[RELEASED] UniStorm 5.2 - AAA Volumetric Clouds, URP Support, Weather, Sky, Atmospheric Fog, & More!

Yes, we found out that as of right now, both folders need to be imported. We will fix this with our next release.

 

Unfortunately, that doesn't work either. I'm going to have to drop it from my project for now as I've lost too much time trying to find a solution.

Thank you very much for your help.

 

I really don't believe it's UniStorm as I have been able to get shadows working perfectly fine in build mode. It may be a conflict with another asset. Are you using any other assets besides UniStorm in the same project? Other shaders, terrain systems, etc.

You are welcome. We'd like to help find a solution though, even though it may be a conflict with another asset.

 

We have updated our UniStorm Wiki site with an entire page for the Dynamic Plant Growth System. We have also included an example script that allows for harvesting using a RayCast check script. You can find the script along with documentation below.

http://unistorm-weather-system.wikia.com/wiki/Dynamic_Plant_Growth_System

If anyone would like more tutorials, documentation, code references, etc in a section the UniStorm Wiki is lacking in, please let us know and we will add it.

 

I filled every missing field. Apparently all the weather options were also empty. The system is truly gorgeous and works fine. I have two questions however: is it possible in any way to adjust the color of the night sky? I'd like it to be more blue and less pitch black, and adjusting the default night sky color results only in the night clouds getting weird. Also, for some reason the particle effects (rain, mist, snow, etc) don't show up. As I have a custom camera in the scene, I disabled the default player object with its camera, and moved all the particle effects onto my camera. However they don't show up.

 

Have you made sure to apply all the particle effects to UniStorm? If you are using your own camera, you may have set something up wrong. The particle effects should work and if they aren't, they're not connected to UniStorm.

 

We have added 2 new example scripts to the UniStorm wiki.

A script that disables the Sun Shafts image effect for when a player goes underwater:
http://unistorm-weather-system.wiki...asis#Disable_Sun_Shafts_for_going_under_water

A script that will randomize the weather when you press the R key. This is useful for testing out the dynamic weather and not having to wait for it to generate dynamically:
http://unistorm-weather-system.wiki..._the_R_Key_.28Can_be_changed_to_any_button.29

 

How do weather zones work? I click on it in the unistorm menu and nothing happens. I also tried adding the weatherzone example script to an unrendered box etc. The script is added, but nothing happens.

 

Doing that should create a weather zone, unless you've moved a folder somewhere.

If that isn't working, create a new empty game object, add the weather zone script (search for it in the project), and then add a box collider to your game object you just created. Be sure to check isTigger on your box collider.

Everything should now work. Your box collider is what triggers the weather to change. The editor will help you choose what that particular weather for that weather zone will be. The weather will only change once a player hits the box collider. You can have multiple weather zones.

 

We have added a new tutorial to the UniStorm Wiki site that gives a tutorial on how to sync UniStorm time, weather, and more over the network. As well as saving and loading over the network. This can work with Photon or other network/online systems.

http://unistorm-weather-system.wiki...time.2C_weather.2C_temperature.2C_and_more.29

 

Great to see the updates on desktop and mobile.
Are the current asset store downloads compatible with Unity Pro 4.6.2?
including the plant growth aspect?

thanks

 

We are currently working on UniStorm for Unity 4 users. We will post here when we have finished the update. Until then, if you need the plant growth system, you can download the new version with Unity 5 and just put the plant growth script in your Unity 4 project. It should work just fine. If you don't have Unity 5, send us your invoice number for UniStorm and we will send you the plant growth script.

If you have any issues with it, we can fix and convert whatever needs tweaking.

 

@BHS What models do you use in the stuff you show us?
Deer, Plants, etc

 

We used the Medieval World Creation Kit for the fence, plants, and buildings.
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/36555

We used the Nordic Deer Model for the deer model.
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/34098

Are there any other Assets you interested in knowing we used?

 

Thanks man

 

You're welcome.

 

We are currently taking feature requests for UniStorm 2.1. If you have any suggestions or feature requests, let us know here by commenting them and we'll add them to our list.

