http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=37142

just randomly browsing the nexus and saw this.

so its a proven concept for oblivion, i wonder how skyrim will have it.
that was one of the big things i picked out of the article and was like WOW THIS IS POSSIBLE? REAL TANGIBLE WEATHER EFFECTS?
so, do you think skyrim will handle snow in the same way, or similar? or will it be unique.

discuss.

oh, random sidenote for those not in the know, silgrad v3 just got released recently, check it out if your a morrowind fan.

How prescient of HarisonZamperla (modder)!

However these are new meshes with a snow texture on them which grow or shrink according to the weather. A good solution, but not the sort of "dynamic" snow described for SKYRIM.

The way I understand Skyrim's dynamic snow, it works nothing like that. That mod is just pre-placed meshes that slowly raise when it's snowing, and sink back down when it's not.

In Skyrim, it's more like a dusting. A very fine layer that spreads out over time. It is truely dynamic.. I don't believe they have to do anything special to make it work. Just place any static object into the scene, make it snow, and a dusting of snow will accumulate on top of it automatically.

procedural, interactive snow would win

A scripted mesh is kind of lame if you ask me. Snow doesn't accumulate in such a simple way. This is also limited by available manpower as they have to create these fake meshes for all of Oblivion, not just Bruma as seen in that mod.

What you "picked out of the article" is wrong, also. There's nothing said anywhere about effects being tangible.

We at OBGE have done something more in line with what they are doing in Skyrim, as seen in the many photos of snow. There's no evidence for 3D accumulation of snow in Skyrim. Here are some shots of Oblivion (it's somebody's non-Tamriel mod however):

http://pikucha.ru/i49mm
http://pikucha.ru/i49ml

Also here's a shot from Oblivion:

http://img218.imageshack.us/f/snowwithinterpolatednor.png/

Note it works with ALL of Oblivion, not just Bruma. Since OBGE is more or less a hack, we can't keep snow from falling on people and other dynamic objects.

right, like they were so specific with that one feature and actually gave a description that was concrete.
do we actually know this? i dont remember it anywhere.
link? source?

its wrong, really, my initial hyped reaction, who would have thought :whistling:
of course its wrong XD that was was my first thought though, thats what i thought it meant.

and i agree its a cheap means to an end. but hey its one way to do it.

He's not the one in need of a link or source. I'd like to know where you saw that snow was "tangible". Everywhere snow has been mentioned it has been mentioned as a fairly simple effect. One magazine even called it a "dusting" specifically.

The "concrete" description in Game Informer was absolute crap, and it was written from a very non-technical perspective. We also don't need to rely on it anymore, as the screenshots show exactly what the snow shader does.

http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc26/cheshire03/Crysis%20VeryHigh/ScreenShot0014.jpg
http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/article/114/1149185/elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-20110211094554924.jpg

It's a 2D, pixel shaded effect based on the surface normals. Nothing else. That's why it's been called a dusting.

I hope for actual snowy terrain they at least do what Lost Planet and Uncharted did, with a fake snow mesh on the ground, that your feet pass through, and particle animations at your feet mask this lack of collision. It was sufficient for me.

Edit: In addition to it essentially being the same effect as in Crysis, they've mentioned an artist-directed component. This obviously just keeps the dusting from appearing on things they don't want it to be on. It's essentially a "snow density" map to keep things from appearing too even.

exactly my point, its only been "MENTIONED"
and even those screen shots do not fully convince me.
i asked for a link or source not to be a [censored] but to get a clear picture of what we are dealing with.
i didnt SEE the snow was tangible, that was my initial thought after reading the magazine. i thought i made that clear.
thank you. i really apreciate you taking time to point it out to me.
understand its like 2:00am here and its getting hard for me to type.

We don't know for absolutely sure (hence my "I believe"), but it's a logical extrapolation given what we've seen and been told. We'll have to wait for Skyrim to actually be released to tell with absolute certainty.

As far as I know the dynamic snow in Skyrim is only going to coat statics with a thin layer of snow, not form piles.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-2-1278457583.jpg

I know its off subject, but how do you add a link such as the one above, and change the description?

i thought every flake of snow was going to be its own object? like white super thin coins of varying shapes and diameters falling from the sky that would eventually mold together, but thats probably wrong right?

While that could probably be done using top-end graphics cards dedicated to simulating snow and only snow, that's a little beyond us.

i know its out of the question, but would it be possinle to do what i mentioned if skyrim were running on this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ATtrImCx4

When your in the post editor, click the chain thing next to the smiley under the "Sizes" option. Now you can place a link, and a description.

precisely what i was wondering...

No, we don't use voxels for a good reason, they're highly CPU bound and have a significantly harder time making things move. You couldn't do tens of thousands of unique snowflakes persisting and interacting if you didn't draw it at all, never mind voxels or polygons.

Thank you for elaborating on that for me

The "Unlimited Detail" tech is not voxel based. With that said it's obviously CPU bound as it's currently a software-only solution... there is no GPU acceleration. They've been trying to get vendors like AMD and Nvidia to look at this tech so they could actually use the parallelism of the GPU to make this tech more feasible. Your points are still correct, though, it IS CPU bound, and moving millions of points in their point cloud format is likely extremely intensive.

The order of magnitude for snow particle interaction is a lot higher than the thousands. Even just in your immediate surrounding it would probably be millions of particles for a decent looking simulation.

Dynamic snow is interesting feature, maybe now rain will not go trough solid objects like in Oblivion and we can create cool Ash or sand storm with it.
But I better prefer havoked clothes instead then dynamic snow or even better dynamic water in seas with waves, even GTA have them and thats not major part of game.