Feedback: Mobs at seasons

JeanPhilippeGunghar

We know that seasons have some different effects on multiple things. I want to bring a new point that could be debated: Seasonal mobs.

Seasonal Mobs power
Seasons could influence mobs. Example: A flower mob would be at full power at summer and weaken at fall while it’s totally absent from winter. Same for insects-type mobs. Some mobs such as “Totally Normally Flower” could have a slightly different name such as “Withered Totally Normal Flower” and a different appearance depending on the season. They could have a slightly different attack pattern. We can also have, for example, bears that are more aggressive at fall and hibernating at winter.

Mobs based on seasons
Obvious that we could get mobs based on the season. For example: When the lake is frozen, we have Frost Elementals to fight and a full fauna at summer.

Season-based quests
Quests based on seasons could add some spicy to the game. Could range from picking flowers at summer to eliminate Frost Elementals in winter.

Seasonal Bosses
We also can have bosses based on the season we are. As an example, a Frost Dragon or an Ancient Frost Elemental could appear at winter while a Giant Treant appears on Fall.

McShave

One question i have about seasons is how do you represent different seasons in the different biomes? For example, what do you do for winter in the dessert/ tropical/ jungle biome? Is there summer in the snowy area? How would those seasons effect those biomes visually and environmentally?

JustVine

McShave wrote: »

One question i have about seasons is how do you represent different seasons in the different biomes? For example, what do you do for winter in the desert/ tropical/ jungle biome? Is there summer in the snowy area? How would those seasons effect those biomes visually and environmentally?

The design I thought of this for farming is relatively simple. I'm not going to go too in detail until they clarify farming more but essentially each node has markers for 'temperature' and 'humidity'. Each node also has a set value for how much they can change these values per season. The equation to cause seasonal rotation is a bit more complex, but yeah.

Node data should be fairly easy to store per node and measured against the server clock. You adjust the percipitation and temperature floor and ceiling separately by biome type so equatorial zones can be hot year round with little variation but super rainy vs dry as their seasonal expression. While super cold regions like alpine mountains have fairly stable precipitation levels with very moderately shifting temperatures, with the season more so effecting the frequency of snow storms.

The last value for a complete weather system, therefore, is a 'random climate event' value. The randomness of these events can track relative to temperature and precipitation values. The event can just pull from a table relative to the value after applying the temperature and precipitation modification. This let's you have environments like mountains that have relatively stable climates, be more disproportionately affected by weather events relative to seasons. So now mountains are relatively cold and dry year round but have intense snow storms as their expression of winter, as opposed to a snowy tundra that has more precipitation during the winter and fall with slightly less frequent or intense blizzards than the mountains due to it shedding precipitation more regularly.

Again slightly more complicated than that but still relatively straightforward over all. This structure has several uses relative to crafting, mob population and placement of mobs since it gives an easily retrievable self correcting dynamic set of values to use.

As for visualization of these things it's pretty easy to do the particle effects for this in UE4 though I hope they manage to execute BDO's technique for this as their rain and snow cover effects are quite good.