As for what we have planned for 2.1, we will post our update note sometime later this week.

For Unity 4 users, the 2.0.6 update will be submitted sometime this week.

We are also working on the wiki site today to make sure it's fully up to date with UniStorm 2.0.6. If anyone would like more tutorials, documentation, code references, etc in a section the UniStorm Wiki is lacking in, please let us know and we will add it.

 

I would like to see some network examples

 

As before, I'd say volumetric clouds. I realize that's a big request (and it's perhaps one for something like US3.0), but I feel it has the potential to give both the asset and Unity serious visual "oomph" in a way that very few systems do. How often do you see volumetric clouds in a game? In fact, more work on cloud generation in general would be my request. I have a bit of a weird obsession with clouds, but come on, who can't appreciate the beauty in these shots?


My personal favorite is number 3, where you actually see the shadows of the clouds. You have no idea how pumped up I was when I saw that.

I would also request some...weather fluidity. The ability to have different types of weather on different parts of the map, or to perhaps define it better, have weather be a "box" or something within the UniStorm "globe."

In addition, I want to double-check something. Did you change any of the variables for time recently (like hours and minutes)? Their names or anything? I recently noticed that my "time" UI element is displaying 00:00 all the time instead of the proper time, and I'm unsure if it's because of UniStorm or something on my end.

I've kind of been trying to stay away from UniStorm until the whole Mobile/Desktop thing gets fixed, because I'd rather have things more compact, so it MAY have something to do with that and not UniStorm directly. I just want to know if you guys changed anything there recently. If not, I can assume it's an issue on my end.

 

^This. I am looking for a sky/weather system, and both volumetric clouds and weather areas would be big pluses. I would add that rain/snow appearance affected by wind direction/strength would be cool too if Unistorm does not already possess such a feature.

 

We have added one to our wiki site here (Note that it requires a basic understanding of network programming. We provide what variables you need to track, sync, etc): http://unistorm-weather-system.wiki...time.2C_weather.2C_temperature.2C_and_more.29

Great suggestions. We will use these as reference.

Volumetric clouds are something we would like to add in the near future. We will see what we can do.

I really like the idea of weather parts on the map. We created the Weather Zones, but we aren't utilizing this feature's true potential. I think fronts or systems that spawn across a map would also be really cool.


"In addition, I want to double-check something. Did you change any of the variables for time recently (like hours and minutes)? Their names or anything? I recently noticed that my "time" UI element is displaying 00:00 all the time instead of the proper time, and I'm unsure if it's because of UniStorm or something on my end."

The only thing we changed was how the time was started. A user can fully start, load, and save any time they want. We have an example of this with the UniStorm system.

As for your clock saying 00:00, I'm not really sure why that would happen. What variables is your script referencing to display the time?

We will add an in-game clock to the UniStorm wiki. We made one a little while pack that tracked the time is 12 hour notation as well as weather and temperature.

We have Weather Zones already implemented, but we can do a lot more with them since we release the feature a while back. We will better it to support randomized movement and generation as to create weather fronts/cells.

We are currently working bettering our dynamic wind system. We would like to have directional wind that affects weather and other factors.

 

I have the clock referencing the hour and minute variables, I can't remember what you called them. It's likely got something to do with my mucking about with Unistorm because of the mobile and desktop stuff. I'll take another look at it tonight and see exactly where the problem is. I doubt it's on your end.

 

If you need help with the Time code references, they can be found here on the wiki:
http://unistorm-weather-system.wikia.com/wiki/Code_References#Time

Here, we went ahead and made a UniStorm system that gets the UniStorm Time, Date, Weather, and Temperature. It's a lot more simple than you'd think. I hope this helps.

You can position the UI wherever you'd like. We just did it at the bottom for demonstration purposes.



This uses Unity's new UI system. You will need to apply a text UI for each variable reference (Time, Date, Weather, and Temperature). It's not fanciest UI, but we will tweak it to be a bit more to make it more extensive when we get the chance. We will add it to the wiki and here.

