I’ve been meaning to add wind to the game for a while now, and here are my thoughts so far:
Wind would aggravate the air temperature. Cold + windy == very cold.
The player would resist this by wearing clothing that has a high coverage %. Not wearing mittens in cold windy weather would incur a huge penalty; wearing fingerless gloves (60% coverage) would incur a big penalty; wearing normal gloves (95%) would incur a minor penalty.
The player would also resist this by wearing wind resistance clothing. Either the material would be taken into consideration (wool does nearly nothing, leather is great), either the environmental protection would be taken into consideration, either new flags would be made, either new “wind resistance” values would be made. I am leaning towards the material for simplicity’s sake.
Other game play impacts :
Being indoors would negate the wind (I will ignore open windows and drafts)
Wind could affect creature speed depending on their direction (maybe? this could be neat for very high wind situations)
The player could hide behind buildings for wind coverage (a simple wall check and wind direction check)
Before I start digging through the code at how weather now works and things like that, I am looking for some suggestions or feedback. What do you think?
The big difficulty with wind is that it’s very expensive to simulate. Now it might not seem that way when you are just thinking about flat ground, but as soon as you need wind to start flowing around buildings it adds up extremely fast.
I wasn’t going to model wind in that much detail, which I suppose is a cop out. The model I am thinking about would really just be to affect temperature, so it would just be a flat integer with a N/NW/W/etc direction, vaguely linked to the current weather pattern.
When I mentioned being able to hide behind buildings, it would be a very simple “is there a building 3 tiles in front of you? you’re probably fine”.
I will then calculate the difference between the windchill and the actual temperature. This value will be reduced by the player’s wind resistance, and then added to the temperature for bodytemp calculations.
So if it is 38C outdoor in 7m/s winds in 30% relative humidity, the player will feel the air at 35.8C. The 2.2C drop will be reduced if the player is wearing clothing.
The reduction will be based on clothing coverage and material; wool and cotton will be considered bad, everything else good. I divide the coverage by 2 if your clothing is of bad material; otherwise it is taken whole. I will also do a small calculation in the case of a player being 40% covered by leather and 90% covered by cotton.
Another example of windchill: if it is 17C (62.6F) in 13m/s (30mph) winds with 10% relative humidity, the felt temperature will be 4C. That’s a huge drop, and might require our survivor to wear some extra clothing during a cold dry windy spring day
wind will be a readily available information, so it would be conceivable to create windmills the same way that funnels work, however at the moment that is not my intent.
