I understand what you're saying. Compromises have to be made. My main point is that mappers (you, me, whomever) seem to want to implement a new or cool effect just because they can, regardless of whether or not it actually works well. And we can't just use something, have it not work well (imho) and then blame the modeler or developers of the effect because it doesn't look natural. It's still up to the mapper or level designer to implement the tool or not. Again, just my humble opinion, I thought the map would've still been fine without the snow. Others like the snow, so to each his own. Just me, but the second I saw sheets of snow pelting me inside a house, I would have either fixed it or just not used it.
And (not arguing, just asking), I thought zoning off houses/sheds would optimize performance not reduce it? I mean that's typically one of the main purposes of zoning off a section right?
I guess we just have a difference of opinion here, I used the effect because I thought it was adequate for the function I wanted it to perform. Nobody is blaming anything on anyone here, I am overall pretty happy with the levels and the effects provided by the 227 team. But weather in games is still just a gimmick at the end of the day.
As mentioned previously, I am working on a 1.1 version, which will attempt to address the negative points the pack has received, including the weather FX, but I won't be stripping them out all-together. Perhaps with more time spent on understanding how they work I can get it looking better for everyone.
And with regard to zoneing I'm working for this original statment found on
http://unreal.epicgames.com/Zones.htmFor zones whose purpose is only to speed up the engine, your goal is to divide your level up into zones while introducing portals whose overall area is as small as possible. The smaller the portals, the less work the engine must do to process the portals. Therefore, we place our portals in passageways which naturally separate large areas, such as doorways and hallways. This approach causes the level to be divided up well, without adding too much portal area.
There is no benefit (and often a performance penalty) to placing portals in the middle of large rooms. These huge portals usually eat up more CPU time being processed than they save. Stick portals in doorways, hallways, and other narrow passages.