Seasonal Ambience (in Pineridge, Calgary)

Seasons are coming to Unturned II. In fact, a very early version of them has been implemented into the closed beta and is a work-in-progress.

So here’s a quicker-than-usual post from me to you, regarding some of the potential differences between each season. Behold your obligatory “seasons” post.

I’m going to focus on the four calendar seasons in Pineridge, Calgary specifically.

Regarding Holiday Events

Alongside seasons, maps are planned to have holiday events built-in.

As a real-life holiday approaches, the in-game map could morph to fit the theme without being a separate map. Something similar was recently implemented for Unturned (version 3), as a part of the Halloween 2018 event.

Regarding Temperature

Now, it's important to note that Nelson may not actually be planning to implement a specific temperature bar like in *Unturned* (antique) again.

Instead, he may be implementing something that’s like a more dynamic/advanced version of Unturned (version 3)'s temperature system.

  • Personally, I would prefer if Unturned II’s temperature system did have specific temperature values (rather than solely be part of weather effects). Heat should not be a formidable and frequent lethal threat to the player in most environments, but cold typically should be.


Seasonal Ambience (in Pineridge, Calgary):



Spring
  • Rain comes more frequently, which leads to more muddy or wet footprints being left behind, and increased crop growth. The rain often leads to poor driving conditions.

  • Trees start regaining their leaves.

  • Birds can commonly be heard chirping in the background.

  • Most wild crops (not Player-planted) start growing.

  • Overall, the temperature ranges from about 0° C to 15° C. There should be a trend towards hotter temperatures as summer gradually approaches. (I’m not familiar with the Calgary climate, so I used Weather Spark to get a rough idea.)

  • It is the windiest in the spring, although Calgary has a generally windy climate (supposedly, according to “Living in Canada”).

  • Animals begin spawning at more standard rates.



Summer
  • Leaves become a darker green in color.

  • Rain begins to lessen.

  • Clouds become a bit less abundant.

  • Overall, the temperature ranges from about 15° C to 25° C. Initially the temperature should be gradually climbing as summer progresses, but after the peak of the summer season it should begin to lessen off again and approach numbers closer to 20° C.

  • Due to the temperature, players may become thirstier slightly quicker.



Autumn
  • Leaves falling from trees as a particle effect. Most trees lose leaves over time, eventually becoming barren.

  • Birds are migrating, so they become far less common as background ambience.

  • Temperature is typically between 20° C and -5° C. The average temperature is decreasing as the season progresses.

  • Fog is most prevalent in autumn, during the night.

  • Animals spawn a bit less frequently.



Winter
  • Snow comes more frequently, which covers the ground and helps to more quickly covers tracks.

  • Most trees are barren.

  • Temperature is typically between -5° C and -10° C. The average temperature slightly decreases as the season progresses, but begins to level off before beginning to slightly increase again (towards 0° C) as spring approaches.

  • Due to the temperature, ponds freeze over. Players may also get hungrier slightly quicker. The weather often results in poor driving conditions on and off the road.

  • Animals spawn far less frequently.

  • Most wild crops (not Player-planted) die by this point.



21 Likes

speaking of the closed beta will everyone know when he leaves or just who has access?

Some trees and plants in the spring should bloom. Have flowers.

Would also be cool to see birds flying south or north during their respective seasons.

6 Likes

Instead of just lower or higher spawn rates overall, I’d like different spawn nodes to be impacted by seasons differently. For example, a spawn node near a pond might be most active during hot summer months and least active when the pond is frozen over. Spawn nodes for different animals could be more active during different times of the year.

This is a bit tangential, but I personally hope there’s less of a distinction between wild and player-planted crops. If you tend to a wild plant throughout its life, it should be just as effective as if you tend to its seeds throughout their lives. On the other hand, if you completely neglect the crops you plant, they should be no better than a naturally spawned one of those plants in the same climactic/soil conditions.

Also food should spoil quicker.

Overall, I’d like it if:

  • Summer months would be fast paced, with plentiful small and medium game and other readily accessible resources, and clear roads, and warm temperatures even at high latitudes and altitudes, but also with rapidly spoiling food and constantly depleting hydration.

  • Winter months would be slower paced and more focused on resource management, with a relatively few, but also larger animals to track across the snow, snowed out roadways and frozen waterways, and a need to fuel fires or other sources of heat, especially at endgame high latitude or altitude locations.

  • The months between would be an intermediate between the two, with more wintry gameplay to the North and to the West (where the land rises up towards the Rockies) and some more summer-like elements elsewhere.

6 Likes

I didn’t specify this in my original post but I agree. The same applies to wild crops. I planned to mention it when I added lakes freezing over but didn’t.

The difference to me is that one spawned randomly in a field and the other didn’t. I too don’t think there should be any impactful distinctions.

I planned on mentioning this but it was such a random thing, but summer branch drop.

Besides how random of a thing to include it’d be, I also felt gameplay-wise it’d probably be more useful if players had an easier time getting sticks in the winter, not the summer.

But then that leads into deciding whether or not winter should give breaks like that when it comes to firewood, and then if not how should new players of the server fair, and why shouldn’t twigs and rocks and such just spawn everywhere anyways?

:thinking:

1 Like

I second this. We should actually have a proper temperature metric, since there’s many ways to be too cold or too hot that don’t involve weather at all (e.g. being in a body of water for too long and getting hypothermia)

1 Like

I was asking myself if servers / single player will be able to toggle ether all seasons or toggle only 1 season for playing ?
Will seasons vary on real time or in-game time ?
Will time between each seasons be configurable on servers ?

The idea is that everyone should be able to have configurable seasons .
Also, I think you should also be able to do several things according to seasons , during winter , you could potentially be able to build igloo, create snowballs, or maybe do some ski , we could even imagine a Avalanche node that work only in winter while in summer , you would instead find falling boulders nodes .
Finally, last question was about maps , will we get the option to configure weather, temperature, food/water consumption on maps ?
Will it be possible to disable snow on maps we create ?
Will some maps have eternals snow ( like maps based on alps, Himalaya ) ?

It think that enough for now

Also, I forgot about something .
In my opinion there should be 2 temperatures bars, one about the player temperature ( I will post a concept screenshot soon ) that would determine if the player is loosing health or not , it would act as an insulation bar and the second bar would be about external temperature.

I really do agree with most of this, I also think that there should be different animals/types of the same animals depending on seasons, bears sleep during the winter and that rabbits would become white instead of brown in the winter and stuff like that

1 Like

There could effectively be animals that spawn more at winter like arctic fox, white rabbits .

1 Like

I’d like to point out that there are other things that can be affected by seasons, like how player-planted crops are affected and others like rivers and lakes (overgrwon, dried or frozen).

Seasons are a really substantial addition to the game that affects the map and survival overall, so this post is a bit lacking depth IMHO.

1 Like


The original post focused mainly on ambience, (hence the title) but you’re free to discuss more substantial effects of the climate, if you have something to add.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 28 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.