PC Dew Drop In

4sheetzngeegles

4sheetzngeegles

Well-known member
This is a question about the dew catcher.

I watched JaWoodle 1 to 4 hordenight. During the time he used a single
dew catcher. During this time it rained, multiple times. Instead of the
catcher becoming the new multi build. Can a CVar be used to accelerate
moisture collection during rainfall, and fog situations? It would be
a nice compliment in vanilla, but if not, seeing the efficiency of the
mechanic I may mod that.

 
4sheetzngeegles said:
This is a question about the dew catcher.

I watched JaWoodle 1 to 4 hordenight. During the time he used a single
dew catcher. During this time it rained, multiple times. Instead of the
catcher becoming the new multi build. Can a CVar be used to accelerate
moisture collection during rainfall, and fog situations? It would be
a nice compliment in vanilla, but if not, seeing the efficiency of the
mechanic I may mod that.
Click to expand...
It does not work like that. Dew catchers are often in unloaded chunks, so they are not actively doing anything. When you open one it is simply an elapsed time check. A simple reliable mechanic with low overhead.

 
faatal said:
It does not work like that. Dew catchers are often in unloaded chunks, so they are not actively doing anything. When you open one it is simply an elapsed time check. A simple reliable mechanic with low overhead.
Click to expand...


If I understand correctly, when opened a Dew Collector compares the last time the Dew Collector was opened vs the current time, computes the difference, and makes water as needed.

Using the same approach, couldn't there be a game-wide rain counter? That is, when opened a Dew Collector would keep track of the rain counter value the last it was opened. Then, when opened, the Dew Collector compares its stored rain counter value to the game's current rain counter.

If you wanted fog to contribute, run a game-wide fog counter too.

You could even exclude rain/fog in certain biomes because the Dew Collector should be able to tell where it is placed.

Just a thought. 

 
zztong said:
If I understand correctly, when opened a Dew Collector compares the last time the Dew Collector was opened vs the current time, computes the difference, and makes water as needed.

Using the same approach, couldn't there be a game-wide rain counter? That is, when opened a Dew Collector would keep track of the rain counter value the last it was opened. Then, when opened, the Dew Collector compares its stored rain counter value to the game's current rain counter.

If you wanted fog to contribute, run a game-wide fog counter too.

You could even exclude rain/fog in certain biomes because the Dew Collector should be able to tell where it is placed.

Just a thought. 
Click to expand...
But just because it rains on one part of the map doesn't mean it rains on the entire map.  I'm not even positive it rains across an entire biome, though it might.  Even if it does, if you're not in the biome your dew collector is in and no chunks in that biome are loaded, it has nothing to count.  Besides, when it comes down to it, is it really a big deal to have it fill based on time instead of trying to track weather?  If the fill time is configured to be the average of what you'd get if you were to track rain, then the results are the same over time.  It just fills consistently instead of not having any water until after it rains.  I think this way works fine.

One other thing to consider- if you made it to work on rain and people use mods to disable weather, they wouldn't get any water without modding the dew collector.

 
Riamus said:
But just because it rains on one part of the map doesn't mean it rains on the entire map.  I'm not even positive it rains across an entire biome, though it might.  Even if it does, if you're not in the biome your dew collector is in and no chunks in that biome are loaded, it has nothing to count.
Click to expand...


I believe weather is global. If so, it wouldn't matter if the chunk was loaded or not. The rain counter would be with the code that handles the weather, not in the dew collector. It would get incremented whenever the game decided to make it rain.

The dew collector would be loaded at the time a player is there to open it. That's when the dew collector's "last rain count" value would get compared to the global rain counter and updated.

It is exactly the same solution that is being used now where time is being tracked, but instead of (or in addition to) tracking time, you can track rain.

  Besides, when it comes down to it, is it really a big deal to have it fill based on time instead of trying to track weather?
Click to expand...


I don't think it matters all that much, but in terms of the engineering, it seemed like Faatal's response seemed incomplete. I'm not suggesting he's wrong. I think he was being brief and I'm probably making an assumption about weather being global.

 
zztong said:
I believe weather is global.
Click to expand...
I don't know about the current state, much less A21, but weather has been _personal_ at times; my friend complaining of horrible fog on a perfectly clear day, at the same spot .. I wouldn't trust it being global either :)

 
theFlu said:
I don't know about the current state, much less A21, but weather has been _personal_ at times; my friend complaining of horrible fog on a perfectly clear day, at the same spot .. I wouldn't trust it being global either :)
Click to expand...


Personal? I didn't remember that from server play, but if so then yeh, that would derail my line of thinking.

Hmm, if it is personal then maybe weather is entirely client side? If so, wouldn't that enable a player tinkering with their own weather.

 
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zztong said:
Hmm, if it is personal then maybe weather is entirely client side?
Click to expand...
Note my "at times" .. I don't intend to imply it is necessarily even working as it should ;) So don't draw too many conclusions from that, I don't really know how it is supposed to be.

 
It seems to work the same for others I play the game with.  I often hear, "I hate this fog." as I'm driving through fog anyhow.  However, I was pretty sure that in previous discussions on using rain for the counter, it was started that it only rained on loaded chunks.  This recent post by faatal says the same thing I've seen previously about it.  Doesn't mean I am understanding it correctly, of course.

 
I only asked the question because the Dew collector to me is an environmental additive.
Meaning as I play, in my mind I would see a tarp, a funnel, and a container. Logically
I thought of it visually as a physical mechanic. Faatal explained it as more of an
incidental time to volume calculation.

I like to seamlessly adjust the things they add, it makes my gameplay more like a good

movie.

Zztong's statement "Using the same approach, couldn't there be a game-wide rain counter?"
was what i thought of when it started raining during, JaWoodle's stream.

For me I've reintroduced altitude temp variances, and since I hand layer my biomes by altitude
it just popped in my head. Consistency of an added feature, to make it more a seamless part of
the environment. EX: more water in forest, less in desert waste, no need in the snow, well because
I have snow. But now I have to test that; can I still boil snow???

That's actually what I did in my first days, go to edge of snow biome, collect a load of non melting
snow and boil as needed.

But in the end it all came down to the water catch I built for my son's greenhouse. I was reminded
of this, by watching the stream.

 
I'm pretty sure weather was fixed in alpha 20. I run a mod that centers around environmental/locational challenges. And it heavily affects the weather, and all players on my server report the same weather at the same times. Everyone freezes at once, or gets hot at the same time. So the temperature and conditions are server based now, not player side. 

 
theFlu said:
I don't know about the current state, much less A21, but weather has been _personal_ at times; my friend complaining of horrible fog on a perfectly clear day, at the same spot .. I wouldn't trust it being global either :)
Click to expand...
Tell your friend:

>Press F1
> type the following exactly as it appears:
gfx pp enable
>Press F1 again to close that console

No need to worry about fog again!

 
While a lot of these suggestions seems to achieve a higher degree of realism accuracy, the cost in cpu cycles to track that vs. a single elapsed time measurement is everything you need to know why they aren't making this more "realistic" there anything TFP can do to minimize unnecessary cpu calls to tracking game events the better the fps result will be.

 
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