Posted By: Marky Mark
Intelligent Storm System (ISS) project - 07/12/08 18:59
Hello everyone
Maybe some of you remember my tornado/storm chasing game project... Well after more than 6 months (some personnal problems took me out of the project) I decided to start the project again.
I tried many many many possibilities to make it realistic. I wanted my environment to be creating storms by itself depending on the atmospheric situation in the map, using variables such as CAPE (convective available potential energy) and LI (Lift Index), used by storm chasers in storm prediction.
But, I encountered a problem. I can't program a life-like atmosphere, it is impossible. Even the scientists aren't able to calculate everything in our atmosphere, so I decided to try another way, and this is why I would need your help to figure out how I could do this.
My plan is to use real situations that happened (I have a huge bank of maps for specific US stormy days so it's not a problem). I would create some charts on my world's map that would look like one of this US stormy day, and the player would look at those charts to decide where to go on the map.
That would mean the place where the storms would spawn would be known before it happens (in the engine). Then, no need to create a complex environment system.
But what about the storms? I want my storms to be entities or group of entities all reacting together (in a storm there is many specific parts, some are rolling, some are just fluffy clouds and some are rotating) and all those parts are moving together as a group; the storm.
So if I decide that in my day 1, the storms will spawn at 3pm, I want them to progressivly appear, and then react to what's in the local environment. here's an illustration...
(here you can see the parts of the storms, top view)
(top view of the storm group with movement arrow, and some color zones : the local environnment features)
The blue color zone (invisible in game indeed) would be killing or weakening the storm, the yellow color would make it bigger with more rain and lightning, and the red one would add rotation. At a certain level of rotation (i.e: the rotation variable of the storm is more than 70), create a funnel that starts to move down to the ground.
For the visual/3d part, I already got a lot of it, such as clouds, lightnings, rain, and tornado. So I need help making my Intelligent Storm System
I'm posting here to get some help, i'm not a pro at all, so if anyone is interested in helping for the ISS project, it would be very appreciated.
Thanks everyone!
EDIT: I'm still using A6... :S
Maybe some of you remember my tornado/storm chasing game project... Well after more than 6 months (some personnal problems took me out of the project) I decided to start the project again.
I tried many many many possibilities to make it realistic. I wanted my environment to be creating storms by itself depending on the atmospheric situation in the map, using variables such as CAPE (convective available potential energy) and LI (Lift Index), used by storm chasers in storm prediction.
But, I encountered a problem. I can't program a life-like atmosphere, it is impossible. Even the scientists aren't able to calculate everything in our atmosphere, so I decided to try another way, and this is why I would need your help to figure out how I could do this.
My plan is to use real situations that happened (I have a huge bank of maps for specific US stormy days so it's not a problem). I would create some charts on my world's map that would look like one of this US stormy day, and the player would look at those charts to decide where to go on the map.
That would mean the place where the storms would spawn would be known before it happens (in the engine). Then, no need to create a complex environment system.
But what about the storms? I want my storms to be entities or group of entities all reacting together (in a storm there is many specific parts, some are rolling, some are just fluffy clouds and some are rotating) and all those parts are moving together as a group; the storm.
So if I decide that in my day 1, the storms will spawn at 3pm, I want them to progressivly appear, and then react to what's in the local environment. here's an illustration...
(here you can see the parts of the storms, top view)
(top view of the storm group with movement arrow, and some color zones : the local environnment features)
The blue color zone (invisible in game indeed) would be killing or weakening the storm, the yellow color would make it bigger with more rain and lightning, and the red one would add rotation. At a certain level of rotation (i.e: the rotation variable of the storm is more than 70), create a funnel that starts to move down to the ground.
For the visual/3d part, I already got a lot of it, such as clouds, lightnings, rain, and tornado. So I need help making my Intelligent Storm System
I'm posting here to get some help, i'm not a pro at all, so if anyone is interested in helping for the ISS project, it would be very appreciated.
Thanks everyone!
EDIT: I'm still using A6... :S