Oh crap did they accept weather?

Hah. They are particles.

Their response will be this: "Can't you just, like, fill your home with giant phantom invisaprims?"

You know I made a 2 prim big parasol for my beach land. I'm sure it can double for an umbrella type thing and I'm willing to sell it for only L$1000 a piece! You know you'll need it when it starts raining!

... Yeah. I don't think that business angle is going to take off.

What if heavy rainfall makes water levels rise? Am I going to have to build dikes around my building?

I think that one makes the most sense and would probably be the simplest to implement. Plot-by-plot makes NO sense whatsoever. I do think that they should have an option to turn it off in the debug menu, perhaps.

if precipitation is done as particles, they could only be rendered at a certain distance, say 30m, so while standing inside a house, the precipitation is only seen outside.

I would imagine its more likely to be a global thing that is the same where ever you are on the grid, much like the sun position. More boring, but most likely.

What if the inside area where you're standing exceeds 60 meters in any direction?

it could be a slider you adjust?

Still sounds horribly impractical to me. It would be easier, since particles have real coordinates, to have the client terminate weather particles when they collide with anything.

Rain has to travel through roofs. You've seen how many builds are in the skies in the test images from the new renderer. Not one drop would reach the ground.

Personally I think what the lindens mean (at least for now) in the way of weather is wind and rain. I suspect the only thing these stronger winds could do is move physics set prim, and bend our trees to sharper angles., but not much more. Rain/snow will also be a new feature which will most likely not collect, flood, or cause changes to the land, but instead simply "fall." Lighting changes along with cloud color may also change.

I truly expect it not to be much more then this, but you never know.

I personally, am one that would love destructive floods, hurricanes, tornado's, thunder storms, seasons , blizzards and the like, but I do know reality, and the reality is we wont see those advanced features before 2010. Most likely with the introduction of Havok 3, 4 or 5 and a newly updated rendering engine (plus faster servers.)

It would be nice if we could get a linden to give us a brief run down of what “accepted” means and a ball park of when to expect these features.

Just my guess,
- Sam

I've often wondered who the first person was to follow the chicken around and wait... then say... I'm eating whatever falls out of that chickens ass.....
Or ...
Who was the first person to look at a cow and say "hey i'm gonna pull them dangly thangs and drink whatever comes out .....

Caveman fraternity pledges.

Where can i apply for Weatherman on Sltv?

hehe, can see it now... instead of the moon/sun changing every holiday, it will be the rain/snow

Easter: Eggs

Valentines: Kisses (preferably Hershey’s)

Election Day (US): B.S.

Christmas: Snow/Presents

St. Patrick’s Day: Beer

New Years: Wine

Dooms Day: Lag/Fire


- Sam

sounds good to me. i'm totally ignorant to what kind of processing that requires so i offered an alternate to your and adam's suggestion that i thought might be less intensive.

Just a guess but I bet the fact that we can't make particles (client-side already) collide with prims now means it's nontrivial. The more I think about it the more it seems that calculating the collision of 4096 simultaneous particles in SL's dynamic world would make my computer explode.

OMG LL competing with my weather systems I'm gonna sue !!!!1111oneoneeleven



I wish it would work like the weather in X-Plane, where you can set a somewhat static, but still evolving weather (altitude of the various cloud covers and their types, precipitation, temperature so you can also get snow), or have the weather read directly from the various, real-time updated, web-accessible METAR.rwx files.

I doubt it'll support fireworks and meteorites, though.

To be honest I'm surprised they accepted it.

Weather systems are very complex, and it might well turn out to be a waste of time. Ages spent developing something that annoys people when it rains, and when it's cloudy, and is just like it is now when it's sunny.

I'd scrap a full weather system and just build the ability of a sim to do special effects, eg program in "whole sim rain" where water can fall and some paint clouds can appear, or "whole sim snow" where snow falls sim wide.

I really wouldn't bother with complex evolving weather patterns, and clouds that drift into sim after sim. And I wouldn't turn on either rain or snow in any sim at all except in special cases, like allowing a private sim owner to toggle rain on/off. Or having a few sims specially noted where rain comes on/off at random times.

And I'd keep rain and snow to a minimum of total time (eg. quater of all time it's not raining, or less) because weather is something that annoys people in real life, and will too after the novelty wears off in SL.

Im sure it will be easily switched off on our end.. but like night time.. will provide exellent Pics and nothing else...

Won't it be a bitch if they spend hundreds of development hours on this and ninety-five percent of us turn it off the first day. I suppose the people who voted for it would use it. I'd rather see it as a client feature. If I want it to rain or snow or such, I could choose that feature client side. It be kinda like building my own world. Oh wait...