Okay, let's say you're working on a game, and in this game there's a castle infiltration mission and that it's snowing outside. Would it be possible for the player to see it snowing through the castle's windows without having it snow inside the castle itself?
(https://rmrk.net/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg263.imageshack.us%2Fimg263%2F7643%2Fmockup.png&hash=5e28b0d5b7766e8812e2b4ad1f9191763c0f1bfb)
Quick MS Paint Mockup; Black dots are snow.
How would one go about implementing this?
You could always have a paralax..however, the snowflakes would all move in unison, which looks less than realistic.
That was my first thought, but after trying it out I found myself unhappy with the result. :/
You could have a lot of paralex frames then switch it every frame, but that would take a lot of work.
You could put events on the window, set to Stop Animation ON, and conditioned by the "is snowing outside" switch. Use a sprite sheet with 4 different patterns of snow, each changing with each frame, and each window will choose one of those patterns. At least this way you'll have up to 4 different patterns when you compare windows.
Shaz has a really good idea. I never thought about making the world more...real? You could do this with alot of things. First thought was movble grass, for a cut sence? But the reason for all of this is stating that it would be easy to make one window the way Shaz suggested. But if your going to have that in your game you really need to think about the rest of the game. If its raining, are you going to have windows showing the rain, lets say your in some forest house. There could be alot of work if you want to make a good game. Just something to think about. I'm going to try to make a window like this for my current project, its really simple animation so making a simple window will be easy. Thanks Shaz and Ryosis for the ideas.