YAY finally an easy way to do a gone home style game that you start outside with it raining or snowing and then go inside and can see it raining from inside your house or whatever 
Haha definitely!
I wanted to polish up the actual raindrop material, hereās a quick update video. Ground splashes can be seen but arenāt quite finished yet.
Nice (y)
I am keeping watch on this thread from the very beginning and your progress is very delighting, keep going (y)
Thank you so much for your support! <3
Very nice material on those rain drops, certainly better than in most games that have rain implemented.
This plugin is shaping very nicely, you have defenetly a winner here i think as long as you allow it to be scalable. If you can learn from other games sky systems such as Ark for example which uses True sky, the main problem there were the clouds which were tied to non flexible reducing of quallity which in end made majority of people have sky turned of completly, which afterwards make weathering a bit wierd (rain from clear sky and such). So keeping materials/clouds/systems scalable to settings is very important especially on those parts that are heavy hitters. Not trying to guide you how you should develop anything at all, just some observations from other games.
Thanks for your awesome feedback! Scalability has definitely been a huge focus throughout the development for Orbit, the goal is to have things look as consistent as possible across a solid range of performance targets. Iāll have a good segment focusing on scalability in the upcoming release trailer, thatāll show it in action.
have you been able to test it on the macbook or macs in general yet?
Iām still too heavy in the development phase to have tested on anything outside my PCs at home, but I have access to a couple Mac machines that I plan on utilizing during the testing phase 
Rain/Snow update, re-working the material function to include the ability to mask out areas that are under cover using the vertex painting tool in UE4. Rain causes splashes on the ground, snow particles now also collide with stuff.
Also, end of July is here, Iāve got a changelog:
Height Fog:
- Added Height Fog as an option to supplement, replace volumetric fog for performance/aesthetic options
- Added Fog Density Param
- Added Fog Colors Param
- Added Tie Fog to Sun Position Param
- Added Fog Height Param
- Added Fog Falloff Param
- Added Render Height Param
Lightning:
- Implemented procedurally placed, procedurally shaped lightning
- Implemented strike location-player location distance based thunder audio
- Added Lightning Color Param
- Added Lightning Brightness Param
- Added Lightning Flicker Rate Param
- Added Lightning Display Length Param
- Lightning strike spawns temporary point light at hit location
- Lightning is physicalized, doesn't pass through solid objects
Rain:
- Implemented rain particles
- Implemented ground splashes for rain in weather effect material function
- Rain particles are physicalized, don't pass through solid objects
- Rain wetness can be masked out from under covered areas/other undesired areas using vertex painting
Snow:
- Implemented snow particles
- Snow Particles are physicalized, don't pass through solid objects
- Snow buildup can be masked out from under covered areas/other undesired areas using vertex painting
Stratus Clouds:
- Tweaked sun and moon backlighting shape and added falloff param
- Implemented lightning backlighting with similar shape/falloff controls to sun and moon
- Added noise texture param
Really looking forward to this. Hope its not long until release 
Current goal is to have the system finished, polished, tested and submitted by or before the end of this month
Hey, quick update, remember in that video posted above, you had to paint out the weather material effects under covered areas to keep them from getting wet/snowy?
You donāt have to do that anymore, itās all automatic now.
Thatās not a shadow under the box, thatās the snow being masked out because itās under cover.
Tell me if you need any betatesters
@
$20.00 USD. Very good price.
I bought your Volumetric Light System on the marketplace, and itās really amazing what it can do using only blueprints.
Iāll likely put out a post for testing the system in the coming weeks, be sure to check back in on this thread for more details
Thanks for your support, Iām very glad my system worked for you
Nice progress. Two ideas that poped into my mind recenlty:
-Maybe implementing some sort of temperature system which would be trigger for snow and rain phases could be interesting, it would also very well fit into survival game as that variable of temperature could be exposed to other parts of gameplay. Perhaps tied to height would also be cool, so this way it would be triggering snowing on mountains while valleys could be rain or cloudy. I havent yet seen any such system that separates the weather effects so i could be throwing too heavy ideas out there.
-Is it possible to mask weather per area, so that for example if you have few biomes on map, it would only snow on certain part of map?
Well for me personally it would be big hedache if there isnt some sort of masking, but most likely it wouldnt be problem for most of users for such system.
Thank you very much! So what Iām implementing in the coming days will be exactly that, a temperature system that will dictate what kind of precipitation will be falling, based on average high and low temperatures that you could set, which would be shifted towards based on the position of the sun, or time of day. If all goes well, Iāll be creating a system of āweather profiles,ā which would be configurable (custom ones would be optional as well, thatās another discussion) and the values set there would serve as a weather pattern that the system could select at runtime by way of user input, or pull randomly based on user-set probability. In the latter case, you could set up a few profiles (or use the ones Iāll be shipping it with) and just let the system run, and weather patterns would change automatically, each easing into the next. Of course, the temperature would be a float value, which you could Get in another script, if you were building a survival game that took into account things like the player being too cold or too wet, and temperature would dictate what kind of precipitation is falling, when it falls.
This is something that Iāve considered, and Iād like to be able to do it, but itās a bit too involved for me to concept, iterate, test and ship before the end of the month. For now, all weather effects/patterns will be global in world-space terms, but itās something Iād like to at least try to pursue in post-release updates. Iāll tack it on to my list of extra features on the project Trello page, if anyone else would like it as well, be sure to vote for it there.
You could use volumes for that. Just derive from the Actor class, add a box collision component (or whatever you want) to visualize the volume and use it bounds to activate/deactivate certain weather effects. You could implement logic into this class mask the edges of the volumes with noise, in order to prevent hard edges. Or you could simply say that the further inside of the volume you go, the more probably it is for the weather effect to appear.
Certainly, but there are more logistics to consider. How many dynamic masks are you going to allow in the volumetric cloud shader, driving up material instructions? How will the exclusion zones be handled at runtime? Will they move, rotate, shrink? If so theyāll likely need to be tied to wind direction, temperature, etc. Whatās going to be the best way to meet a wide range of needs for the end user, having these things generated automatically, manually, both? All the basic framework is fairly straightforward, but implementing it and having it work peacefully with all the other features and parameters would take some time. Iāll definitely look into it, but more than likely itāll be post release.
Been looking at this thread for a while now. Really loving the progress.
Only piece of feedback I could currently offer is to make sure to have the sky look as pretty as possible 
I believe Ultra dynamic sky definitely sells the amount it does because of the pretty looking default things. The screenshots on the marketplace really look amazing. I guess itād be worth some time investment for you.
This pack will have a lot more to offer though, with all the customization and the weather stuff.
Keep up the awesome work. (I check this thread a few times a day to stay up-to-date on your progress! Itās really awesome)
