Local cloud placement

1st Official Post

    Dear IPACs team,

    Since there's no weather engine upcoming soon, could it be imaginable to enable us generating clouds relative to a scenery location instead of solely relative to the aircraft position ?

    Caribbean islands, for instance, usually cause clouds formation on their reliefs (picture example below).

    It would significantly improve the overall experience if we could define a zone (f.i. a simple polygon) where clouds are randomly generated.


    This would also make the wait for an hypothetic future weather engine much lighter.

    BTW the possibility of locally generating random clouds is also a significant enabler for a weather engine.


    Thanks

    Cheers

    Antoine

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    • Official Post

    This really isn't a bad idea, let us look into this a bit and get back to you. Keep in mind that we are extremely limited in what we can and can not do with the current clouds. The scripts are not ours and we can't change anything with them at this time.

    Keep in mind, if anyone is really good with modeling you can make your own clouds and place them but you will need to make them without collision detection.

    The naming to exclude the model from collision would end with '__nocollision'. Please keep in mind that we don't recommend this at it may affect performance but it should work.

    IPACS Development Team Member

    I'm just a cook, I don't own the restaurant.
    On behalf of Torsten, Marc, and the rest of the IPACS team, we would all like to thank you for your continued support.

    Regards,

    Jeff

    Maybe Arno can do something with ScenProc like he does with buildings where you can generate random size buildings - sort of a cloud cultivation approach that would be visible within the 5-6km cultivation bubble that surrounds your aircraft (unconfirmed theory).

    I believe he has a height attribute that could be used to define the base of the clouds - just need a couple of cloud textures to put in the BUILDING TEXTURES folder then randomly generate the size and spacing of the clouds. Not sure how he would handle the collision detection issue.