Transparent windows

Hi,

I would really like to see transparent windows, so that I can see into and look out of cabins and houses. This would be especially important when wolfes or snow storms are raging outside ...

I know, this could be a performance problem, but in my eyes this would be essential to make the simulation even more realistic.

Thanks

Christian

In short, because you have a load screen when you enter and exit a building, its like your in your own container, and wouldn't really be possible in this game. (I don't know the Dev lingo for it)

To know the weather, all you need to do is bring up the HUD by pressing TAB and you can see Temp and Wind Speed, which you can tell from those numbers, what the elements are doing outside. As for Wolfs, you need to make THAT decision and either go for it, or not.

Yeah, I understand. - But the question would be then: Isn't it possible to handle houses (at least these small cabins with doors) in the same way like the open fishing huts (like the ones on the ice)?

I can understand, that big buildings like the damm buildings have to be a seperate "container" with it's own loading screen. But for small ones it would be worth thinking about a solution, I think.

Would it be cool - and more important "realistic" - to be able to look outside windows - especially in this kind of simulation?

Tbh, I kinda agree with OP. we should not be able to read the weather-conditions from our "Inventory"

but it should be reflect in the the windows.

I am sure you can "fake/mirror" the outside based on the conditions and locations you are.

I'm not a developer, and I know this is a bit of an Indie team... but I always wondered why these tiny houses required their own instances. Perhaps they feel its not important enough right now to work through the bugs of walls, doors, windows, and NPC pathing to have all items open in the world. Or maybe several other things I'm not even thinking about.

While itd be nice (and I haven't played since the update that shortens the loading times) to remove the loading of these small instances, I also understand that windows might not actually help us all that much. Consider that its winter and these houses are assumed to not have been touched in a while. The windows are gonna be pretty frosted over and useless as a viewing port unless they are scraped or melted. Thats an option I'm not really gonna care about.

Well let me put it this way, in a world as big as this, and as it will be, it is a lot easier to make, block by block, than having a whole a big block to try and fix. A building is a different entity to the outside world, so needs different this and that, nd as @mikey posted, in a winter like that, the windows will be frosted over anyways.

i also believe this would be an amazing addition, however i do understand the complications this would add. i know there are effects such as howling wind which does help reflect the weather, but yes i would also like to know if there are wolves outside. maybe they could add a sound effect of scratching at the door, or the whimper or howl of a wolf, just an idea.

It would greatly add to the immersion IMO, to have transparent windows. Just like at forest lookout, or what's it called.

Having the outside weather reflected in the window seems plausible, especially since day/night is accounted for with outside illumination.

Can't they program some kind of "fake outdoors" seen from the window. Meaning outdoor world that in reality isn't any larger than the area you can see from the window. Conditions of that little pocket outdoors world would change accordingly to what is going on in the real outdoors. Meaning, if it is a day, "fake mini-outdoors" would have day as well. If it was storming in the real outdoors, the window outdoors would have storm in it as well. You could not see any animals from it, but you could check the weather and luminosity.

Implementing this should not bee too difficult, since the game already keeps track of the outdoor conditions while you are inside.(is it a day or not, how cold or windy it is out there) It would basically just be about creating that pocket dimension(which already uses existing map, so nothing actually new needs to be created) and then program it to change its weather/daytime conditions accordingly, which would not require adding anything really either, since as i already said, the game already keeps track of these things. It would just be about copying a small piece of the existing scenery and bringing it in the "indoors" as well, and telling it to keep track of these weather conditions etc as well.

Transparent windows would remove the performance gain from having instanced buildings. The problem with non-instanced buildings is that the game still has to do all the calculations for the weather, graphics, wolves, etc. For just the graphics part, you'd think it could skip stuff you can't see, but it doesn't know what you can't see until it does the calculations. There are ways to reduce the number of calculations, but you can't eliminate them. It's much faster and simpler to instance the buildings.

A "fake outdoors" would reduce the performance loss, but how much do you fake? The sky, the bending/moving trees, the snow blowing past, the mountains in the distance? And one of the first complaints would be "I can't see the wolves through the windows." Which is a legitimate complaint with transparent windows. This approach would be better from a performance perspective than a fully non-instanced building, but would make the game system more complicated - each instanced building would need it's own skybox, and nearby trees/rocks/etc. would have to added to the area outside the windows. If they were changed by the world designers they'd have to change them in the building's instance, too. Of course, they could use snapshot windows, which are just pictures pasted to the windows, but the window images would have to be dynamic to reflect outside conditions. Ramble, ramble, ramble. I think it's time to end this paragraph.

My opinion, which is only worthwhile to me, is the lack of transparent windows adds atmosphere to the setting.

Andruin

As an compromise, add transaparent window(s) to a few "special" houses. Like the the camp office, 2 floor, that many (?) use as main building, and stay alot.

Or you could even add a "open window"/"scratch/wipe window/"look out" - option on the window surface, and then treat it like an "going out of the house" instance - get the loading screen, move the camera up in window height, and even place a window frame look to the screen...

that could work since they like to have the indoors a separate cell could still keep it with that mechanic. im sure the load time could be very quick for something like that too....maybe

If they got that mechanic down, the quick load of an exterior camera you could move like you were looking outside, it would make spring, summer, and fall more realistic since the windows wouldn't be iced over. Still having a bit of ice on the window when looking out during winter would be nice, though.

