Today's update adds dynamic and randomised cloud and sea conditions to the game.
Conditions will currently change every 5 minutes (for testing purposes) and should smoothly interpolate between different states. There is a CPU cost doing this in real-time as the wave spectrum has to be re-calculated for each change but it does run as a second thread so shouldn't impact performance too much.
Sea conditions are based on the "WMO sea state codes" while wind conditions are based on the "Beaufort Scale" and run from Calm all the way up to Phenomenal/Hurricane (14m+ waves!).
You still can't sink a ship but some smaller vessels may get swamped temporarily in big swells. Eventually water egress and bilge pumps will be modelled with the potential for a boat to sink in bad weather :)
Wind conditions are visible in how fast clouds move and roughly determine the state of the sea conditions. However, wind itself is always from the same direction and doesn't effect any of the boats directly just yet - I'll be updating that as soon as I can.
Next week I shall be adding a Weather Forecast screen to the MFD so that you will be able to see both the current and up coming weather and I shall also be adding a fully voiced weather report system that will work through the ships radio along the lines of a BBC Shipping Forecast.
Other Updates...
1. Clouds now cast shadows
2. Clouds now attenuate the Sun, Moon and Stars when they are behind them.
3. Shiny materials should no longer "glow" at night.