Atmospheric Effects (make PS2 ALIVE!)

YES! That is exactly what I'm talking about. (Btw I <3 UT3) Plus the fog idea is very nice. If nothing else it'll separate for a short time the ground from the air, leaving aircraft less hindered by flak and AA and also leaving troops to fight each other without having to look to the skies every few minutes.

And hell, even wierd stuff happening would be cool. Imagine if Amerish periodically got struck with lightning storms. Not rain or snow. Just straight up lighting flashing and booming for a few minutes. It would be crazy dangerous and all pilots would be scrambling to try and avoid it. Sounds kinda fun

first of let me say this THIS IS A GREAT IDEA AND I WOULD LOVE TO SEE IT IMPLAMENTED only one problem, this feature would have to be able to be turned off as for people like me who run on a laptop and only get 20 fps in a small fight and there for it would be a hindrance to us and people like me (not necessarily me) would push for the ability for this feature to be turned off manually this would mean that players with it off would have a major advantage over people who had it turned on. this is a really big problem BUT IF THEY COULD WORK AROUND IT THAT WOULD BE EPIC.

This. This is what the game has been lacking. I knew something was missing, but could never quite pin down what was missing.

They had thick fog and sandstorms on Esamir/Indar really early on, but people complained that it wasn't fun to be unable to see. Same with dark nights.

People care more about their own convenience than anything else in F2P communities. It's sad, but what can you do?

I would pay a premium for ultra realistic servers with eye candy that scales to my hardware. Scrubs can stay on F2P to beta test for PS4...and buy hats.

Adding wind effects would be nice, too.... imagine hearing a droning whistle in an esamir field or in the dry bay of indar

No. Get a better computer, if you can't then stay with your low FPS. The devs shouldn't be potato-ing their game because you can't meet the system requirements.

It is sad because I miss beta nights. They were so beautiful and I'd stop fighting just to watch the tracer fire sometimes...

Did you consider that those who can just play the game now with their systems, would have troubles playing with more features added later down the track? People shouldn't have to run out and buy new systems when the devs decide to make a few changes that could significantly affect said systems.

add some air turbulence in with these storms so pilots have something approaching real piloting to do and i am in.

also during heavy storms a random lightning bolt should strike a nearby sniper lingering on a hilltop. XD

I appreciate the sentiment that not everyone has a system that can cope with extra atmospheric features. However, it's a pretty weak argument, a weakness that becomes apparent when one asks, "Where do you draw the line?" That is to say, how low-tech do the devs have to consider? Do they refrain from implementing features that can't be handled by a two year old computer, a five year old computer, ten, what?

That said, we do want lots of people playing so of course the game should cater to a wider audience in terms of hardware capability than you would expect say, Crysis 3 too.

However, the point of atmospheric effects is to create realism in a theatre of war. Combat should be hindered by the weather in such a way as to influence the tactical decisions that have to be made on the battlefield and how the battle plays out, just as it would in real life. Being able to turn it off would effectively be cheating. It would for all intents and purposes give you the superpower of being able to see through a blizzard that your enemy hasn't.

Therefore, it would have to be all or nothing, and dictated by the server. That is, if your system can't cope with it, play on a server that doesn't have it.

If you then feel like you're missing out, you'll need to upgrade your system. That is not really different from missing out on Half Life 2 because your computer is only capable of running Half Life 1. To put it another way, crying, "My computer isn't good enough to show your atmospheric effects, SOE, so you can't put them in!" is principally no different from crying, "My computer isn't good enough to play Half Life 2, Valve, so you can't develop it!"

Going back to my opening paragraph then, there comes a point at which you have to upgrade in order to obtain the latest gaming experience. It's up to you (and your finances) when that point comes. The rapidity with which that point arrives with respect to PlanetSide 2 in particular can be mitigated by the suggestion in my fourth paragraph.

Given that it has been 18 months since PS2 was released, SOE devs should stick to the system requirements that were set when the game was launched. Any new features added to the game should not negatively impact upon the gameplay experience of people, including those with systems classed as only meeting the minimum requirements.

As I have said previously, there are some weather effects that can be done without impacting performance much at all, such as lightning, and the sound effects to go with it. There will be other effects, mainly wind and anything else that might go with it (rain, snow, smoke, etc.), which could severely impact people with systems that only meet the minimum requirements.

If SOE did decide to go down the path of making significant changes to the way the game functions, so much that it in turn would significantly affect the gameplay performance of systems of many players that play PS2, they would have to let their player-base know at least 6 months in advance before going ahead with the changes.

Hence my point about having a separate server.

