Clouds Keep Falling on My Head

Today was a day to tackle another possible application - The Weather Changer! (Or just Weather; still thinking of a good title). The most difficult part of this (which I also tackled last night) was the cloud covering; I'm still not quite used to a cloud system in Unity (50 bucks for volumetric clouds? naaah) so I worked on a horizontal particle system of stretched billboards to get a general feeling of weather:

I also worked on varying both the emission rate (cloud cover) and the colors of the clouds over time. The tricky part of this one was determining how the emission rate is changed in the latest version of Unity; the emissionRate variable is now obsolete, forcing the access of emission (read-only) with a writable rate value. That rate value is actually a MinMaxCurve struct that required instantiation and assigning of a completely new struct. Hacky, but it works.

Combining it with accessing the exposure of the skybox (in a similar script to the SkyChanger) allowed a separation between dark and stormy:

To light and sunny:

The "Thunder" and "Sunny Day Sound" modules also got a chance to counteract each other's sounds with an optional list on the sound cue scripts that allow stopping of opposing sounds when events start.

What next? Rain, perhaps! And I'll also see how to integrate tooltips to make the system easier to navigate.