Storm sprites

[Philippe]

One of the reasons that I initially had trouble figuring out how to use seaplanes and carriers was that I didn't realize that my ships were sitting in the middle of a storm at sea.

I took a look at the issue this morning and found that fixing it was merely a question of changing the saturation of the storm sprite icon to make the water look greyer and angrier.

But then I noticed that the storm_sprite_zoom icon didn't exist. I experimented with making one in the incorrect proportions just to see what would happen if a bitmap with this name were included, but nothing happened.

From this I have to conclude that coding is probably missing.

It's not a big deal. When you're zoomed all the way out to the strategic map or all the way in you can see the storm (especially if you're using a less saturated version of the original). But in the middle setting storms are invisible. The surprising thing is that rain is visible, so I think this is probably an omission that can't be fixed by graphics modding (unless the name of the missing bitmap is something other than storm_sprite_zoom). The other possibility is that the program won't read a storm_sprite_zoom bitmap that isn't reduced to the correct proportions.

And as soon as I decide just how dark and angry-looking the storms should be I'll include the greyer storms in my mods.

[Philippe]

After playing around with different levels of saturation for the storm tiles, I think I've found one that is just dark enough to be a clear reminder of the sea state, but not so dark as to look terribly out of place. There is no edge of storm tile, so boundaries for storms have lots of ninety degree angles, which doesn't happen much in Real Life . There's no way around this, but at the end of the day I prefer being able to see that there's a storm out there, rather than to find out after the fact by having a ship get damaged or not being able to launch an airstrike.

In testing the darker storm tile I noticed that storms (at least visually) only seem to occur in all sea squares. Is this because there isn't a coastal storm tile, or are coastal areas immune to storms? And if they are, should they?

The nautical part of my mind tells me that if there's a storm I should either take my ship out to the open sea and maneuver in the waves, or batten it down in a sheltered harbour. The one place I problably wouldn't want to be is in a coastal area, where I can get thrown up on the rocks by a sudden surge.

Am I reading too much into this, or am I missing something?

[Hubert Cater]

Hi Philippe,

For the storm sprites I believe there are no specific zoom versions as some elements of zoom are handled by code, i.e. the game engine handles the zoom effect, while other bitmaps are zoomed with a secondary zoom file.

Essentially, if you edit the regular storm sprites file, the edit should then also appear automatically when you zoom.

For coastal tiles the weather effect is set by the land weather effects so if it is raining on the land and coastal tiles where your ship is located then it will pretty much have the same effect on the ships in terms of not being able to conduct or limited combat.

However, damage at sea effects will not apply along coastal tiles, these only happen on the full sea tiles if there is a storm.

Hope this helps!

Hubert

[Philippe]

Hi Hubert!

I'm not quite sure what you mean by edit. Left to my own devices I would make a zoom bitmap that was proportionately smaller than the full-size one and add _zoom to its name. I would be surprised if that worked, but if that's what you mean by edit, I'll give it a try.

I did a spot check on Assault on Democracy and it doesn't have the storm_zoom sprite either, and doesn't show storms when I zoom out. Feels like something is missing, and perhaps what needs editing is the code.