Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
Guest, can you feel the love in the air? Valentine's Week at The Bell Tree has begun with a new mini-event featuring four activities to enjoy -- new and returning collectibles are up for grabs! Dive in to the love here.
I'm trying to find info on how clouds work, how the day/night lengths work, how it calculates the equinoxes, how the Wild World constellation mechanic works... basically anything I can get my hands on. All I've ever seen is technical breakdowns of how NH decides weather patterns, and even that excludes additives such as fog.
For real time clocks, they would write code to check the system (switch, 3ds, ect) clock to get the date/time and build on that by conditions to display day/night/season. Weather is probably built on that to buy a percentage of possibility. Example, rain chance would increase in spring months vs summer months. Maybe weather is stored in a dictionary and each weather have a value of 0. Weather is randomly picked by percentage chance and then given a value of 1? I'm just guessing. I mean there are different ways to do it and my guess is simplified and is probably the long way, and I think (not sure) Nintendo often use thier own game engines which could make things shorter and cleaner.
Try contacting creators of AC fangames that have similar weather systems. Theres a chance they might tell you what they did. Its slim, but Ivetalked to many creators of popular rpg games (IB, Undertale, Witch's House) for advice on how to do things for my own game. Very fun and helpful. Plus I got to talk to famous creators ^^
Another thing is there are loads of games that use weather systems. So maybe look into weather systems of other games to see how those work, and then slowly measure it up to how it works in AC. Weather systems can be a pain to program, its possible to do in rpg maker, in which you randomize the weather effects. But if you change them up too much you could say, if the MC leaves one area, with rain, then when they go back and theres snow. But you eventually get into the flow of things
I recommend as a creator, is simply just play around, and try things out. See what works and what doesnt. I feel like the weather system in AC is incredibly sophisticated, so measuring up to that might be hard. Still possible. But very hard. So try coming up with your own weather system and lead up to there.
Post automatically merged:
Also. Super important for me, and ive messed up. Is dont just leave it up to the coding and make sure to try it out. Because if you think you have some, everything else is good, then you do the coding and it doesnt work you gotta go look for it again. So no matter how massive the coding is, always make sure to test it out
You can get RPG maker sprites on online, but some dont work, while others actually move their legs, theres the ocasional one who doesnt. So I always make sure to test them out. I have a testing field in each game, and always tey out every code or system there first.
I dont have a weather system persay, but I have a day system in my game
You wake up everyday when you wake up, and as you play the day goes to night, the enemies, ghosts come out. In the day there are also enemies, but less in the day. Since your a rabbit you gotta hide. But your faster. At night you need to find places, but if you faint theres a chance you will die
Berries and various objects such as a spiked branch you get from your friend. You get various objects depending on the friend. lessens the cjance of dying at night. If its raining rheres little to no enemies, only the ocassional eagle and spirit. So its a horror, but also survial.
A pain to program, long coding, so much play testing, so much patience. I wanted to throw my laptop. But the end result was worth a half a years work.
I don't know if it's still active, but there was a discord where data miners would post what they found in the game's code. And there was a data miner in the beginning known as Ninji or something like that. They designed the New Horizons weather predictor. It's possible you can get a copy of the code dumps and decipher them yourself, or ask for a rundown of how it works.
I can't say how exactly the weather is working, but I can tell you it's seeded pseudorandom. The weather in your town for past, present, and future is decided when the island is first created. So if it's raining at 4:00am on 7/30/2020, it will forever rain at 4:00am on 7/30/2020 every time you time travel to that moment. The weather in 4 months from now is already predetermined. Etc...
I can also tell you the weather is by the hour. That means it can't randomly start to rain at like 4:15am and stop raining at 4:37am. It can only start on the hour, and end on the hour.
Another detail is that in the winter, rain is snow. So if the game decides it should be raining, and it's in the winter, you'll get snow. Some months receive more rain/snow than others.
If you're programming a similar game to animal crossing, that uses a real-time clock and you want weather in there, you might be ok deigning it yourself rather than copying directly how animal crossing does.
The sun in animal crossing is a literal light source. It moves gradually throughout the day. You can see how shadows change throughout the day as the sun moves through space. Everything involving the sun and lighting is just gradually shifting from "night" to "day" and then from "day" to "night".
Weather is tricky visually. For example, in new horizons the sky color changes and there are things like fog that roll in and out. As of now I’ve already gotten the real time day/night cycle working, but I’m trying to figure out how to mix that with stuff like rain turning the sky grey instead of blue. It’s tough stuff.
What I think I’m going to do is make severa copies of the day/night cycle, one for each type of weather, and then try to see if I can transition smoothly between those when weather changes. I’m not sure if I’ll lock weather changes to the hour or not, nor am I sure if I will use pre determined weather patterns like NH uses (ie there are only about 30 different sets of how the weather can behave across 24 hours in the game)
Here's a little video of it playing at turbo speed. No textures yet, very early prototype here.
And an example of a map. (The video is taken in what would be D4)
Note: I’m aware of the error where the sun rises from the north and sets in the south.
Update: I've made the sunrise/sunset be based on real world sunup/sundown times and gotten some clouds going. Have done a basic test of rain. Going to work on dynamic weather next.
Sunset (Going into Twilight), Early Night, Early Morning
