Snow shoes

[K3V038]

Simple crafted snow shoes to move quicker through patches of thick snow, makes travel through wild terrain easier. It would add another use to sapplings, which is always a plus in my opinion

[stratvox]

They'd have to model actual snowfall and snow accumulation first, so there'd be an actual benefit to them. 

I actually looked into what is know about modelling that on computers, as well as looking at modelling sand dunes (as being relevantly similar to modelling snow drifts), and the math involved is ... challenging for computers. 

Very challenging. Modelling of this kind is generally run on supercompute clusters because of how challenging it is.

That's setting aside about how you'd represent blowing and drifting snow to the player, which would probably require a serious retooling of the game terrain, plus creating a temporary surface for the accumulated snow, and then having those accumulations affect the player, as well as the wildlife in the game.

Gotta say that if they figured out a good way to fudge that up, though, I'd be pleased as punch because I personally have a lot of experience in walking in deep snow, as well as snowshoeing across it, and it would add a whole dimension to the game. Would also make creating snowshoes a high priority for everyone, perhaps even higher than making a bow and arrows, or finding a rifle, simply because of how much easier it would make accomplishing those things.

It's really hard to overstate how difficult walking in three feet of snow is, and how fast you can travel (which would probably be measured in metres per hour; like maybe a few hundred m/h is a reasonable pace for a human in three feet of snow without having snowshoes).

[K3V038]

21 hours ago, stratvox said:

They'd have to model actual snowfall and snow accumulation first, so there'd be an actual benefit to them. 

I actually looked into what is know about modelling that on computers, as well as looking at modelling sand dunes (as being relevantly similar to modelling snow drifts), and the math involved is ... challenging for computers. 

Very challenging. Modelling of this kind is generally run on supercompute clusters because of how challenging it is.

That's setting aside about how you'd represent blowing and drifting snow to the player, which would probably require a serious retooling of the game terrain, plus creating a temporary surface for the accumulated snow, and then having those accumulations affect the player, as well as the wildlife in the game.

Gotta say that if they figured out a good way to fudge that up, though, I'd be pleased as punch because I personally have a lot of experience in walking in deep snow, as well as snowshoeing across it, and it would add a whole dimension to the game. Would also make creating snowshoes a high priority for everyone, perhaps even higher than making a bow and arrows, or finding a rifle, simply because of how much easier it would make accomplishing those things.

It's really hard to overstate how difficult walking in three feet of snow is, and how fast you can travel (which would probably be measured in metres per hour; like maybe a few hundred m/h is a reasonable pace for a human in three feet of snow without having snowshoes).

I dont think anyone has to go out of their way to model snow accumulation etc, im just saying that snow shoes would be good for walking Wild terrains with no paths

[Lexilogo]

23 hours ago, stratvox said:

They'd have to model actual snowfall and snow accumulation first, so there'd be an actual benefit to them.

Nah, I don't think so. The game already checks what kind of terrain you're walking on for SFX purposes, & walking on roads actually already gives you a speed boost to emulate having steadier ground to walk on, so it would be as simple as snow shoes granting half or a third of that benefit to you on snowy ground.

 

Just to discuss as a hypothetical, I would love a version of TLD that simulated snowfall and required you to plan around it, but sadly that is a pipe dream. The game's maps are designed around snow piles being permanent fixtures. Even in Sundered Pass, there's a cute thing Hinterland do with a house's ground floor buried in snow, you have to climb to the first floor and opening the ground floor doors reveals a snow wall- They'd have to completely redesign that, and tons of other areas, if snow accumulation was in. They would also presumably have to model the true terrain of all Great Bear underneath the snow, which would be completely insane.

 

Snow accumulation is super hard tech-wise, but I don't think it would be impossible for it to be executed in a modern game, it would just have to be heavily abstracted. Snow physics designed for CGI, like Frozen's, is far too intense to run in a real time videogame. But a simpler system to add clusters of snow while you aren't looking, and checking clusters over time for if they're becoming packed snow or if they're melting, I think that could be done. It wouldn't be that much different from other games with terrain deformation, the main extra concern would be snow requiring the game to check it passively over time. In contrast, a building in Red Faction only needs to check its physics when you blow it up, the physics can "sleep" when nothing is happening.

It's kind of like water physics or destruction physics, it's not impossible, it's more a matter of risk and cost/effect ratios as to why game devs avoid it.