Snow

Snow

Snow is the USP of this project. Ground can be covered in snow enabling certain mechanics. Snow can be melted with heat sources.

The look

There are three components to snow:

• Falling snow. This is the most simple one with Niagara particle emitter just following the player character. For now it's constantly snowing so that every place without heat sources gets covered with snow. Disabling this increases level of difficulty - if a patch of snow is once melted, it doesn't get back.
• Ground covered with snow. It's a blend of two material layers. The snow layer uses displacement mapping and subsurface scattering. The blend uses Runtime Virtual Texture to expose the bottom layer near heat sources in a dynamic way.
• Props with snow caps. Also a blend of two material layers, but instead of RVT uses object orientation to apply snow only on top. Melting this kind of snow TBC.

The mechanics

• Falling snow. For now it's constantly snowing so that every place without heat sources gets covered with snow. Disabling this increases level of difficulty - if a patch of snow is once melted, it doesn't get back.
• Ground covered with snow. The layer of snow is thin and can be melted with heat sources. The player character can use snow to hide, so melting snow makes navigating through levels
• Props with snow caps. This kind of snow is purely visual, at least for now, so no impact on the gameplay.