Code (CSharp):

1. using UnityEngine;
2. using System.Collections;
3. using UnityEngine.UI;
4.  
5. public class UniStorm_Clock_C : MonoBehaviour {
6.  
7.     UniStormWeatherSystem_C uniStormSystem;
8.     GameObject uniStormObject;
9.  
10.     public Text ClockText;
11.     public Text DateText;
12.     public Text WeatherText;
13.     public Text TempText;
14.  
15.     // Use this for initialization
16.     void Start ()
17.     {
18.         uniStormObject = GameObject.Find("UniStormSystemEditor");
19.         uniStormSystem = uniStormObject.GetComponent<UniStormWeatherSystem_C>();
20.     }
21.  
22.  
23.     void Update ()
24.     {
25.         ClockText.text = uniStormSystem.hourCounter.ToString() + ":" + uniStormSystem.minuteCounter.ToString();
26.         DateText.text = uniStormSystem.monthCounter.ToString() + "/" + uniStormSystem.dayCounter.ToString() + "/" + uniStormSystem.yearCounter.ToString();
27.         WeatherText.text = uniStormSystem.weatherString.ToString();
28.         TempText.text = uniStormSystem.temperature.ToString() + "°";
29.     }
30. }

 

Hey BHS team.

I wanted to ask, how you guys (and anyone else for this matter) get those nice, fluffy, light clouds.

Any time I use "partial" or "mostly cloudy" weather settings, I get these bland, dark greyish clouds, which are OK for a muggy day, however for a nice clear day, I was hoping for really light clouds. (Think of sky gazing cotton candy/woolly clouds)

I've already tried changing the cloud colours in the Unistorm editor, the Sun_Moon brightness and practically every other light source, to no avail. Also I have played around (a lot) with camera properties and image effects... still nothin'

The closest I have gotten to getting what I wanted (or even just affecting the cloud colours) is when I played around with the Ambient Lighting in the lighting panel, however bumping it up too high of course makes the scene unrealistically bright and all that.

So I'm guessing that the clouds aren't getting any lighting attention; and for that matter they do not seem to be on any layer, prefabs included.

Anything you guys can suggest?

 

The clouds you see are the default clouds that are from the demo that's included with the UniStorm system.

You need to make sure that your Ambient Source is set to color and not Skybox. This will allow your clouds to properly be shaded and look like ours do in the screenshot about.

 

We have finished our tutorial of how to create a UniStorm UI Display system.

This will display UniStorm's Time, Date, Temperature, and Weather with Unity's UI system. This is useful for displaying this information for your player or even testing. The system supports both 24 hour notation and 12 hour clock types.

We will be including an advanced displaying system with our next update. Until then, this should give everyone a nice guide of how to do so.

This tutorial is also useful to show how easy it is to grab and reference UniStorm's variables.

The tutorial can be found here on the UniStorm Wiki Site:
http://unistorm-weather-system.wiki...e.2C_Date.2C_Temperature.2C_and_Weather.C2.A0

 

As we stated earlier, we will be adding the UniStorm UI Display system with the next update. Plus a ton of other cool features. We also have added the option to adjust the storm cloud color.

Here's the improved version of the UniStorm UI Display. We will include this exact system with the next update, including icons. We also plan on adding moon phase display as well.

Currently, this displays the Time, Date, Weather, Temperature, and Season.

 

I am 120% all for weather fronts, that alone is a buy for me. A few thoughts tho.

Include a movement option that follows a direction. If you look at time lapse doppler radar maps you will see storm cells change shape a bit over time, but all move more or less the same direction. Or at least around here they do.

Also, in a given cell there are heavier (usually center) and lighter (usually surrounding) areas of precipitation

Ideally if an avatar was standing in a sunny place they would look west and see rain clouds and precipitation moving their way. wait a bit and it would get overcast, but looking away would see clear skies in the distance. Wait a bit more and it would rain. maybe a bit more and heavy rain, etc.

 

Yeah I tried changing the Ambient Source to colour, but still nothing.

I should also mention that the same case can be seen in all the Unistorm demo scenes that come with the package; the same dark, just shy of black, clouds...

