Hello again everyone!
I don't usually tend to make announcements for these kind of small updates where it's mostly fixing bugs and not much new content, but todays fix comes with some fairly significant changes I wanted to let you all know about!
So, the weather system. It's been a frustrating part of the game for a while now, as it has been widely considered too harsh and not changeable enough. Well, no longer! Along with a variety of bug fixes, this update brings out a rather substantial overhaul to how the game decides which weather it is going to change to as well as how frequently the weather changes.
The new weather system has 3 key changes. The first of these is that there will now be a longer amount of time between weather changes. According to my maths, the weather should (on average) take around 1.5 times as long to change as it did previously. Of course, it's still subject to randomness, but the probability of it changing within 6 hours of the last change has been significantly lowered. Whilst this change might seem counter-intuitive with what I'm trying to achieve with this update, it makes sense to balance out the second change to the weather system.
This second change is that the weather system is now MUCH more sensitive to the weather staying either good or bad, and will adjust accordingly. It's now significantly less likely to have either bad or good weather for more than 3-4 changes of the weather. In practicality, this means that it's very unlikely for the weather to stay either good or bad for more than 2 in game days. This is why the time it takes between weather changes had to be increased, as with only the overhaul to the system that picks the new weather type it would frequently change from completely clear weather to a blizzard in the space of less than 24 in game hours.
The final change is that the weather can jump larger distances in qualities of weather. What this means, to use an example, is that previously it was only possible for the weather to go from a blizzard to heavy snow, to light snow, to cloud and finally to clear. With the new system it could go from blizzard to light snow and then to clear, skipping out several steps in the process and making changes from bad to good weather and vice versa take less time. If the weather has been of neutral quality these larger jumps aren't particularly likely, but if the game detects that the weather has been either good or bad for a long period they become more and more likely.
These changes are still quite experimental, but based on my own testing, it seems like this should go at least some way to alleviating the problems with the weather system. Of course, this is based on my own thoughts as a dev, which is why I want to push this new system out to you, the players. If this weather system doesn't work out, then I will of course revert back to how it was previously in either the next update or another hotfix. Alternatively, potentially this update doesn't go far enough to fixing the problems with the weather system, in which case I'll look at how the same changes can be continued so the weather system stays moving in the right direction. Or maybe even this time I got it just right... only time will tell!
Anyways, enough talk about technicalities, I hope you enjoy the changes to the weather system and the bug fixes along with this update, and make sure to let me know what you think!
Seph