I love your weather mods
But I have the feeling that beeing inside a building or making a campfire is not changin the temprature - still freezing at -26° Celsius...
Any idea?
Short answer: "Maybe". If you're in a cold area and you have heat sources, they should provide heat. My weather modlets can possibly generate "you're going to die" temperatures, and I don't have any way (well, I didn't set anything in my weather modlets) to configure indoor weather protection conditions.
Long answer: I'll try to keep it short
General:
- My weather mods only modify the overall weather conditions of the biomes (but there's more than just this for weather!). There's no (purposeful) lowering of the heat generated by objects like the campfire/forge/or just "being indoors" in my weather modlets. So in theory if you started a campfire or something with a heat source you'd get some heat. I believe its the same if you go indoors (*but I'm not 100% sure*). Putting on clothes that protect against weather should be working as designed (no changes in my modlet for these either)
- I did have a "Survival" weather modlet that attempted to make it colder as your elevation went up (like going up a mountain), but I'm not thinking I can get it to work in a19. So if you're using the "Survival" weather modlet I made this *might* be part of it, if you're high up in elevation on the map. It looks like TFP changed where these configurations are so I'm waiting until I can learn more about how to change temp by elevation, so I'm likely going to suspend/deprecate my "Survival" weather modlet for a19+ for now.
- I tried to my weather mods to be more harsh (but not insanely brutal) in terms of the possible weather extremes that *could* occur. I did not test/calculate all extremes out, but if it does get hot/cold enough to kill your character that was considered to be 'ok' in terms of "this will be allowed". More about this below...
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I don't know a lot of about how TFP handles the weather (more below). If anyone has any info on my unknowns below, or I'm wrong in some details, please call me out! All 'I believe' statements below are my beliefs/reasoning only and are *not* some sort of internal information I have about the game mechanics/workings.
Specifics:
- From what I believe, TFP has a "global weather" that cannot be modded with XML (my weather mods are all XML). Then they have a "biome" level weather that you can mod with XML (this is what I'm using). They have it set up so for a biome (say, the "snow" biome) there are several things you can configure up to make that biome overall feel like a snowy area (make it cold, make it windy, have some snow fall, cloud cover, etc). HOWEVER these biome level settings *
are relative to the global game weather settings not absolute for that biome*, meaning if you set "temperature = -10C" (or 14F), it will not necessarily be -10C/14F. What happens is that the global game weather may be 21C/70F and the XML configuration for the biome is actually just an add/subtract from the global temperature!. There's more to it (like you get to set a "randomness" in the biome to how cold it should be x% of the time), but essentially the global game weather runs the show, and the biome level XML is like a tweak to those settings.
- From what I believe, the global game weather is the weather for the entire map, and the biome XML is to tweak the biomes. If true, I believe that the global weather would not fluctuate wildly (like go to -10C" (or 14F)) but instead would fluctuate a little. I believe the starting and "base" temp of the global weather is 21C/70F.
*What I do not know* is how much the global weather fluctuates! I also cannot control how the game chooses what settings I have in my weather modlets as several properties are just "make it this x% of the time" and the game chooses the percentage
- I believe the game has some sort of calculations it uses to determine if you are "indoors". I don't know what this really is, but I believe if you're in a room and there's a hole in the ceiling, you have to be X distance from the hole or you can be considered "exposed"/outside. Same with an open door. I'm not sure if weather affects these (like if its windy or super cold does the X distance change).
- When I made my weather modlets, I tried to make the weather not be as nice as the default (but also allow niceness, for a short time. The % "nice possibility" is just rarer). "Niceness" is subjective, but also there are several parameters to change, so the "real" odds of getting nice weather drop significantly because 1 parameter may be "no fog!" but another might be "its really, really, cold". Having them all line up to be "no fog, no wind, and not so cold!" should be rare. I also wanted to make the "harshness" for a biome match what it really was (snow = cold, desert = hot). So, I basically just took the default biome level settings and added some extremes to them (both above and below the default...but skewed towards the biome. Meaning: if its cold, skew towards colder), then made these extremes be the more common occurrence. Additionally, generally I then added a 1-10%? chance of "yeah this is over the top cold/windy".
So the "extremes" could all line up and happen all at once
- I made the weather modlets mostly because I wanted some visual darkness and gloom, but also because I feel that the weather in the vanilla game really isn't an issue to work around, meaning: if its cold, so what. clothes are easy to find, put them on, meh. With more extreme weather suddenly clothing (and clothing modifiers) start to make a difference, or at least you might have to actually think about the values vs "take the best, all the time" and "take off my coat, I guess". I wanted there to be a real chance you might die due to hot/cold and you literally might not be able to make it. You'd have to choose to maybe try to build heat sources (there's no cold sources..hmmm) or maybe make a run for it and get out of the biome. Generally this means (for my modlets) that the burnt forest and desert are bad places to put bases in them as you cannot cool down with anything but clothing). I can't do the math to figure out what specific settings in my XML modlets need to be (to avoid death conditions) because I don't know how to determine how much heat a forge/campfire puts out or how cold/how the global weather might get. So I guessed and fudged a bit based on the biome level default settings so it seemed reasonable that it *could* get bad enough to kill you. I don't know how much weather protection you get from being indoors either. In general, I wanted you to worry about your character being able to survive in every biome... but less so in the green forest (as its basically the safest biome).
- Its possible that there's a bug in the game that if the temp gets too cold, heat sources/indoors not work?
Anyway: If there's some way to determine (or someone knows) any of the unknowns about weather that I have, let me know and I'll tweak my modlets (likely with an override modlet) to try to remove any possible issues like the heat issue or "certain death conditions". I just don't know what settings and values to change to "know" what the min/max values of weather are going to turn out to be after global weather is taken into consideration, or if there's a "too low/too high" temperature that negates heat from campfires/forges or weather protection from being considered "indoors".
