Rain on the unplainest of pains

Posted on: September 22, 2005


Appears LL has Accepted a proposal for "Real Time Weather" in Second Life, as proposed by Bob Parks.

I've remarked how much I love sunrises and sunsets, and even the simpler particle simulations we have now. The buzzterm "cellular automata" is in there somewhere.

I wonder if just like we have such an array of Resident-created content, from clothes to vehicles to houses to gadgets, if there'd be "weather kits" you could plug-and-play with. This will, of course, depend on how the featureset's implemented, and as a finer point, how precise control Residents will have over their climate. I bet someone would get awful cranky if their picnic grounds kept getting rained on?even if the effects were client-side, because then each and every other person would have to turn it off as they went munching too. Unless something was put in like a "Disable Weather" switch in Preferences.

Introvert Petunia started an SL Forum thread about this, join in if you can!

How about wearing your weather (i.e. weathersuit)?
If an attachment compelled clouds to turn dark as you just broke up and
wanted to express your dreariness to others? Or if you could trade
collections of storms like Pokemon a la P2P? Mix and match the weather like pets? Breed them in a microlab?a pair of snows falling in love?and watch them unfold over the greater skies.

Unlikely for a long time but being able to zoom in to view the details of a snowflake is a romantic fantasy. Crunchable snow on the slopes even further off; nevertheless, a dream.

I foresee it will be amusing in a way. We're so accustomed to weather offline, but putting a more advanced approach into SL may seem like a shock at first, "ZOMG IT'S RAINING/SNOWING/SLEETING!" It will, hehe, tide over in time though, as many things do.

I also should hope that the current and confusingly-titled Force Sunset be retitled Force Daylight and put under the View menu. Currently, it's not mint in my book.

On a connected note, having individual sets of Preferences for each Resident login on a computer would be better than the everyone-in-household-shares-same-prefs approach we have right now, or some way to transport your Prefs (like Firefox) and sync 'em up if you have multiple computers. This would, of course, include the weather setting.

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