I do agree. I would also like that there would not be loading screens while entering a building, like it is done in lookout tower. It is really nice to observe weather from indoors there. Both together really add to the immersion.

Also: Strangely enough the lookout tower seems to be the only indoors location that does not have lag in my system. I am running highest settings at 1920x1080.

EDIT: I did not consider ice fishing huts as a indoors location since they dont have doors :roll: In those i don't get lag either.

Even if Forestry lookout works that way, I think everything were in 1 huge exterior cell it would slow down the whole game both when you are outside and inside. That's probably why they enabled it for 1 house only, not all of them. The way it is now it cuts down everything in half when outside and even more when you are inside.

I agree with Burning. It would be kind of pointless having a Forestry Lookout where you cannot look out of the windows. But for the other buildings, I quite like having the interior. It's a lot easier to handle, to make changes to the map. So it's also good for the developers.

As far as looking out of windows is concerned: Half the time it's dark and then there's also snow storms. So one can Imagine that the windows are snowed in or one cannot see anything from them anyway.

I think the sound of wind outside is enough to be able to guess what's outside. just my 2 cents.

A compromise would be to have 2-3 houses with transparent windows for people who want that, but most houses like the Lake cabins with a separate cell.

Right now there is the Forestry Lookout (and I agree it was enabled for exactly the reasons Trandor mentions - it is a lookout) but since the ambient temperature is so low and it's on a steep cliff, it would make a very bad base.

So what about windows on eiter Camp Office or Trappers Homestead, or both??

Yeah, that seems to be a good idea, Burning. - The thing with the fake windows is: I'm always wondering, how the weather could have changed so fast outside. The one minute it's sunny, the other it's snowing or it's foggy outside. With transparent windows I would know what to expect when going outside again.

But instead of guessing for the whys and wherefores, it would be interesting to hear about the reasons for the different building and window types from one of the developers directly. Perhaps one of them is reading this?

yes i think having key "base" locations with transparent windows would be nice, not every location.

Agreed, key locations having transparent windows would be the best way to go. Still... i like to keep my head on the clouds just a little, because i know i won't be disappointed either way Just to mention, a lot of indoor objects are behind "loading screens" but that really depends how you look at it. I do like stuff just to be randomly around the rooms too.

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A "fake outdoors" would reduce the performance loss, but how much do you fake? The sky, the bending/moving trees, the snow blowing past, the mountains in the distance? And one of the first complaints would be "I can't see the wolves through the windows." Which is a legitimate complaint with transparent windows.

My opinion, which is only worthwhile to me, is the lack of transparent windows adds atmosphere to the setting.

I can suggest a compromise solution:

Make the windows with a "snowed window" texture (or 1, 2, 3) on the outer side and apply a "frozen glass" distortion shader that would blur and distort everything just a little bit. Then you can "fake outdoors" simply enough using few low-res sprites for what on the foreground and a simplified skybox.

I don't know the way the 3D Skybox works in Unity, in Source engine you can place all the needed sprites/models/e.t.c. inside the 3D Skybox, you also can make it really small and set the upscaling factor (x16 by def) for rendering.

In the end it should be something like that (or that).

This way it'll be easy to make, as the devs will only need to make small sprite-based part of the map which won't take away any significant amount or resources. And the blizzard can be simulated by less dense kind of fog or by additional inhomogeneous flowing animated shader.

Bonus pics:

[spoil][/spoil]

I don't know, but duplicating the scene with "fake outdoors" would go against my instincts as a programmer.

I could imagine that the HL guys have a problem with that too.

It is of course a valid idea, a compromise feature that avoids the performance problem, but for the cost of serious rendundancy. Keep in mind though that it would lead to an increase in loading times, so the performance problem is not entirely vanquished.

But those images you attached are fantastic!! I hate Winter, but it is also incredibly beautiful, especially if viewed from the "safety" of a computer screen

I don't know, but duplicating the scene with "fake outdoors" would go against my instincts as a programmer.

I could imagine that the HL guys have a problem with that too.

It is of course a valid idea, a compromise feature that avoids the performance problem, but for the cost of serious redundancy. Keep in mind though that it would lead to an increase in loading times, so the performance problem is not entirely vanquished.

Well in source engine based games 3D Skybox is used to give a map appearance of a much larger world without high resource consuming. And they don't have instantiated interiors that have to be loaded separately from the main map.

As for redundancy: why would it be serious?

The skyboxes I suggest will be small in size + they won't have any models/hi-res textures/polygon meshes, only simple geometry for the ground and low-res sprites for hills/trees/boulders/buildings. So they won't noticeably affect loading time.

Lake cabins will only require 3 outdoor simulating 3D skyboxes variants, because for each of groups of 3 cabins only 1 shared skybox is needed + 1 for the lone cabin. Then one for the camp office, 1 for the Trapper's Homestand, 1 for the lone cabin, 1 for the logging camp and 1 for the dam. Total 7 small 3D skyboxes.

[spoil][bBvideo 560,340:1swpsvg7]

The problem is that your suggestion works only for semi-transparent windows. Imagine you were the programmer and you know that sooner or later some smart person will come and ask why you did not make it work with fully transparent windows. Since you already opened Pandora's Box you will eventually have to make it work with that case too, completely duplicating the effort. Half-solutions tend to always work out that way, either they get skipped or result in more work to make them complete.

That's at least how I see it.