Tornado7

Tornado7 6.3

This is the biggest update the mod has ever had. 6.2 was a storm chasing mod. 6.3 is a storm chasing mod with a hurricane hunter plane, a rocket and a solar system above the clouds. Here is everything that changed since 6.2.2, the first NeoForge 1.21.1 release.

Trailer:

New

The WC-130J hurricane hunter

• A flyable WC-130J weather plane with a flight model checked against a published study of the real aircraft.
• Walk around the cargo bay in flight, use the clickable cockpit, flip switches, run the autopilot.
• Drop sondes into storms and get a real sounding back.
• Hail dents, lightning strikes, a shaking airframe inside a hurricane, voice warnings, and a crash if you push it too far.
• /t7m plane and /t7m plane runway to get flying quickly.

Hurricanes

• Tropical cyclones from tropical storm up to category 5, with rain bands, an eyewall and a calm eye you can fly into.
• /t7m cyclone <wind>, /t7m cyclone cat <0-5>, /t7m cyclone info, /t7m cyclone clear.

Space

• Climb high enough and you leave the atmosphere. Up there is the Sun and all eight planets on real orbits.
• Land on the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Europa and Titan. Europa has a hidden ocean and geysers, Titan has ocean life, the gas giants are clouds all the way down.
• Flying works like in Kerbal Space Program: navball, SAS, a space tablet with a 3D map, and an autopilot for transfers.
• A black hole and a pulsar you can spawn with /t7m spawn black_hole and /t7m spawn pulsar.
• Spacewalks: step out, grab the hull and pull yourself along it.

The RSP rocket

• A multistage launcher with real stage separation, onboard cameras, satellites that stay in orbit and a capsule that lands on parachutes.
• Every part has its own crafting recipe.

Spaceship engines

• Three engines for ships built with Create Aeronautics: Orion (a chain of small nuclear blasts), Daedalus (a fusion torch) and the warp drive (jumps between planets).
• Seats work on the way between worlds, and SAS figures out which way your ship's nose points from where the thrust goes.

Two new interceptors

• Titan and Dominator 2. That makes eleven vehicles in total, counting the DOW6.

Skis

• Skis, boots, helmet and poles. Push off with the poles, carve down mountains, and wipe out in style.
• Works in VR too.

The cloud buddy

• A little cloud that teaches you the whole mod in 42 short voiced lessons, in English and Russian.

A real atmosphere in Excessive Realism

• Every region gets a proper sounding: CAPE, CIN, the level of free convection, and a cap. Mornings sit under the lid doing nothing, the cap breaks in the afternoon and everything fires at once. Mountains and sea breeze fronts break it early, so storms start on boundaries first.
• Wind at two levels gives a hodograph, and helicity decides the storm mode: pulse storm, multicell, squall line or supercell. Straight shear means damaging wind, curved shear means tornadoes.
• Storms use up the air they grew from. A cell that just produced leaves a cold pool behind and goes quiet for hours, so severe weather comes in waves.
• Moisture comes from somewhere now: the wind carries it off oceans, jungles and swamps, and deserts dry it out.
• /t7m weather prints the whole sounding for where you stand.

Wildfires

• Wildfires that spread and burn out on their own, and fire tornadoes that really burn. /t7m fire <intensity> <radius>, /t7m spawn firetornado <radius> <windspeed>.

And more

• A DOW view on the laptop: switch to it and the scope shows your DOW6 truck's own close range beam, with the inside of the tornado in real detail.
• The Atmosphere Sandbox zooms properly now. Storms keep their shape at any scale instead of stretching into needles.
• Hydraulics on your own builds now lower the hull onto the ground, so the wind can't get under it.
• A new loading screen.
• The laptop works like a real computer now, and the radar was rewritten from scratch.
• Tornadoes now push, spin and break physical builds from Create Aeronautics and Sable. Wood comes apart, steel mostly shakes.
• Vivecraft: fly the plane with your hands, hold the steering wheel, steer ships with the stick.
• Every item in the mod can be crafted in survival.

Reworked

• The supercell was rebuilt from the ground up as one storm instead of separate pieces: a rotating mesocyclone, a proper wall cloud, an anvil that spreads with the wind.
• The tornado funnel was rebuilt, and tornadoes now follow their storm instead of wandering off on their own.
• The whole cloud sky runs on a new engine. Clouds form by region and for a reason, and storms fire where the air can actually support them.
• All ten cloud types were redone, including cirrus with sun halos and patchy cirrocumulus.
• Ordinary thunderstorms and gust fronts now exist next to supercells, and storms go through a real life cycle.
• Lightning and night look completely different: real bolts, and nights that are actually dark.
• Driving: wind now acts on the whole body of a vehicle, trucks can roll over, dents land where you got hit, and mud, sparks and tyre marks react to the ground. Handling of every interceptor was retuned on a test track.
• Dust devils got their own look.

Performance

• Much faster storms and clouds. Weak PCs and integrated graphics went from single digit FPS to playable.
• The mod tests your GPU on first launch and picks a fitting preset. If shaders can't compile, it switches to a simple renderer instead of crashing.
• Adaptive quality drops detail for a moment when FPS dips.
• Shaders no longer take forever to compile on first launch.

Fixed

• Freezes when arriving at planets.
• Clouds sometimes moving way too fast.
• Storms, hurricanes and tornadoes being cut off at a distance.
• Things disappearing under a supercell or inside a hurricane.
• Rain not reaching the ground, and rain falling inside the plane.
• Tornadoes in mountains.
• The mouse being stuck after leaving some screens.
• Ships freezing in space far from the world center.
• Many smaller things.