[Suggestion] Weather effects

Ever wondered how the snow on Esamir got there while it's never snowing? Why Hossin looks rain-forest like while there's never actually rain (same goes for Amerish). Or why Indar doesn't actually feels like a dry environment?

Well I did, and I think the game would be so much better with weather effects like rain and rainstorms on Hossin and Amerish, snow on Esamir or wind blowing sand away (tornado like) on Indar.

On a side note, wouldn't it be awesome if your soldier's appearance changed depending on the weather?

So, weather effects in Planetside 2. Do or don't? What do you guys think?

We had sandstorms sometimes on northern Indar for a while. I have not seen them in a while.

Sure, as long as we have the option to turn them off. Can't imagine what this would do to performance.

thats prolly why we dont have any....everyone would tune them down to improve performance...

Cool idea, would add immersion, but for PS2? not really feasible.

From what I understand, the H1Z1 team is working on building weather into the Forgelight engine, and that once they get it working it'll be evaluated for PS2 (performance, desirability, etc).

Personally, I would love weather effects... but only if it could not be disabled. It would be too much of an advantage for people that turned it off. That being said, they could create different graphical levels with the lowest essentially just being a really heavy fog that limited view to the same degree of the full weather effects setting.

Is h1z1 a mass online zombie shooter or something? If its not, the performance hit wont be so bad as in PS2, where there is already really poor overall game performance. The last thing this game needs is a continent wide x4, performance destroying weather effect.

Im not saying it wouldnt be cool to have, but overall, I think everyone would just tweak their settings in such a way as to kinda remove the effects so as to ignore the fog or w/e from the fog and to get their lost performance back. Soooo, while it sounds good and would kinda make the game a bit more exciting to look at, it wouldnt do much for gameplay...and therefore, im sure alot of people dont want it.

I talked to Arclegger a while back about this and while the current engine can do weather, it had a lot of issues tied to it. Mainly performance issues and stability issues (such as graphics breaking bugs).

I'm down if the weather causes status effects for all players in range and the weather constantly moves.

I remember the dust storms.

There are no sandstorms. There's some winds of dust some times. A cheap particle effect. Maybe you confuse the fog during skybug with Indar grassland skyfile for sand...

Where the issues only with implementing it in PS2 or did they occur in H1Z1?

If it was in H1Z1, once they get it figuared out I can't imagine it would affect performance in PS2 that much. Especially if its processed mostly though the GPU.

It was in PS2, this was way before Arclegger was on the H1Z1 team. Actually, I don't know if he is on the team, but I saw him with a shirt once, so I figured as much. But anyways, this was way before that. I asked about it when we were playing and he did say he saw the effects and was really impressed by it, just that at this time it wouldn't work out well in PS2 due to bugs with how lightning was rendered and such.

It definitely sounds like something the team looked into implementing, it just got set aside in favor of bugfixes. And in SOE's defense, I will admit that the game is in a bit of a better state than it was at the time I talked to him. At least in terms of stability, bugs, etc. There are new bugs now but a lot of the ones back then were pretty...yeah. Vehicles exploding and flying off into the sunset, bodies flying off, etc.

Rmember Higby's screenshots from them experimenting with weather in PS2?

Imagine this + flashes of bullets everywhere. My god it'll be so sexy.

It would be 1 fps.

Yeah... its SOE's response to DayZ

Higby tweeted weather effect pics some time ago, including volumetric clouds. From my understanding, the H1Z1 guys are working on fixing Forgelight so that it doesn't crash and weep in a corner if you try to do anything a bit expensive with it, thus enabling weather effects.

Hopefully we will get them in the future. Perhaps they could impact gameplay, sandstorms (Indar) could weaken vehicle engines, snowstorms (Esamir) could mess up with aircraft handling, heavy rain (Amerish) could slow down infantry, and Hossin could get extremely thick fog"storms" that make it impossible to see past 50 meters without appropriate optics.

to be honest I don't think it would be too bad on performance. Like I said before this has to be something mostly handled by the GPU. I don't know what you have, but my GTX560 could handle this game pretty well on high (this was before ultra). Stuff like this doesn't seem like it would need much work from the CPU. That and if they where really tedious they could use this to lower the draw distance.

This game didn't seem like giving sub-60 fps on a triple titan machines with the best avaliable CPUs on hard overclocking, yet it does.

They still can't optimize it for two+ years, implementing something like this would ruin even a hope for good fps.

I would think that weather effects could be used in a way that would reduce long distance visibility, therefore reducing what your machine has to render; hopefully increasing performance. Obviously I have no idea how this engine works from a deeper technical standpoint and I would assume if it could be done that way they would have already done it... don't mind me, just thinking aloud.

In any case, weather effects would be super cool and most welcome. Anything that increases immersion and the feeling of 'being there' is a plus. When not only your enemies/teammates affect you, but the environment itself has an effect on you, then you can really start doing some cool things. Right now in PS2 the landscape is a static thing that you simply drive/walk on with little more than funneling you onto certain paths as an effect.

On Indar, for example, imagine a huge sandstorm that effects a full one third of the map and slowly moves across until it goes away. In addition to severely limiting visual distance for everyone inside, flying aircraft in the storm would have the sounds of a thousand tiny specks of sand and pebbles plinking against your fuselage, and in addition to that large gusts of wind could even affect your thrust capabilities and maneuverability. Being outside of the sandstorm and seeing it billowing and roiling toward you from a distance, as tall as the sky, to then become engulfed. Ambient light reduced heavily, vision distance reduced heavily, the blowing wind and sand make a lot of noise, ground vehicle movement reduced a touch (you could even add new parts/vehicle implants that negate the effects of storms and would cost certs or SC). You could go a lot of different directions with weather and environmental effects with regards to the playing experience. This kind of stuff sounds sounds like a lot of fun to me. Bring it on.