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TalonFloof / EnhancedWeather

Adds Localized Weather Systems to Minecraft
https://modrinth.com/mod/enhanced-weather
MIT License
19 stars 3 forks source link

[Suggestion] larger, more varied, dynamic clouds #52

Open AlienXtream opened 3 months ago

AlienXtream commented 3 months ago

in the real world clouds are usually several kilometres across, come in various types, change shape over time and are affected by the terrain. having the clouds in several visually distinct forms as well as being larger and more dramatic could really help set the tone of things.

the size of the noise map should be scaled up significantly (or made a config value) to allow huge clouds thousands of blocks across.

weather should come in several specific cloud types, ranging from sparse, nearly non existent whispy clouds in hot dry biomes, to massive tall cumbulonimbus clouds for storms that form over oceans, moving inland.

for dynamic clouds i would suggest a secondary lower quality noise map that rolls in the opposite direction to the clouds direction and possibly using the local heightmap (as an intersection of the y level the clouds are at) to create the effect of clouds "wrapping" around tall mountains.

TalonFloof commented 3 months ago

With the way the clouds are generated, dynamically updating them would be really slow since the mesh has to be reconstructed with each update to a single bit of it, there's not a practical way of quickly and dynamically keeping up with all of this without it being extremely expensive on both the CPU and the GPU.

AlienXtream commented 3 months ago

hrm.. what about dithered alpha? or some other textured surface? i tend to think about this from an artist's perspective so idk about performance and all that. would having the "mesh" be static and its texture change be faster? that way the meshing can be reused and only the material data needs updating?

RubenRME commented 2 months ago

Random idea, feel free to ignore if deemed unwanted/too difficult/w.e: what about an integration with Better Clouds? No clue if its doable but might be interesting to investigate ^^

TalonFloof commented 2 months ago

@RubenRME Better Clouds doesn't have an API that makes it possible to integrate with, plus, what if the user doesn't want to install another mod? It makes things redundant and makes no sense from a user and developer standpoint.