Starfield Community Discovers Rain Only Ever Falls on the Player, Developers Explain Why

ign.com:

Some within the Starfield community were surprised to learn that rain only ever falls on the player this week after a Reddit post revealing the normally unseen trick saw nearly 30,000 upvotes.

“In Starfield, rain only exists in a small area around the player,” redditor thelastfastbender wrote alongside a screenshot showing the effect in photo mode.

The Reddit post then made its way onto social media where the video game community helped explain what’s going on. It turns out pretty much all video games handle rain like this, although usually in a slightly different way.

Thomas Francis, lead visual effects artist at Darkest Dungeon 2 developer Red Hook Studios, posted to say rain is normally attached to the camera rather than the player character, which is why the effect is visible in Starfield’s photo mode. This is done “because it is less performance intensive than simulating particles everywhere. Why spawn particles across the world when a few hundred particles in front of your camera does the job just as well,” Francis said.

Gamers have discovered our secret lol.. Could have been avoided if you parented the rain to the camera Bethesda pic.twitter.com/U0sTNgGQwH

This technique is used for pretty much everything, Francis added, including snow, dust, and even blades of grass. “Anything that flies across your screen as you are moving in a zone/biome is probably using something like this,” Francis explained. “It’s optimized and easy for us developers to control.”

The Starfield rain Reddit post has sparked yet another fascinating ‘developer tricks of the trade’ moment on social media. Francis went on to explain that video game rain does not make anything wet, rather it triggers a system that tells the environment to “look wet”.

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