New weather system

[Zireael]

KA, I loaded a game from the 14th experimental into today’s one and Clear 22 degrees Celsius went to a thunderstorm -3 degrees Celsius.

Do I need to start a new game?

[KA101]

[quote=“Zireael, post:1, topic:6828”]KA, I loaded a game from the 14th experimental into today’s one and Clear 22 degrees Celsius went to a thunderstorm -3 degrees Celsius.

Do I need to start a new game?[/quote]

That might be necessary, unfortunately. When were you (Season, day X)?

Unlike the usual start (65F and Clear), this system starts with accurate temp/weather for mid-March (vernal equinox, literal day 1 of Spring) in New England, which is 20-50F during the day, and there was an issue (Efimero fixed it) with it taking half an hour to load the actual weather system, so it’s an instant takeover now.

[Zireael]

Summer, day 1, year 2.

[qurvax]

Nice. Gonna test. Rolled my usual frail char, and got killed by landmine in the middle of the damn endless forest on day one. This gonna be tough

[Efimero]

[quote=“Zireael, post:1, topic:6828”]KA, I loaded a game from the 14th experimental into today’s one and Clear 22 degrees Celsius went to a thunderstorm -3 degrees Celsius.

Do I need to start a new game?[/quote]
Actually, you don’t need to start a new game. The side effect of loading an old save in the new weather system is it will snap right into whatever the new system considers the weather is for your world and position in spacetime. That means that it will completely ignore whatever weather your save had before. This should only happen when loading an old save, but it won’t affect anything else, really.
It’s also unavoidable, because it’s a complete paradigm shift respect the old system. Before, the weather was generated as time passed. Now, the weather is always the same for each point in space and time, so if you were to somehow travel in time (not that it can happen) to a place you had been before, the weather would be the same.
It’s using a perlin noise generator and some constant wave functions to find out the weather parameters, if you are interested in the implementation.

This should mean no more cold summers or hot winters, but the rain-causing conditions were eyeballed very, very intuitively, so if you find yourself under constant thunderstorms or with no rain at all, tell me and we’ll adjust that. Keep in mind, though, that it should rain more in winter than in summer.

I made some assumptions regarding what would be best for gameplay and modified a bit the algorithm towards that from a more realistic model, so you shouldn’t see days that stay under freezing temps for too long in winter (which would happen irl) or days in summer with scorching hot nights.
Also, keep in mind that there’s some randomness in the algorithm, so you could get extreme conditions for brief periods and that’s just your bad luck. =3

New characters will probably start under freezing temperatures, but in less than an hour it should start rising, unless you’re really unlucky. I also noticed that the outsides are warmer than the insides of buildings, so keep that in mind if you’re getting chilly the first hours of the game.

At night, though, it sill very likely freeze, as KA101 said, so get warm clothing the first day or prepare to make a fire.
Good luck, survivors. >:3

[Pthalocy]

That’s what happened to me! Weather overwrite of Thunderstorms and 8C out. Brr. On the plus side it suddenly meant not dying of thirst. Hooray funnels!

[qurvax]

Fire doesn’t seem to work well. The night of day one was a real nightmare. Getting beat up by wildlife, and having constant frostbite on my face. Also, effects seems kinda off. Somehow i got “Hot head”, “Hot legs” and Frostbite on the face at the same time. Seen this just standing inside, with no fires near and -10C ambient temp. To add some more challenge - dodging doesn’t work. There are text about dodging attacks, but damage still come thru, and no exp in dodging is gained. Have my legs almost ripped off by coyote. Overall - Cata seems realistic more than ever

[Efimero]

Fire doesn’t seem to work well. The night of day one was a real nightmare. Getting beat up by wildlife, and having constant frostbite on my face. Also, effects seems kinda off. Somehow i got “Hot head”, “Hot legs” and Frostbite on the face at the same time. Seen this just standing inside, with no fires near and -10C ambient temp. To add some more challenge - dodging doesn’t work. There are text about dodging attacks, but damage still come thru, and no exp in dodging is gained. Have my legs almost ripped off by coyote. Overall - Cata seems realistic more than ever

Fire should work. Sleeping near a fire might not. It never has for me. Body temperature drops while sleeping.
Don’t confuse freezing with frostbite. Freezing is a temperature, so it can’t happen at the same time as hot on the same body part, however frostbite is an injury and it will last for a while after you get to that point. Picture your character with purple bruises burnt on the face due to the cold. Even if now it’s hot, the ice has already damaged the tissues and it takes a while to repair.
Also, head and face are separate bodyparts that must be covered independently, so you could have your face frozen while the rest of the body is hot under the clothing. Have fun. =3

[KA101]

For sleeping, the best advice I have comes from Shoes’ work: sleep on a bed or at least a rollmat, and have surplus gear on that tile to blanket-up as you’ll need. (Err for too much, as you’ll use exactly the amount of warmth you need if there’s an overage.)

[qurvax]

I had chilly status, because my head and mouth warmth was very low (0/5), and tried to compensate by standing right next to burning heavy stick. Apparently that was not enough, as heavy stick burned completely and i still had “Chilly face” going on.

[Efimero]

I had chilly status, because my head and mouth warmth was very low (0/5), and tried to compensate by standing right next to burning heavy stick. Apparently that was not enough, as heavy stick burned completely and i still had “Chilly face” going on.

Make a bigger fire. Fire size depends on volume of fuel in the tile. =3

[Aenye]

I also noticed that the outsides are warmer than the insides of buildings, so keep that in mind if you’re getting chilly the first hours of the game.

If we’re talking unpowered buildings with no heating / AC, this would likely be the case for a march morning (seeing as the house would slowly cool down over the night and start warming back up through the day). On the other hand, if the house was powered and had central heating / AC (and this is the case for most US homes in 2010), the temperature should be stable and “comfortable” in game terms.

