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Pokémon Shadow Unbound - The Weather (Game Maker Studio)

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I spent most of yesterday working on a weather system, and this is the result! It still needs some work - for example, most of the clouds looked so bad that I actually disabled them for this video - but overall I like the way it turned out! (A technical description is farther down.)

Weather effects:
 - Clear skies
 - Rain and Heavy Rain
 - Snow, Blizzard and Hail
 - Sun and Strong Sun
 - Sandstorm
 - Darkness (like the inside of a cave)
 - Fog/Mist

When you enter/leave areas with different weather types, some aspects have a transition state (fog line, sun size, etc) and others don't (precipitation, etc). I'm probably going to work on those things in the future, but it's not really a priority.

Most of these were only shown during the day because I haven't really spent much time trying to make colors fade to black at night. That's also not terribly high on the priority list, there are still way more important things to take care of first, though slightly more of a priority than the weather transitions.

Yes, the sun grows and shrinks in different weather conditions. It's ridiculously cartoony and totally unrealistic but I kind of like it so I'm probably going to keep it that way. Plus there aren't really that many defining characteristics of sunny weather, aside from the fact that the sun takes up like 40% of the sky.

Speaking of the sun, it gets drawn independently of fog and nearer to the camera than the clouds, so there are a few times when you can see it when you shouldn't be able to. Hopefully I'll have fixed that by the time you're watching this video.

From some angles, Heavy Rain appears to be slanting the wrong way. That's unfortunate.

Whenever I finally get around to programming the battle system, most (if not all aside from Clear) of these weather conditions will probably have an effect - both the effects in regular Pokémon games (Rain powers up Water moves) and experimental ones that I invent. A few of them will probably also have an effect on the overworld, at least concerning things like the Pokémon you can encounter and perhaps idle NPC banter and stuff.

Technical Notes
-----------------------------
I'll probably make a tutorial video on this at some point, but I assume the interesting part is the 3D particle effects. Game Maker is notoriously bad at handling 3D drawing and especially so with particles, so this actually doesn't use them at all. Rain and snow is just a regular 3D object like the terrain, items, etc. textured with different pre-rendered particles. The "rain," "snow," whatever model just jumps up and down to give the illusion that it's falling from the sky; adding a bit of x/y jitter gives it the "blowing around" effect. The precipitation model is drawn relative to the camera, so it looks pretty much the same from wherever you're standing. It's all handled in just one draw call and is decently efficient.

For the most part, it looks pretty decent, unless you happen to look straight up in the air while running and notice that the raindrops have a weird tendency to move along with you. The only real downside aside from that is that I have relatively little control over the intensity of the weather, except for the alternate forms like Rain/Heavy Rain and Snow/Blizzard; I'm actually almost out of characters for this description, so I'll let you deduce why. Maybe someday I'll find a workaround, but once again, priorities.

A long time ago I put up this video on weather for the game, and it basically "cheated" by drawing a flat layer of particle effects over the GUI. That worked and was relatively simple, but felt kind of flat and you couldn't really do much with it. This one is a completely different system and I think it looks a lot better. Anyway, in case you're curious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfjoVdFzRfM

Clouds are handled somewhat similarly; they're basically just an inside-out sphere with pictures of clouds on them that more or less forms a shell around the player. Cirrus, cumulus and cumulonimbus looked pretty bad so I removed them until I can get some better art; the only type shown in this video are the rather homogeneous stratus ("rain clouds"). The cloud sphere also rotates kind so the sky doesn't look exactly the same all the time, though it's kind of slow and stratus clouds all kind of look the same anyway.

Regarding fog and lighting, if you're still reading this I can assume you know how those work. The code that makes the fog distances transition looks like this:

fog_start-=fog_start_target;
fog_start*=0.95;
fog_start+=fog_start_target;

You can combine that all into one expression if you want.

fog_start=(fog_start-fog_start_target)*0.95+fog_start_target;

(Was actually trying to record a "random programming" video for this, but it didn't come out too well :P )

Music credit (I'm still using Happy Dragonite):
Johto Route 47/48
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_vDFOkmulQ
- - - - -
That promised social media link spam.
https://twitter.com/DragoniteSpam

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