Expanded Weather2 Dynamics

1.06.2 Ten thousand downloads. Thank you - that is ten thousand worlds this mod has been dropped into, and the reports, screenshots and complaints that came off them are why most of this list exists. The sea is the headline here.

New cloud and funnel art. The storm deck and the funnel each draw a single authored puff now, instead of eight-frame strips with four phase siblings per role. The old sheets were animated by uploading every frame into the same atlas region, which meant every puff in a storm showed the same frame at the same instant and the whole sky read as one large texture flipping. A still has nothing to phase, so the extra sheets, their atlas entries and their animation clocks are gone - along with the setting that used to stagger them, which now does nothing but is kept, whole, as the way back.

The tornado draws its own darker puff. A funnel is a few large, close surfaces where a cloud deck is hundreds of soft ones, so the same art that sums into an overcast summed into a haze on a column - which is why a wider funnel used to read as more transparent rather than less. The funnel now has its own sheet, deliberately darker and denser than the cloud's, and it is not governed by the art switch: a tornado draws its own art either way, falling back to the selected puff rather than to nothing. the waves still dont work btw The wash finally reaches the sand. Waves now run up the beach the way they should: a crest arrives, water sheets up onto the row of sand past the waterline, and it drains back between crests. Before this, the water could only ever wet the row of sand sitting at the water's own level, because the run-up was measured from the waterline while the first row of sand stands a whole block higher than it. In practice that meant the swash appeared on an ordinary beach only in winds above about 47 mph. It starts climbing at around 30 now, and a strong storm wets the row above the waterline right across a crest, with that row dry again behind it. Small seas behave as before: a calm day washes the waterline and nothing above it.

No more whitewater painted on the seabed. Water that had run up was also being drawn on ground below the waterline - a film of foam on sand that was already underwater, visible through the shallows. Only ground above the waterline takes a wash now.

The Surf switch actually switches it off. Turning Surf off leaves no breakers, no whitewater and no wash on the sand, and setting Surf Run Up Blocks to 0 leaves the water entirely. The wash used to keep running up the beach whatever those two settings said.

The cliff in the sea around a beach is gone. The wave surface is only told how deep the water is for a band of cells around land, and that band was sized in advance for a seabed that drops a whole block per block. On the gentler bottom most shores actually have, the band ended while the water under it was still shallow enough for the swell to stand up and break, so beyond it the waves went back to their full open-water height: a ring of raised water, up to a block and a half tall in a big storm, running around every beach. The band is now grown outward until the water at its own edge is deep enough that the waves cannot feel the bottom - two cells on a cliff coast, eight on a gently sloping one. Measured on a shore sloping one block down per two blocks out, the step went from 0.64 of a block to none at all.

The sea no longer shimmers when you move. Each cell of the wave surface shows one window of the water texture, and that window was tied to the surface's own grid rather than to the world. The grid is rebuilt every time you swim or sail across a cell, so the whole sea's texture re-rolled as you moved - a pop with nothing visible causing it. A patch of sea now keeps the same texture wherever you are standing.

One knob means something slightly different now. Surf Run Up Blocks is measured from the top of the block of sand the water is standing against rather than from the still-water line, because a beach is made of blocks and that first one is a whole block above the water. The default is unchanged and was chosen against this reading; if you have set your own value, it is now worth about a row more wash than it used to be.

Satellite tornadoes no longer sink into the ground. Small suction vortices now hug the ground they are standing on instead of burying their lower rings in it, so a multi-vortex tornado's whirling feet read as standing on the surface rather than clipping through it.

Storm debris is made of the ground. What a tornado throws used to be a vanilla stick or a twig sprite tinted by how dry the ground under it was, so every debris field was the same grey and a scoured field, a desert and a gravel path all threw the same thing. Loose debris is now a real piece of the surface block it was cut from - grass, dirt, sand, gravel, terracotta, whatever is under it - cut from a random face of that block and carrying its colour, so a debris field tells you what the storm has been tearing up. The pieces are deliberately smaller than the twigs they replace, so the field gets lighter as it gets solid rather than heavier.

Chase drones survive their storm. Fixed the drone being lost to the weather it was launched into.

Fixes and polish across the radar panel, the settings screen, the spotter net, photographs and the chase log, mostly small.