Weather System

From TESS-GEN

Introduction and Quick Example

The Weather System is one of the most advanced parts of the game. It basically define the temperature of a region, and how your HUD will react to this.

When you create your account, you need to specify which Weather Zone you are more comfortable to. The zones available depends of your race. Since the game for now only has the race Human, the available zones for registration are Temperate, Tropical, Continental, and Arid (check the end of this page for the full list and ranges).

For the player, every zone has a normal value in Celsius degrees, as well a Minimum and a Maximum temperature that your HUD can support before starting to suffer the consequences of the Weather, or need protection with clothes and special Food and Drink. For example, the Temperate zone, the game default one, has a normal temperature of 20°C, the minimum is 16°C and maximum is 24°C. This mean that you don't need extra protection if your are in a place that the temperature is 18°C, for example.

But if you are in an area where the temperature is only 14°C, you will become Cold, you will start to lose Comfort. When your Comfort get too low, you will start to lose Energy and Health, and also some actions will not be available, or will suffer penalties (using weapons is one). To stop losing Comfort, you can:

  1. - Wear a piece of TESS-GEN Apparel that have the Warm trait.
  2. - Consume Food, Drink, or Medicine that warms you
  3. - Move to another place or near a source of heat (ambient modifier) if there is any around.

When you get protection with one or more options above, your Comfort will start to raise again. Same apply if you are in a zone hot than your maximum, in this case you will need apparel and Food / Drinks that cold you down, also ambient modifiers that decrease the ambient temperature.

Defining Weather Zone in a region

To define which weather a region will have is not a simple task, due to some reasons. To define it, the owner or person responsible for the region need to ask TESS-GEN Staff to include the region in the game.

If you own a region or is renting an entire one, send a Support Ticket or a notecard to Sernance Resident with the name of the sim to be added to the game, also the temperature you want for it. We will check the information provided, and if the requester have rights for it. When the sim is added, you will receive a special link to our website where you can login and manage the weather in your sim (or more sims).

Note that the weather of a region can be changed only every 12 hours.

Defining Weather in a parcel

If you are renting a parcel in a sim, and want to override the sim weather, you need to acquire a Parcel Thermostat, rez it in your parcel and set the desired temperature. Like the sim, the weather can be changed only every 12 hours, and only one thermostat can be placed in a parcel.

You can get the first parcel thermostat for free at the TESS-GEN Main Store.

Area Thermostat

The Area Thermostats allows to set temperature at a specific area, overriding the region and parcel temperatures. These are useful for skyboxes, and they can set an area to be a fixed rectangle, or a spherical or semi-spherical area around the thermostat. The temperature in them is set like the Parcel Thermostat.

Each Area Thermostat can work with only one area, so, if you need a different area for various skyboxes, you need to acquire more.

One good example of an Area Thermostat is the use of it inside a dome. In the game's HQ you will find two glass domes set to different temperatures, one for arid, another for artic, both overriding the sim temperature.

Note that if you overlap two or more Area Thermostat, the HUD will use the one closest to the player.

There is no free Area Thermostat available, only paid ones you can buy at the Main Store and the Marketplace.

Ambient Modifier

Ambient Modifiers are objects that can be placed around and will heat or cool the ambient in a specified range, ading or removing some small values of Celsius degrees to the sim, parcel, or area thermostst. These objects comes with fixed area and value they can add or remove to the ambient temperature. Some will also required fuel to work.

Examples: Burning Barrels will add 2°C to the ambient temperature in an area of 3 meters, and requires Coal or Firewood to work. Air coolling units will remove from 2°C to 10°C from the ambient in a range from 5 to 15 meters (these values depends of the model) and will require Gas or Cosmic Energy to work.

Setting the Temperature

To define the temperature the steps are almost the same for a Sim, Parcel, and Area Thermostat. The diference is that for a Sim it is made in a webpage, while the two others in the rezed thermostat:

  1. - Rezz the Parcel Thermostat. Be sure that there is no other one already in same parcel.
  2. - Touch for menu. Select Temperature option, and then one of the options that will appear. Select the one that is close to what you think is the ideal temperature for your parcel.
  3. - With the option Divergency you can fine tune the temperature.

Example: you selected Tropical for your parcel, that has a temperature of 25°C, but you want the parcel to be at 23°C. In the divergency menu, select -2. The menu will now show the actual temperature (23°C), the base one (25°C) and the divergency applied (-2°C). If you are happy with the value, you can hit Start to save the values and put the thermostat to work. Remember, once it is started, you can only change again after 12 hours.

Actual Temperature Ranges

These are the actual ranges available in the game. For thermostats it is used the Ambient Temperature value. Maximum and Minimum are applied to players.

Name Ambient Temperature Minimum Maximum
Arid 30 25 35
Artic 1 -15 10
Cold Hell -10 -25 1
Continental 14 8 16
Hot Hell 35 30 40
Temperate 20 16 24
Tropical 25 20 30