PDA

View Full Version : climatic disposition and climate



Evil Knievel
12-29-2009, 01:27 AM
bored again and i try to be creative:

climate in jade? there is more to it than just rain and the drakeling and cold. Which races are more adapted to the cold or heat? I can't think of an orc liking heat more than a troll, so maybe just a random (or not) birth and growing up place/region or climate will give the character different resistance to cold or to heat. While this might not affect the game too much in normally, it can make it easier for mountain born pc to cross a glacier than a desert and vice versa.
Affected could be: Walking speed, food consumption, thirst?, healing rate, and i don't know what more? Possibility of sickness, strength loss (carrying capacity diminishes temporarily, take that plate mail off - or does it freeze and you can't really use it anymore...).
In the very extreme most pc's need to prepare to cross a certain desert to not loose health or toughness in the long run - could mean having support of certain types of potions or gear, those others used to it might just make it.
This brings up seasons that are better for certain regions. Like on our planet, in some times, some places should be avoided. On the other hand, overworld lakes could freeze.
Climaticly different regions may be favourable for hosting specific monsters, or benefit their combat abilities.
Frost and fire spells gain some other uses, and become less or more powerful if the environment is too extreme. I mean, freezing someone in a freezing environment sound like another hoax.

All this I would think of existing on a soft scale, like assigning every place in the wilderness a certain temperature value (and a certain humidity???, wind?? ok now it gets maybe too complicated) that might be a function of the day of the year ( or the typical mean value and standard deviation of a dice roll ? the dice only needs to be rolled upon entering a square. )

Btw, booze gets a new use, too. Oh, and the survival talent.

Fullmoon
01-04-2010, 10:50 AM
JADE. IS. NOT. A. DWARF. FORTRESS.
I can't emphasise it more clearly.

BTW, there already was such thing in ADOM, only it called terrain, not climate.

xax200
01-07-2010, 09:14 PM
I, for one, would really like to see this kind of feature in jade. I think that it probably shouldn't affect the game very much, but if you grew up in the coldest part of a snowy providence in an igloo, you're survival skills in the cold/snowy weather would most likely be better than joe-shmoe who grew up in the desert. Plus, I really like the whole climate/weather idea. It gives the game more life. I can just image in Jade, where a town becomes snowed in along with some of the surrounding area, and a lucky adventurer is offered a quest to go to the town accross the pass to ask for assistance and bring back food for the starving villagers. Deserts could be especially dry, requiring travelers to either have good survival skills, or bring along enough water.

Silfir
01-07-2010, 10:19 PM
As much as I adore Dwarf Fortress, it's made by one guy full-time and it still won't be finished for another five years at least. Thomas has a full-time job, a family, and several other projects going at once.

I think even he's not crazy enough to start implementing climate in JADE. Different terrains, with benefits of the Survival skill implemented, sure. Actual climate change? Ludicrous.

Evil Knievel
01-08-2010, 09:55 PM
As much as I adore Dwarf Fortress, it's made by one guy full-time and it still won't be finished for another five years at least. Thomas has a full-time job, a family, and several other projects going at once.

I think even he's not crazy enough to start implementing climate in JADE. Different terrains, with benefits of the Survival skill implemented, sure. Actual climate change? Ludicrous.

Well, I don't know, I think Thomas has to choose himself what is too much work and not, and what is worth it and not, so the only thing I consider here to be my job is to pour out all the ideas I have. The implementation of climate changes can be difficult, or not, depends on how detailed or realistic you want to make it. I think, if you can implement climatic regions, than implementing four states for four seasons is really a small jump. Interpolating them smoothly to have a smoothly varying annual climate is only another tiny jump. And giving it a little random component is another little small jump. A big thing would be something like in DF, where you have rivers shaping the morphology and stuff, or realistic climate zones in their relation to each other (have a desert behind a mountain because the wind come from the other side and no rain falls etc). That's overkill.
The main issue of the difficult climate system in DF is btw the computational cost. This arises due to real time calculation. But hey, simplify: Make changes large scale, so compute less, make them only happen every once in a while and compute less. And then, Jade is turn based.

I don't see the problem. Things like randomly generated always different quest settings that still make sense and generate a plausible game world - and are sufficiently complex - appears far more demanding to implement, than having one or two numbers attached to terrain and evaluating their effects on it, on some modifiers on the player and monsters.

garyd
01-09-2010, 04:00 PM
Things to bare in mind when considering climatic zones for a world of your design. Elevation effects temperature as does degrees of latitude from the equator assuming you are doing an entire world not just an area of one. One can freeze to death in a desert. The defining parameter of a desert isn't temperature but the amount of percipitation. Caves tend to have a standard temperature down to a certain depth a which point they began to warm as one gets closer to the planetary core assuming such is molten which appears to be a requirement for that peculiar item 'life as we know it'. Which brings to mind another peculiar paradox. If it isn't life as we know it how will we recognize it as being alive? Oh and if it isn't life as we know it we probably aren't life as it knows it and how will it know we are alive?

For what it is worth I've been designing worlds off and on since I first stumbled across D&D when I got out of the army in 1972. It is fairly easy to do a part of a world but a whole thing and making it realistic can be quite a complicated task.

Oh and how much control do the various deities in the Pantheon of the Jade universe have over the weather.