“The way we’ve modelled it is that the atmosphere has a number that will drive up, and that number dictates how much moisture is in the atmosphere,” says art director Ben Penrose. “And as that number starts to climb, you’ll start to see different cloud layers build up.”
Technical director Alan Roberts goes on to explain that the weather in Horizon 2 is fully dynamic.
“We’ve got quite a lot of different systems,” says Roberts. “We’ve got fog and haze. We’ve got rain, clouds, we’ve got wind. We’ve even got rainbows.”
“We can combine all of these in an almost limitless number of ways to give you a load of variety in our weather types throughout the game.”
On screen it’s hard to distinguish the simulated clouds from the ones hanging in the sky outside Playground’s UK studio on what’s otherwise a slightly soggy English morning.
“It’s all down to the kind of things you’d expect in real life,” says Penrose. “So when the atmospheric intensity reaches a certain breaking point you would get rain and, if it carries on, you would get more rain.”
“And that rain will affect all the material on the car and the world in the way you would expect. Cracks in the road will start to fill up with water, or if it’s just light rain the tarmac will just darken slightly. But they’re all nuances we can play with to get a whole range of different scenarios going.”
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