![The Weather Dome [1.5] - Thunderstorm - Sim Surround (1.5 x 1.5 km)](https://slm-assets.secondlife.com/assets/36200046/lightbox/TWD%20Front%20-%20SS.jpg?1734531838)
The Weather Dome is a dome-shaped object that surrounds your place. It's available in various sizes, ranging from 32x32 m till 1.5x1.5 km. The one in this purchase is the biggest one of 1.5x1.5 km.
The largest weather dome is much larger than a single region, and can therefore only be used on single island regions or in the sky where it doesn't interfere with other builds.
The dome has:
- Animated clouds (PBR materials and Blinn-Phong textures),
- Animated matching environment settings,
- Animated lightning (only PBR-enabled viewers, version 7 and higher)
- A self-attaching user HUD for matching thunder and background rain sounds,
- A self-attaching owner and admin HUD to change weather and dome settings,
- An option to let your scripts control the Weather Dome,
- A way to listen to rain updates and help you make your own objects respond to the dome,
- Rain objects that respond to weather conditions with sound, falling rain and ripples in water,
- Sound objects that respond to weather conditions. They can be placed anywhere inside the dome.
Other properties:
- Its land impact is 7 (of the demo it's 9).
- The dome is large and can only be used properly on one single island region. It can be used in the sky, even above 4 km height.
- The dome can only communicate with avatars and objects in the region where the dome is positioned. This means avatars and rain objects outside this region will be part of the experience.
- The dome will cut into some of the version 8 mega landscapes. For some landscapes this is not a problem, for others it may be, Please use a demo first to see if it works in your desired situation.
- The dome can be placed inside the Starry Night system. You may have to disable meteors to prevent them from intersecting the clouds.
It can be rezzed around two or even 2x2 regions, but there is only one region where the experience with sound and environment changes will be active. This is because much of the necessary communication between the dome and avatars cannot cross region boundaries.
See item in Second Life- Product of Landscapes Unlimited, by Sominel Edelman. For natural environments.
- This weather system changes weather conditions and windlight EEP on your parcel
- Weather changes from bright to cloudy to dark and gloomy with lightning and rain
- Has rain and sound objects that you can place on your parcel.
- A HUD makes thunder sounds. Can be managed by using scripts. With PBR textures.
Ultimately I do love this, but there are a couple of issues.
I combined this with Tarn Valley Full Mega Surround for a full sim and they look and feel very amazing together!
If you use the optional Experience with it, then you will be unable to adequately adjust your land environment settings for any other purpose without opting out of that land experience, which is what I chose to do in the long run and removed it from my land so that shared experiences remain consistent.
The hud is nice but it will consistently not remove if you teleport out of your sim and when you return the scripting doesn't check to see if you're already wearing it, and just pushes on new ones, layered on top of the others. What typically happens is that this builds and builds and you just cannot remove them. It goes a step further though because your attachment slots fill up and you can't add other things also.
MY SOLUTION
Not using the HUDS or the Experience. It's not that I don't want to but two things that matter to me most are compromised if I do; my shared environments are not able to be adjusted easily, and of course fighting the huds.
What I am going to do is go into my viewer's preferences (Firestorm), under Avatar > Preferences > Sound and Media > Media Tab:
Then go to Media Source volume rolloff distance and set the two sliders below that to 512 for starts getting quieter at, and completely disappears at.
Then I'm going to try to find adequate sounds that work and set them out as an acceptable substitute over using the huds at all.
Sure it means I am not changing the weather dome beyond the initial setup but that's okay. My hope is that this product gets updated with some form of fix that permits environmental changes, and a better way of handling the huds and sounds so you aren't forced to wear them all the time, let alone stack them until you just can't function properly.