 

Actual weather cells similar to Doppler would be a little too intenisve for simulating weather in a video game. We have a few ideas that were going to try an implement today.

UniStorm has move of a global weather system. If it's raining where the player is, that would be the current weather so the whole sky would be cloudy. However, that doesn't mean we can have a wall of rain effect heading towards the player. Then transition from clear, to mostly cloudy, to cloudy, to light rain, then to full blown thunderstorms as a cell approaches. We will figure out the approach we're going to take and post our results here.

We also plan on revamping our weather generating algorithm in general. We are also looking into a way to plugin real world data to change the weather.

That's strange, your clouds shouldn't be black. They are default supposed to look like they do in the screenshots above (the white clouds). Are you receiving any errors? Have you adjusted your cloud color to a lighter color? Also, could you post a screenshot so we can get an idea of what's going on?

 

No errors in the console, just the debug logs indicating the newly selected weather.

As for the cloud colours, I've bumped them up all the way to the whitest of white, plus the ambient day colour, etc for these screenshots

 

Strange, it looks like your clouds are taking in the color of the fog. The fog is what adds the extra color and brightness.

What version of Unity are you using?

Is your Fog Setting enabled?

 

I'm using v 5.2.2 and the latest Unistorm release.

Yes the fog is enabled, but regardless of deactivating it or changing the colour and even the mode, the clouds are still remaining unaffected.

I'm not sure if it is related or it's something completely different all together, but during the night, the stars seem to be in front of the moon, creating little black dots on the moon; barely noticeable on a small moon, but on a large moon, it stands out a little. (Mostly noticeable on a partial moon)

It's as though the moon is behind the stars in a way. Maybe something is between the clouds and the camera? Or the clouds are behind something?

 

Is this with using a built game or within the editor?

The little black dots are because of the starts. We will have a fix for this with our next release.

 

Good to know about the stars.

I took the screenshots within the editor...

Update:
Even a built scene does not change the cloud colour

 

This is strange. I have never seen this issue before, but we will find a solution.

What shader are your clouds using? Also, does your UniStorm Parent object have blue text, like a prefab object does?

 

Hi guys, a quick question about the survival demo. It seems that the version I have running under Unity 5 simply displays the 3 stats in the bottom left corner, but it does not allow pressing the M key for getting info and dynamic weather modifications like in the Youtube video I saw. Is it because I'm running it off Unity 5? To start it, I simply open the UniStorm_C_Player_Vitals.unity scene.

 

That was a special menu we made for that specific demo video. However, we just added a UniStorm UI system to our Wiki that displays Time, Weather, Date, and Temperature. You can find the tutorial here: http://unistorm-weather-system.wiki...e.2C_Date.2C_Temperature.2C_and_Weather.C2.A0

It'll look like this, but you can adjust the Texts wherever you need them.

 

Thanks for the quick response and the re-post, will look into it.

 

The shaders for the light, partial and "mostly cloudy" clouds is the "Dynamic Light Clouds (Unity 5)".

No blue text, so it isn't a prefab. (Also on account of the "Sun" in the Lighting options always having saving issues, I normally break prefab instances)

For testing purpose I tried the "UniStormPrefab_C_Basic", but still the same issue.

Maybe the cloud textures are incorrect on my end? Could you tell me which textures go where on the shader, and I'll try and swap them around and see if it does anything...

 

That's very strange. I've personally tested several new imports of UniStorm and cannot recreate this issue. That's the right shader. So, if that's the case then your textures are the right ones.

Are you using any other assets that may possibly be causing some conflicts? If you're not, could you send me an export package file of the project you're using so we can see what's going on?

Also, try reimporting UniStorm to see if that fixes your problem. It could possibly be an import issue.

 

We have been hard at work with UniStorm 2.1.

We have a new feature that we have been working on that we're sure a lot of people will find useful.

We have been working on a new addition to the UniStorm Editor that is called the Climate Generator. This Climate Generator generates multiple types of Climates according to real world data.