That said, what would the coding side of this look like ? Easy addition ? Nightmarish jumble of various changes ? Would it pay off to implement something like that ? (Unfortunately I’m blank when it comes to json / lua)

Why am I asking ?

[spoiler]

We can exploit this, of course ! Don’t you think the construction menu is limited in relation to other crafting areas ?

Build walls, build furniture, decorate and that’s pretty much 90+ % of the options there. Why not give the possibility of adding / removing insulation to walls ? Heating / ventillation / AC systems ?

If you can craft a charge rifle or mininuke and build a mobile fortress from the ground up, laying air ducts, building a rotary pump and heating / cooling elements sounds trivial, doesn’t it ?

IMHO, this would enrich the game and be fun to actually consider thermal aspects when building a shelter / car for the needs of my survivor…

Model ?

Right away: If we consider an unpowered / unheated object (be that house, car or even a rock), the temperature vs time plot for its interior would resemble a sinusoidal curve with daily extrema occurring at dawn (minimum) and dusk (maximum). The amplitude of the curve would of course be dependent on thermal insulation (actual insulaiton or being located above / below ground) and outside conditions (temperature, rain, wind).[/spoiler]

Cheers,
Aenye

[KA101]

[quote=“Efimero, post:5, topic:6828”]I also noticed that the outsides are warmer than the insides of buildings, so keep that in mind if you’re getting chilly the first hours of the game.

If we’re talking unpowered buildings with no heating / AC, this would likely be the case for a march morning (seeing as the house would slowly cool down over the night and start warming back up through the day). On the other hand, if the house was powered and had central heating / AC (and this is the case for most US homes in 2010), the temperature should be stable and “comfortable” in game terms.

That said, what would the coding side of this look like ? Easy addition ? Nightmarish jumble of various changes ? Would it pay off to implement something like that ? (Unfortunately I’m blank when it comes to json / lua)

Why am I asking ?

[spoiler]

We can exploit this, of course ! Don’t you think the construction menu is limited in relation to other crafting areas ?

Build walls, build furniture, decorate and that’s pretty much 90+ % of the options there. Why not give the possibility of adding / removing insulation to walls ? Heating / ventillation / AC systems ?

If you can craft a charge rifle or mininuke and build a mobile fortress from the ground up, laying air ducts, building a rotary pump and heating / cooling elements sounds trivial, doesn’t it ?

IMHO, this would enrich the game and be fun to actually consider thermal aspects when building a shelter / car for the needs of my survivor…

Model ?

Right away: If we consider an unpowered / unheated object (be that house, car or even a rock), the temperature vs time plot for its interior would resemble a sinusoidal curve with daily extrema occurring at dawn (minimum) and dusk (maximum). The amplitude of the curve would of course be dependent on thermal insulation (actual insulaiton or being located above / below ground) and outside conditions (temperature, rain, wind).[/spoiler]

Cheers,
Aenye[/quote]

Fortunately: it’s pretty much all C++ for temp & bodytemp calculations.

Unfortunately: there’s no central power grid to handle natural gas, electric, etc; presumably the plants were either shut down safely when evacuated, or have run out of fuel/overloaded as their staff succumbed to the zombies/triffids/fungus.

Aside from that, R values aren’t well-implemented as (IIRC) Shoes wanted to hold off on that until we had wind. Feel free to revise & extend!

[kevin.granade]

As a rule, buildings are unpowered and will remain so. Even if you have a power source, central air conditioning is EXTREMELY power intensive to maintain, so I really don’t see anything other than perhaps air circulation happening any time soon.

The exceptions that are powered can simply override the weather conditions like ice labs do.
We can talk a look at whether the effective conditions inside buildings reflect what would really happen in the scenario, but I don’t see any benefit of trying to calculate insulation, ventilation, thermal mass etc for buildings, it would be a lot of work for basically no benefit.

[Womble]

This all sounds great. I’m already itching to sink a few hours into a new survivor, something I normally don’t feel until getting the old one killed in some damn fool way.

re: the house insulation stuff - the simplest solution might be to add air conditioning to vehicles. A lot of what one might want to install in a base is already kinda covered by vehicle construction not having a definite “purpose” - e.g. if your survivor wants a powered fridge at home, build a minifridge and give it a power supply.

[KA101]

[quote=“Womble, post:15, topic:6828”]This all sounds great. I’m already itching to sink a few hours into a new survivor, something I normally don’t feel until getting the old one killed in some damn fool way.

re: the house insulation stuff - the simplest solution might be to add air conditioning to vehicles. A lot of what one might want to install in a base is already kinda covered by vehicle construction not having a definite “purpose” - e.g. if your survivor wants a powered fridge at home, build a minifridge and give it a power supply.[/quote]

Already in. (Enclosed!) Vehicles tend to maintain you at Comfortable.

[Womble]

[quote=“KA101, post:16, topic:6828”][quote=“Womble, post:15, topic:6828”]This all sounds great. I’m already itching to sink a few hours into a new survivor, something I normally don’t feel until getting the old one killed in some damn fool way.

re: the house insulation stuff - the simplest solution might be to add air conditioning to vehicles. A lot of what one might want to install in a base is already kinda covered by vehicle construction not having a definite “purpose” - e.g. if your survivor wants a powered fridge at home, build a minifridge and give it a power supply.[/quote]

Already in. (Enclosed!) Vehicles tend to maintain you at Comfortable.[/quote]

Hadn’t noticed, but I had been driving around on a trike with a roof. (At least, I presume that the game is checking for doors, windscreens, boards, etc. all around.) Good to know that finding a car might be enough to avoid frostbite on Night 1, too!