BETA - Vivosim Weather

Details: Read Time: 6 mins

Now available from the beta section of the Mintor store. SECOND BETA 27 Feb. 2023

This box contains the components to set up weather (clouds, rain, fog, fine) for your farm. The system has options to allow for adjusting the environment over a parcel or the entire region. It also allows for generating fog, rain, lightning and clouds.

Note that this is the first beta release and is intended for people to test and give feedback. Please give feedback on the group discussion here...

Setting up

First, you need to put out one copy of the SF Water Tower. This is an updated version of the original weather based water tower (the ‘droplet’) and so if you have one of these you should replace it with this new version. This water tower is the main weather controller and generates the main clouds, so it can look based placed roughly centre of your farm.

The config notecard has some new settings at the end, and you can adjust these to suit your needs. Note that PRIM_RAIN, PRIM_SIZE, PRIM_LIGHTNING and FOG_AGE settings relate to this object, and you can adjust separately for the repeaters as described later.

## New weather related settings ##
#
# Set to 1 to change the environment values for parcel or region as per below setting
CONTROL_ENVIRONMENT=1
#
# Can be parcel or region, not case sensitive
EXTENT=parcel
#
# Not sure this is implemented in browsers yet?
TRANSITION=30
#
# Chance of rain. Can be 0=Never, 1=low, 2=medium or 3=high
RAIN_CHANCE=2            
#
# Set to 1 for prim based rain, 0 for particle rain
PRIM_RAIN=1
#
# Set size of the weather prim if prim rain is active (length, width, height)
PRIM_SIZE=<25, 25, 30>
#
# Set to 1 for prim based lightning flashes or 0 for just light flashes
PRIM_LIGHTNING=1
#
# Set to 1 to have a foggy environment set every now and then
DO_FOG=0
#
# If weather system will produce fog this adjusts the extent of generated particle fog coverage from this prim - larger value makes larger area
FOG_AGE=12

If you choose to have the environment controlled, you must have the correct access permissions for the region or parcel.

The water tower comes with three day cycles assets that will be used for normal (fine) weather, rain and fog. You can replace these with your own if you already have customised your EEP settings. You must make sure that they are named exactly as the originals e.g.

DayCycle_Fine
DayCycle_Rain
DayCycle_Fog

You can ‘add’ the SF Umbrella to wear it. This is hidden away normally, but automatically opens when it starts to rain. It then closes when the rain ends, plus you can touch it at any time to close it.

The SF Weather board can be placed somewhere, so you can see a record of the weather.

Once you have set up this water tower, it will control the weather for the entire parcel or region, but you will only get prim rain around this object. If you wish to have prim rain over your entire parcel/region, you will need to use the weather repeater.

You can place multiple “SF Weather Repeater” objects around the area you are covering. Each repeater can be configured separately via the config notecard

# Set to 1 for prim based lightning flashes or 0 for just light flashes
PRIM_LIGHTNING=1
#
# Set to 1 for prim based rain, 0 for particle rain
PRIM_RAIN=1
#
# Set size of the weather prim if prim rain is active (length, width, height)
PRIM_SIZE=<30, 30, 30>
#
# If weather system will produce fog this adjusts the extent of generated particle fog coverage from this prim - larger value makes larger area
FOG_AGE=120
#
# Set transparency (alpha) integer value from 0=Solid to 10=Clear
ALPHA=8

Note that for the prim size, as you increase the size the rain spacing can start to have gaps in it, so it’s a compromise between how dense you wish the rain to be verses how many repeaters you need to put out to cover your required area. A range of between 15 and 30 seems to give good results, but feel free to experiment.

One way to line up your repeaters is to use the SF Weather HUD. With this you can click on the ‘debug’ button and that should get all the repeaters to start raining. When done, you can click on it again to turn off rain.

Tips & Tricks

Advantages and disadvantages of prim verses particle rain

Prim rain looks great, but you should be aware that when it is raining, the rain prim covers everything so if you try and click on a plant, for example, you may just click the rain prim. This may make harvesting in the rain a bit tricky!

Particle rain doesn’t have this issue, but depending upon your viewer settings and other things in your region, you may find that particle rain isn't always visible, or only appears in some parts of the area you have covered.

Preventing fog in your house

If you have set the weather system to change the environment in your parcel, you will find that it gets foggy even inside your house! You can overcome this by creating a parcel around your house. You can then set that parcel to use the region settings.