Weather Effects Indoors?

[Jon the Great]

Is it possible to script weather effects to occur inside a mine?
Or does that only work on terrain?

[Spaceboy]

i no nothin bout scripting, but ive been in a level where the roof was missing but it didnt snow in the room, but it snowed outside

[Duper]

if the terrain cells are removed and the level is above terrrain level, it might work that way.

[Kyouryuu]

The Dol Ammad level (the snow one) has the quirk Spaceboy speaks of. The outside of the level is snowing, but the moment you drop inside, the snow visibly stops.

What might be a possible solution is to flag the rooms as External in the Room Properties menu. Course then, you'd have the risk of the weather falling through the walls.

Since I think Descent 3 has animated UV scrolling textures with speed adjustment, what might be another option is to "fake" the weather. Unreal Tournament does this pretty well. Create a series of very tall faces in the shape of an asterisk (*) and position them liberally around your level. Then, plaster a custom rain or snow texture on there and have them scroll.

[Interceptor6]

Yeah, weather effects will only work in outdoor areas or 'external' rooms. However, like Sol mentioned, the weather will indeeed fall through all walls and ceilings since the particles are not real objects.

Uhh the only problem about the tall faces method, is they would have to checked as fly through in the gam, and also making a heavy snow/rain effect that way will take up a lot of faces and do some serious damage to the framerate. So be careful trying that one in D3.

[DCrazy]

Sol, a face in the shape of an asterisk wouldn't be convex and hence wouldn't be allowed. That would mean a buncha faces instead of just one. Now multiply that out by the number of asterisks and you have a monster.

[Kyouryuu]

Not at all.

First, if you look again at what I said, I said a "series" of faces, not just one. To make a six-point asterisk configuration, you'd need to have just three faces sharing a common center. That's not very much.

Now, granted, the effectiveness of this trick depends on how much terrain you need to cover with rain. The concept for this visual cheat came from Unreal Tournament. The trick is used repeatedly for flame torches and rain in that game, but you wouldn't want to use it to have rain throughout an entire level. However, if rain outside a window or outside a building is all you need or even just in one particular room, it's more than sufficient.

[Liquid Fire]

I know the level Jon wants to do this in, and it is very tiny. The asterisk trick would probably work, even with just three or four asterisks.

[Jon the Great]

Sorry I've been busy with school work reccently meant to respond sooner.
It is a very small level. This asterisk idea sounds like it'll work perfectly.

Thanks for the input you guys.