

I've seen that glitch before & it does look pretty darned cool.

There are already many snowfalls: Lots of Frostfell house items make snowflakes fall. I suspect the reason it isn't zone-wide is because there'd be too much lag. In restricted areas like individual, instanced homes, and coming out of quite small-by-comparison house items, and in small quantities of snow at that, it's obviously more doable.

You've seen rain in Qeynos and Freeport before, right? Introducing a different particle effect for snow with the same density of particles would have the exact same performance hit unless the particle was a lot more complex to render. So as long as they stick to white blobs instead of complex snow crystals the falling snow effect would be trivial.

The part where you have snow on the ground is a lot less trivial. I'm not sure how much the city zones can be altered with the current assets. I suspect some of the groundwork already exists, but I have no idea how much more effort it would take. It would be great if both Qeynos, Freeport and their associated overland zones (Antonica and Commmonlands) could experience 4 seasons of weather. Well, more like 3 seasons for Commonlands since its more desert like (wet, green, brown), and the 4 traditional seasons for Qeynos.

Most zones aren't made for weather effects, and outside of the big cities seasonal weather is less important than maintaining the integrity of the storyline associated with the zone.

I'm thinking since this is an older game it will be less or a priority than a newer game but it would be nice to run through the seasons.

I still love being in the commonlands when it storms and lightning flashes happen and the only light sources you see are your own and a few burning torches

We need the tinkered weather rocket from EQ1.

I'm not familiar with that one. Is it any different than the druid spell that just stopped rain/snow?

129 days until Christmas! And maybe 13 until Costco has Christmas decorations up!

I think Hobby Lobby already beat Costco to it.

Hobby Lobby started a month ago at least.

Should be a law against advertising before 1st December. We get retailers going holiday-happy in October here, and that's bad enough.

Bah, humbug.