The argument is moot anyway as I really don't think these suggestions will have much effect on people's systems as they are all, without exception, effects that have been present in games for many years.

Fog is already built into the PS2 engine. We're just asking them to make it thicker on occasion. If anything this would improve performance as there's less of the environment for the graphics card to draw. The sandstorm effect shown in my example was from Unreal Tournament 3, a game released in 2007. If your computer cannot handle it then I'm afraid you're out of the game. You say, "It's not fair to add in these effects because my computer can't handle it." It's every bit as valid for me to ask, "Why should my gameplay experience be neutered because you're playing on a system more than nine years old?"

But yes, if they decide to make significant changes to game and graphics engine functions then they can implement them on a separate server. Problem solved. People playing on decade-old systems can play on one server and the rest of us can play a more enjoyable game on another.

Weather effects can have a fairly light impact on performance if optimized the proper way, in conjunction with proper implementation for different graphics settings.

There should be a separate setting for weather effects. For example, on low, rain could simply be made by attaching (parenting) several planes, textured with scrolling rain textures, to the player, so that they are constantly surrounding him and giving the impression of rain falling around him (this is similar to Minecraft's implementation).

On medium, rain could be composed of elongated particles or even simply sprites (which are extremely cheap to render), with medium density, that are not physically simulated and simply spawn 400 meters above the player and follow a straight path to the ground; this is similar to early Source Engine implementations.

On high, rain could be a fully-fledged, physically simulated particle system that creates particles at the flight ceiling that morph and change as they fall down while being pushed by physically simulated wind, and realistically impact on all surfaces they hit.

The exact same could be done for snow.

Also, as someone else said, fog/render distance would be greatly lowered on low settings to simulate the bad visibility that more complex rain simulation would create on high settings, thus low-end computers would have less things to render and performance loss would be negligeable.

OK, suppose SOE should create a single separate server for everyone around the world with "low-end" systems to use...
One would not be enough, as most players would have connection issues from elsewhere in the world.

Supposing SOE has the funds to set up and maintain multiple "low-end" servers for people to use around the world, then your idea could work. Are they likely to do this? No. They would need at least 3 more servers worldwide to do this.

Also, I don't like your assumption that there are people with "decade" old systems that play this game; people who have such old systems would probably not be playing the game as it currently stands. Having said this, if there is anyone out there playing PS2 with such an old system, I would be interested to hear from you.

You've deliberately misinterpreted my post to mean that I assumed there are people with decade-old machines. I made no such assumption; I was merely being facetious. That should be obvious. I suggest you look up 'straw man.'

Planetside 2 already has nine active servers, plus twenty-three inactive ones. The only assumption I've made that may have been inappropriate was that, given this, a couple of extra servers with lower-end expectations wouldn't be a stretch.

Please don't think that your assumption that SOE wouldn't do it is any better than my assumption that they could.

Further, in order to attack my previous post you've conveniently ignored the main point of it. Namely, that this argument about alternative servers is irrelevant because the performance impact would be very minimal in order to achieve the objectives of implementing the effects.

The other obvious point I made that you chose to ignore is that these effects were old hat nine years ago. A fact illustrated by my example of them being implemented in a game that long ago. Therefore, if your assumption that there are people playing

You can't pick and choose elements of a person's argument and take them out of context in order to attack them.

I've made my position very clear and it's a waste of my time to argue it further.

I think they can work around it. Dynamic weather would involve mostly additional GPU work - and PS2 is quite efficient in it's GPU use, it's the CPU that's the bottleneck. Most players do have GPU headroom.

The problem is when you want to make the weather meaningful to gameplay. Galaxies hovering above the clouds, invisible to AA, for example. Remember the infiltrator invisibility issue at low details? People complaining that disabling vegetation is unfair? The additional work is in making sure the features work more or less the same, functionally, on ultra as they do on minimum - even though you could be using a DIAMETRICALLY different approach on those detail levels.

The cool part about this idea is that if you've got a solid dynamic weather system, you can include that as a player-controllable element (eg. capture satellite uplink, make it rain frogs in Vanu warpgate) - or link it to the alert system, occasionally spawning deadly thunderstorms to spice up that tedious biolab grind.

I say - dev team go for it. Check the viability of low-hanging fruit first like the Esamir haze shader and thunderstorms before moving into the feisty stuff like volumetric clouds.

I'm not out to "attack" anyone, and saying so is yet another assumption that you have made.
I am also apparently wasting my time with this, so here we shall part ways.

Bumping!
I want rain and thunderstorms!

I appreciate the bump and the thoughtful discussion!