How do you make your own weather/climate?

[Sabyn]

Hi all,

I'm new to the modding scene, so pelase bear with me

So I set up a new worldspace and made it so my climate is always night time. That works. Then I set the weather to "snow" 100% of the time and that worked also, but there were a few things I didn't like about it. It was too bright. I also wanted some occasional lightning and stronger wind through the trees, so I started searching around google and a few forums for information on editing weather but there seems to be almost nothing out there.

Here's the process I tried (which failed):

In weather, I made a copy of "Clear." Using Oblivion Mod Manager, I browsed through a BSA file, extracted snow.nif and put it in my oblivion data directory. I then selected that as the precipitation, and added like a 20% chance of blue lightning. I saved and set this as the weather type for my world space's climate, 100% chance. In game, however, the sky is just clear. There's no snow or lightning.

So I tried the opposite. I made a copy of "Snow", added lightning and changed the color of stars from black to white. Loaded it up in game, there are no stars and no lightning!

What am I doing wrong? Is extracting these .nif and .dds files from the BSA the best/only way to change the precipitation type? I'm using the steam version of Oblivion, if that makes a difference.

[DarkRider]

Hi There,

Yes, to change precipitation you need a mesh to direct the slot to, but no textures. Just put the mesh in your data folder using the same folder structure as the game (ie meshes\sky\snow.nif) then select it in the CS, and then delete the mesh and folders you added to the data folder. After that your mod will draw it from the BSA, so will save you some data folder space.

The trouble with duplicating the snow weather is that it has full cloud cover so...no stars.

With lightening you need to set its fader in and out (Fade in set to 80 Fade out set to 20) set the frequency slider to somewhere in the middle, higher means more flashes. Remember lightning will be better visible at night.

I would copy cloudy so there are some clouds to justify your snow, but spaces to see stars and lightning. Leave the star color the way it is. To change star colors you should alter the textures instead. If it's too bright, change the daytime, sunset and sunrise colors to match the nighttime colors on the general tab that will give you night.

Last note, when testing weather schemes make sure you use a clean save, or all the changes won't show up.

Let me know if you have more questions.

[Sabyn]

Thanks, Dark! That was really helpful. I now have snow with partial cloud cover The lightning is still being stubborn though - I followed your directions and put the frequency up to the 50% mark and waited around in-game for 2-3 minutes but didn't see any.

[DarkRider]

On the precipitation tab, what weather classification did you assign your weather scheme?

[Sabyn]

On the precipitation tab, what weather classification did you assign your weather scheme?

It's set to snow.

[DarkRider]

You might try setting it to rain and see if that makes the difference, It's the only thing I can think of at the moment.

[EDIT] Sorry, to clarify, it will still snow because that is the precipitation model you chose, but the lightning may be limited to a rainy class, so worth a try.

[Sabyn]

Hrm yeah, I just tried it on Rainy and no dice there, either. I wonder what the problem is...

[DarkRider]

Tested a couple things out. It looks like for the lightning to show (and it is likely there) you need the same settings across the board as the default Thunderstorm, including the thunder sound FX. So, what I did in testing is duplicated the thunder storm, changed the lightning color to blue, change the precipitation mesh to snow, and the cloud .dds files to CloudsCloudy.dds and CloudsClear.dds from the cloudy weather scheme and everything worked just fine; and was a really nice effect in game. Give that a go and see if you can get it all squared away.

[Sabyn]

Awesome! I'll give this a try. Thanks so much for your help! I'm taking a vacation for the next two weeks but after that I'm sure I'll be back on this board with more strange questions.

Update: I did away with the heavy rain and and heavy wind noises, as well as the "close" thunder. I kept the distant thunder, put in medium wind and turned the lightning rate down to its lowest setting. It makes for a really cool atmosphere!

Edited August 3, 2010 by Sabyn