Dynamic vs static time and weather

[Fluppi393]

Hello everybody!

I have been thinking about the whole dynamic time of day and weather feature, because today I am not sure anymore if it actually improves the experience.

The advantages of this feature are obviously that you can set the time and weather to whatever you want, however I didn't really see people using that than rather being annoyed about it.

So my idea was to have a static time and weather scenario for every map, and possibly also some maps with multiple scenarios which you would be able to select from the main menu.

The main advantages of this system would be better graphics and better performance.

I didn't want to take away a feature like this before asking the community. Please leave your opinions about this below!

[Trance]

I enjoy both dynamic weather, and dynamic time. When I'm just messing around it really adds depth. I had first got the game and fell in love with the weather when it started to snow. I had the plow truck out and it was getting dark. Being in that situation reminded me of all the times I had to plow my driveway out through blizzards in the night. When I build, or test creations I do turn both settings off, but personally I would rather have to disable it occasionally and still have the weather and time effects instead of not having them at all. Besides, why take it away when you already have settings to turn it off. You could always make disabling/enabling dynamic weather or time a permanent change that persists even if the game has been closed (you could add it to the config). A change like that would suit both sides of the argument.

[Fluppi393]

Yes I agree, if the dynamic time and weather stay in the game the player should have more control over it rather than being random on every game start. However the point is that these effects do have an impact on performance, mainly because all objects have to have dynamic shaders for a dry, wet and snowy condition and the lighting has to be recalculated every second. Without the dynamics you would still get to experience certain combinations of time and weather, you would just not be able to change while playing. For example the city map could have a sunny day, rainy day and snowy evening variant.

[Trance]

Performance wasn't a big thought on my mind simply because I have a powerful computer, but by how much would A removing, or B limiting the dynamic events improve the performance of the game? Could changes like this help increase things such as brick count, and is it possible to further optimize how the game handles these dynamic events? Those are important questions for me. Now, very off topic, are there any plays for passenger seats?

[Trance]

Plans, are there any plans for passenger seats*

I need more sleep.

[Chip?]

I don't use the dynamic option, tbh, but I do use the slider to change time of day. No need to take it out of the game. If there are too many ppl not using it, perhaps making it disabled by default would be ok?

[Verdeth]

Originally posted by Trance:

Plans, are there any plans for passenger seats*

uh i would also wanna know about that, maybe allow them to control something, need a gunner seat :D

@ topic: i would not mind a limitation to the weather, have to say thou, iam more in the garage than on the playing field.

[five hundred cats]

I like the dynamic weather, but I usually just set the time to 0 and keep it there (which is mid day I think)

I do, however, use the time for cool screenshots. I get my vehicles and take night shots or try and get a cool looking shot of a morning sunrise. I believe the ability to change time has a high art value.

If only that were true in real life

On the other hand, since I haven't experienced many gameplay issues like low frame rate due to my current system, I also believe that reducing processing pressure would increase the performance vastly for users and players with less powerful computers. You can make the game appeal to many more people if you can play the game on almost any computer!

[TIMUEL]

just make a setting for controlles pleas just i can azerty and qwerty because i prefer azerty so yea i want to change that instead ot the wheater :\