Sure, This might have been posted before, maybe in a different area, or if not well...Guess I'm the first! This idea came to me while I was watching a nice cloudy rain sitting in my home on my starting planet.... Why couldn't rain accumulate to form puddles, or lakes? As it stands right now, unless there is a background tile, water drains away, so there is no real risk to most of a planet's surface, it's the caves, and hopefully newly added pits, that are at risk to be filled with water. It also provides a reason to not just dig a hole on the surface without covering it, or at least creating a base before the stone layer where drainage is no longer possible. Open mineshafts are bad, M'kay? When I thought of that, I also thought of how weather could also play on different things. As I've never been out of the the Alpha Quadrant, I've not seen all the other Biomes, or if there are effects yet, but it's worth a shot at saying these. Acidic Rain! A planet's atmosphere might be habitable, breathable air, and bearable temperatures, but what of the rain? Depending on hidden stats, and the general planet Biome, Different Rain storms could have a chance to be acidic (or always be, should the planet be toxic.) This would deal a very, very very small amount of damage (Scaling up as planet threat increases, more acidic places and such.) So for instance, every second it would deal 0.1 damage. So every ten seconds, you take a point of damage at low acidity areas, upwards to 2.0 in those places where you can barely walk without toxic/corrosive lakes around. This Leads to structural damage unless blocks have a high health/resistance, though again this is about weather, not blocks. Players armor could provide resistance, even immunity to this, an umbrella item, held in the hands, could allow movement about without harm, or lowering it's damage by X for better umbrellas, crafted at the loom! Non-Water/Acid Rain Other Biomes, such as the bloody flesh one (I've found it twice now, so creepy) If near enough to the surface, could also rain non-water based things....Just for effect, again drawing on it pooling in dents that have backgrounds. Snow Blindness A light snow is pretty, and a good sign that a planet is cold and you should stay near a fire, or wear lots of warm clothes....But in heavy amounts, it could be hard to see, to travel even. Again Armor/Items could possibly help with this. Stronger Snow storms could lead to the screen being fogged over (Similar to when you are freezing to death) Making it more dangerous to travel entirely, and harder to tell just how cold you are until you hear the warning bells. These heavy storms could also drop hail, which upon hitting a block, forms either a chunk of ice, slush, or snow, meaning you will have to de-ice your base station, or home after a heavy storm. Light, and normal snow fall wouldn't include building up. I could almost see a custom darkness, instead of the screen freeze effect, imagine instead of darkness it's whiteness, and lights/torches/everything invert during the storm to create "Darkness" in which you can see clearly, allowing you to make paths using torches, or slowly navigate with your flashlights. Other Non-Water/Snow Things Dust Storms on Arid planets, Sandstorms, ash storms, all things similar to snow (Being non-liquid particles) Could accumulate during heavy, blinding storms. Sand storms would leave sand, Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. And could cause blindness of it's color, and leave behind chunks like snow, though different qualities of course. A sand storm would bury things differently than snow, or ash. Anyway, That's my little suggestion...I'm not a forum poster usually, I lurk, poke at interesting things, make a post once in a while, but I don't go digging for already suggested things, as I might have my own take on them, and wouldn't want to lean one way or another while my fingers do this magical typing thing.
I personally agree with this... I was just thinking myself that more extreme weather effects would be interesting and make exploration more risky and possibly rewarding. Like for instance in the desert, if there is a major dust storm, maybe it would reveal a hidden dungeon or tomb underground as it blows dust off? Just an addition I think would be cool. Kudos to you for bringing the idea up!
I was thinking of sand blowing about too, though I wanted to try and keep it a little simple with the hail/snow/sand fall during storms, there are already systems in the game that have projectiles become blocks, so I'd think making said projectiles fall from the sky randomly would be a step into going for my suggestions, actually moving the sand on a surface might be a lot more complex, getting each block to shift one or more spaces in a direction.
I dont see how it would be more complex... If you are mining and accidentally mine the wrong thing, you would create a huge chain reaction of tiles collapsing... all they would have to do is add a wind effect.
It's shifting more than one space at a time without entirely overworking the processes, each sand block moving requires calculations and date crunching in the background, plus naturally set sand doesn't have effect of moving until it's mined. Think of it this way: Projectile -> Create block upon Impact. If sand/gravity effected block, check for block below. -> If no block, move to location. Sand Shift -> Check if destination is open -> If open, move to location, if not, stay and check if secondary location is open (Below it) -> if 1st location obtained, check for secondary location in new target area. If secondary Location is first used, check if primary or secondary are open in secondary. Repeat until all blocks are at final destination. When I mine deep, and basically have my screen full of sand, If I power down into it, the game lags some, needing the time to process all that movement data and queries into how the sand should move/work.
Not bashing your system or anything, but I am running a Intel Celeron Dual Core 1.80GHz with 4GHz of RAM and an Intel HD Graphics internal card, and I have yet to run into any lag issues with block physics... Only when I run into an area with a ton of NPC's do I get lag. So that makes me think it might be an optimization issue, not hardware. Block physics don't seem to use that much power to calculate, at least not from what I have seen.
It could be optimization issues, and NPCs use a crap ton more in them than terrain blocks, but it still sort of stands than compared to just having blocks fall from the sky as projectiles, is a much simpler process. Perhaps they could fly from the sides of the screen, being shot locally (IE where you are) during the storm, one direction or the other, wind depending, would create the illusion of shifting sands...of course, being buried in sand isn't deadly or a fear....but the shifting would also close up all the sand-made tunnels and caves formed naturally, that have the shifting type for a roof and floor, Ores would be lost left and right due to it being shifted and not seen anymore and so forth. I have a lot more in mind as well, but I focused this thread onto the effects of the weather, not new liquids and such. I mean there are so many possibilities there as well, Quicksand, Functional Tar (as it is now, it's just black/purplish water.) Honey...Apex Chemical pools, which I'd imagine would be like the stim buffs.
Perhaps they could make it to when an ore is moved in the shifting sands, it would set up again like a normal ore block vs being lost forever in the sandy abyss.
That might be possible, though honestly it'd also be a bummer if that would happen...Part of the joy of mining in sand/rubble is when you find ores, dig below it, and profit as all the ore falls into you.
True... I'm sure they could figure something out with the vast pool of development knowledge they have proven themselves with thus far lol
I know this thread has been dead for a while but I also would like to see more weather effects. Maybe not quicksands... but I would like water to accumulate better or possibly to help it by being able to melt snow. Also, there is a type of light rain which does not affect water levels at all, and it's always a disappointment...
