Does anyone know what is up with the snowfall in my world?

[Umbrus]

I just got to my first winter, and noticed this on the map. (See attached pictures). Some of it looks normal, but some of the snowfall if really choppy(chunks next to each other, one having a ton of snow and one having none) and I don't know why when some of the rest of it is so nicely distributed. Does anyone know why this is happening or how to fix it?

[Fredrik Blomquist]

I get this a lot, if you enter an area at surtain temperature, it gets covered in snow shortly after loading. The snow then starts melting at plus degrees celsius, but get removed completely at a higher temperature. So all is down when the chunk was last loaded and the temperature when it was. The game only load the are closest to you, that why you get this.

[Silent Shadow]

The game does not update your map until you pass somewhat near the area, so snowy (and green) patches can persist on the world map for a while.

Factors like elevation and biome can influence when snow appears too, so you can have some jagged climate edges.

Edited August 1, 2021 by Silent Shadow

[Streetwind]

Beyond what Silent Shadow mentioned (the map/world only updates in a certain area around you), there's an additional layer of complexity: the weather system.

Only areas near the player are loaded. And only in loaded areas does anything happen. Everything else can be thought of as being frozen in time - until you go near it again. Usually, you don't notice that, because the terrain itself doesn't change over time. But as soon as snowfall enters the scene, there's a problem. It just snowed for a whole day over your base, and the ground is covered in a thick layer of white. But all those areas outside loading range, frozen in time? It did not snow there. If you walked over there, it would be as green as ever. Super immersion breaking. This is a huge problem that generally prevents games like Minecraft from having seasons altogether.

Vintage Story tries to tackle this problem by, well, memorizing all the weather that should have happened while an unloaded area was frozen in time. And then, as soon as it loads, that area is fast-forwarded through all the memorized weather, so that all the snow that should have fallen actually appears.

This may sound like an elegant solution... but it's actually not. Because this problem doesn't have any elegant solutions. If you want to know whether there should be snow on the ground or not, and how much of it, then you must do the math. All of it. All you can do is throw CPU cycles at the problem. Which is what this solution does. And because that's a huge amount of work for the CPU, it is placed into a background processing queue. The idea is that whenever the CPU has some breathing room, it'll silently do some weather simulation in the background. That way it doesn't interfere with the game's performance/framerate.

This is all well and good, until you make it run on an older, or lower powered system that's just got roughly enough CPU power to run the game. The CPU is almost always under very heavy load, and can no longer keep up with the weather simulation background queue - especially if the player is traveling and constantly loading and unloading, or even freshly generating, different chunks (which in itself takes CPU power, and adds additional work to the queue). And then, well... the weather simply isn't processed fast enough. Some chunks may wait five, ten, fifteen minutes or longer until they realize that hey, all this snow here should long since have melted. Then they'll update, one cycle. But it may take multiple cycles for multiple snow layers to get melted one by one. This can even happen for chunks that are already loaded, if the simulation queue is really backed up hard.

My system is older too, and pretty much all of my winter looked like that. I got snowfall weather playing, but no snow accumulation on the ground. Then, like half an hour later, snow layers on the ground suddenly just spawned in, chunk by chunk, as the simulation finally caught up. In one case it updated right under my feet, and I was suddenly shifted up in the air as I was walking along. One second, bare ground, next second, snow everywhere. In spring, the snow melted the same way. And some chunks simply took longer to update than others.

If you open the map and stand still doing nothing for a few minutes near the irregularly snowed areas, you should eventually notice the chunks updating. ...Probably.

 

Edited August 1, 2021 by Streetwind

[Fredrik Blomquist]

Aha, thanks - i had no idea. Noticed that the snowfall seemed to upgrade - slowly or fast when you entered a chunk - but i thought it had to do with some triggers, not a slow update.

[Onsdag]

On 7/31/2021 at 9:13 PM, Silent Shadow said:

The game does not update your map until you pass somewhat near the area, so snowy (and green) patches can persist on the world map for a while.

Factors like elevation and biome can influence when snow appears too, so you can have some jagged climate edges.

I suspect it has more to do with biomes (biomes aren't exactly in the game though...), microclimates, the way chunks are loaded, or simply just a bug.

If you take a look at the screenshot in the OP you'll see there's areas of smooth transition where the snow gradually and seamlessly segues into no snow, and then not a few meters away there's areas where the snow coverage drastically changes like chunk errors in minecraft. It's not elevation related - in the second screenshot you'll see that the elevation is the same between the snow covered areas and clear areas. Neither is it exactly biome related for the very same reason. I don't think it's chunk loading issues, or at least not in the way described by others above, as I have travelled far away into virgin areas that haven't ever been explored before and seen this same issue crop up.

I think it may be caused by a number of factors, though I couldn't pinpoint what exactly those are. Temperature and microclimates may have something to do with it. On my server, when it finally started turning Spring my base continued to be gripped by freezing temperatures and snow whereas my brother's base not 50 meters away the berry bushes started flowering and he was able to start growing crops 7+ days before I could. Elevation was virtually the same, biome was the same, rainfall amounts were identical, both locations were constantly updated by the server, etc., etc. However, my area was colder than his even though I was further south. Also, like I said previously, when traveling into completely new areas where the server had to populate new chunks I would witness firsthand what the OP shows: that is areas of smooth transition and areas of 'chunk errors'.