It consists of 5 presets Random, Rainforest, Desert, Mountainous, and Grasslands. Each preset will generate a random climate according to real world data so no two climates are the same (even the same climates). Each preset will follow the data we have supplied and such as minimum and maximum temperatures for each season, generate seasonal temperature averages, generating weather odds, and precipitation amounts. We also randomly generate the date, starting time, starting season, and moon phase.

All this allows you to truly utilize UniStorm, but have the ability to generate complex climates with the click of a button. All data is realistic for that environment. You can then tweak these settings to your liking at any time. This is great for generating climates either for your games or even for testing. We feel like it greatly increases the realism and believability of the system.

We have also supplied a default setting to reset all data to the original settings we supplied with UniStorm.

The Random Climate will generate a random climate with no real world data. Everything is completely randomized, while still being realistic. This can give you very unique results which you can then alter how you'd like.

With the Climate Generator and the Dynamic Plant Growth system, you should be able to create some very cool gameplay for your players.

We are currently taking feature requests for more climates to be generated.

Here's the Climate Generator part in the Editor:

 

No such luck with the reimport

I doubt there is any conflict, because I tried the reimport in a new project.

Let me try a fresh re-installation of Unity and see where I land with that.

Update:
A reinstall didn't fix it as well.

Please check out the link I sent you and let me know.

 

This sounds like a cool idea, though I think it would be nice to have certain climate-unrelated choices like the date remain constant. So you can institute a new climate but keep the same timeframe. Just a thought.

 

We will download it within the hour and try to find a solution.

We thought people might want a constant time option. We can do this. We will simply add an option for whether or not to generate time/date.

If you, or anyone else, has more suggestions, just let us know.

We should be releasing a new demo today demonstrating this.

 

This is just a vague plan at this point. I don't have anything actually started for this. I don't know how much of this would be something you could do, but I'll mention it anyway and we'll see.

The way my game is going to work is that the terrains are procedurally generated. Based on that, I think it would be neat to have procedurally generated climates, based on things like the height of the game terrain and a general climate selection before the terrain is generated (Temperate, Tropical, etc.) Of course, a part of this is the microclimate idea I mentioned a short while ago (a week or two?). If you can get something like that it would be great.

Just to mention again I'm nowhere near the stage where I "need" this, this is probably at least a year away if not more. Just thought I'd mention it since you're asking for suggestions.

And actually, to make a more direct suggestion about your current implementation, I would personally make climates for the "real-world" climates. Things like Tropical, Dry, Polar, etc. Some of that isn't totally your purview, but that's what I would suggest.

 

Ok I can not get the UFPS to work with this anymore

Also I am creating a snow scene I have set up to static snow all the time, and I want to to snow allot, So I set the intensity to very high and getting some issues the snow starts then the snow stops every few seconds and then starts again. So there is a gap in the snow fall and looks odd

 

I'm not entirely sure what you mean with the snow, please explain more in detail or provide a screenshot.

As for the UFPS, it does work. I personally just tested it.

* You transfer the particle effects over from the demo player.
* Apply the weapon camera to UniStorm's editor
* Increase the Far Clipping Plane on the FPSCamera to 19,000

Works.

 

I had a similar issue. I just started to get it to work and came on here for some of the recent links the Developer has posted xD.

I created two cameras with a mix of this "Using UniStorm with Ultimate FPS Camera (UFPS)" and "Using UniStorm with a 2 camera setup."

Then I created a prefab from the UniStorm camera I had setup and removed it from the scene. Then I used playmaker with the "Advanced Object Spawn" action to spawn that prefab as a child to the the ufps camera (yes the camera) and then used two other actions to set the position and rotation to the self 0,0,0.

In the end it worked. So far there isn't any issues I've seen yet.

Note: Using that method I was able to remove having two movement controllers since the cameras were essentially latched onto one another. The reason I spawned it instead of having it in the scene by default is that UFPS will change many of the camera settings and mess up the scene. Furthermore, drag and drop the particles- do not copy and paste them. For some reason that also caused me issues.

 

ok thanks guys also BHS don't forget to add you awesome ai to you signature man get the work out there! (I love it)