[CF-Devel] Weather level 5 (Re: Weather needs smoothing)

Fri Jul 30 12:34:10 CDT 2004

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Weather code, IMO, need a complete redo. The guy who coded this, i think had 
too great ambitions for a MORPG. When you look at code you see it simulate 
seasons, humidity, temperature, wind, gulf stream (no you are not dreaming), 
altitude, and am not sure but probably earth rotation.

All this to tell you the code is far too heavy and has become to complicated 
to manage. Already tried to fix leaks, improved speed, but i ended up 
breaking some other things. Yes this code use memory, and a lot of CPU, and 
in the end you end up with problems like duplicating object (hope this has 
been fixed since) and crashes.

But i think there were great things in this code that should be kept!

1) terrain change as climate change (eg snowed mountains)
2) plants are growing (a good tihng to make the world alive)
3) snow and rain change as you change location (but current calculation is too 
complicated, all i need as player is too see climate change and perhaps 
moutians area colder and mor humid than sandy areas). This could be complete 
random player won't see difference. No need for climate predicitons.
4) Day/Night. Also important on a RPG

But the following could be changed/added

1) No gulfstream (simply reducing speed of climat echange at seaside is enough 
to simulate)
2) Better drawing for rain (I have seen player trying to fight those blops) 
Some small circles would be enough, perhaps adding smoothing to this would be 
good (you just need to set a good smoothlevel (say big case on top of most 
things) and draw the smooth picture. No need to make it floor as smoothing 
isn't restricted to floor (any visible arch can be smoothed!!!)
3) No large scale calculation, i think creating randmoly some clouds and then 
moving the smoothly along the land until they are empty would be good enough 
to simulate some small climate.
4) need some way to tell client 'hey it's raining' or 'hey it's snowing' so it 
can do some special effect (sound of water drop, snowflakes, etc...) And we 
can make the difference between 'it's snowing' and 'snow has dropped here a 
few minutes ago, it's full on ground'
5) Perhaps create a life cycle for plant (a rose is not suppose to survive on 
full snow ground, grass starts to die put in sun for too long)

The last 2 points are not the most important and may need lots of work, but 
the rest could be done quite easily (easy to say, difficult to do, like 
usual).

Anyway, i dunno what's your opinion but mine is current weather code is 
jeopardy to activate on server and personnaly i don't want to touch it 
anymore (too difficult to maintain).

Ok, time to rush to the theater for king arthur movie, bye all!

Le vendredi 30 Juillet 2004 14:30, Lalo Martins a écrit :
The reason *I* don't run level 5 is that it eats RAM like
crazy.  I know it's supposed to, but if someone could check for
leaks, I'd feel better.

Recipe for crashing your server:
1. run with 128Mb or less
2. run with weather on lvl 5
3. open a client (if possible in the same machine to eat more
   RAM) ;-)
4. go to Wolfsburg
5. crash

No, I don't know why Wolfsburg :-) I suppose it is (IIRC) an
equatorial climate, very humid, so the server has to manage
pools and plants and whatnot *PLUS* the town itself...

[]s,

                                               |alo

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