Zandronum

"Bumi" means earth in my native tongue (malay).

This will (hopefully) be the official thread for my real-time day/night and weather engine which I have been continuously working on and the one I talk about a lot around here.



Current features:

- Real-time day and night cycle with tinting across the entire map
- Gregorian calendar system with days, months and years
- Moon phases
- Adjustable timescale
- Sun lens flare
- Particle clouds in the sky
- Chance for overcasting, rain and thunderstorms - completely random and in real-time
- Rain drops that do not fall through ceilings
- Compatible with sector lighting - my engine does not overwrite your sector lighting work
- Minimal sector tagging required (and customizable range of tags - useful for maps with a lot of 3D floors)
- Sky lights (dynamic lights that follow the ambient colour; useful when placed indoors to simulate environmental lighting)

Upcoming features before I release version 0.9 BETA:

- Fog and haze Done!
- Seasons Done!
- Snowing during winter Done!
- Seasonal texture swap (level textures that change appearance depending on season, in real-time) Done!
- Stars in the sky Done!

ALL DONE!

Ideas for version 1.1 in future:

- Currently, weather system is linear. It goes from clear -> overcast -> rain. Thunderstorms and fog can be layered on top of these weather modes but it's kind of clunky. Future goal would be to completely overhaul the weather system so that current weather will be 1-dimensional and you can smoothly blend to and from different weather "modules" or "blocks" seamlessly and non-linearly. Idea inspired by FoxEngine devs who mentioned doing something like this
- Each weather module would have their own set of unique properties - blend colours, precipitation type, etc (PS day and night would be considered as modules as well).
- Overhaul the chance calculation because right now it's too erratic and has very biased favours (look into implementing custom random number generators).
- Externalize weather module defintions so that ACS doesn't need to be recompiled? Not sure how feasible this would be.
- Probably would eventually need an editor to generate the data needed (and if weather modules would be externalized, then DEFINITELY an editor would be needed)
- Get rid of the sun glare hack, this shit has no business being any of this hacky HudMessage nonsense... it should be a GZDoom full-screen post process shader.

Credits [incomplete for now; will update this constantly]

Randy Heit - ZDoom
Graf Zahl - GZDoom
Nash Muhandes - main developer, programmer
carlcyber -assistant programmer, technical advice and optimization

Special thanks:

Zeberpal - giving me permission to feature his map DCA2TechTest in the demonstrational video
Blzut3 - GetAspectRatio() (which was heavily modified In Bumi)
Isle, LilWhiteMouse, Gez, TheZombieKiller, DavidN, FDARI, marrub - general programming help
Gavin "Interkarma" Clayton (Daggerfall Tools for Unity) - his season code in DFTFU gave me some ideas on how to implement my own
undead003, Shane Strife, loismustdie555 - playtesting

[thread incomplete; more to come later]

Wow. Just... wow.
Can't wait for the code to be released.
I'd love to see what's behind this.

Very nice work!

I have wanted to try making a weather system myself before, but have never gotten around to it.

You seem to make it sound as if it's hard to make. Although i am sure the quality you are going for also has something to do with this.

Hi agaures, it's not hard to make, but getting it to look right requires a little effort and might not be as straight forward as how most people would attempt to do it in ACS. :) A lot of somewhat complex (not too complex) calculations are going on in the background which can only be appreciated by reading the code... understandably, from an end-user perspective, seeing the thing run might not be too impressive. :)

inb4 we see this in everything after it's released

inb4 56 GB

Does anyone remember where I put my seal of approval? I approve of this.

Thanks dudes! :D

CloudFlash: it's not large at all, it's only like 1.5 MB, most of that space coming from the cloud sprites (they're huge images). :D

truly impressive, i couldnt imagine something like this being done on this engine.

Holy Fucking SHIT!

Does the sun cast shadow?

Anyway, that's impressive. Nice job for (trying to) bringing a real gta-like openworld mod!

Kara Kurt: the sun doesn't cast shadows for now... but Graf Zahl was talking about possibly adding support for fully programmable hardware shaders for the new OpenGL renderer for GZDoom. If it becomes a reality, then I will definitely look into adding real-time shadow maps for the entire world.

Highly impressive. Can't wait to see what it'll be used for.

Espio wrote: Highly impressive. Can't wait to see what it'll be used for.

I would say a lot of stuff

Espio wrote: Highly impressive. Can't wait to see what it'll be used for.

Guardsoul maps.

[spoiler][/spoiler]

Nash wrote: If it becomes a reality, then I will definitely look into adding real-time shadow maps for the entire world.

That'd be nice !!!

Will this wad be able to be applied to any wad or will it be applied to wads that is build with this resource?

Shoggy wrote: Will this wad be able to be applied to any wad or will it be applied to wads that is build with this resource?

It's not a wad but a feature in the GZdoom feature in which you can use ACS to create such lighting.