Default Smoke effects orientation and mission wind direction.

[Stonehouse]

I did do a search to see if this has been raised previously and could not find anything. Currently I understand that when you add a smoke effect you need to manually set the orientation to match the ground level wind direction which is set in the wind overlay at the mission level.  If you don't do this it defaults to a 0,0,0 orientation and the smoke blows from south to north. 

 

It would be really helpful - particularly I think for mission builders - if the orientation instead defaulted to whatever was set up for ground level wind orientation in the mission weather. This would remove the need for manually setting the orientation for every smoke effect that is placed.

 

eg wind overlay at 0 m is 16 degrees so default the smoke effect orientation to 0,16,0.

 

I believe this would be helpful to mission builders as it would remove one extra set of manual tasks that is needless and prone to oversight and error due to it's manual nature plus I really I cannot think why you would ever want the smoke to move contrary to the overall wind direction.

 

Smoke created by explosions and destruction of air, ground and naval units already does follow the mission defined wind direction so presumably this would not be too hard to do. 

 

I realise it is not the dev teams concern since a mod is outside the game as such but this would also assist with getting randomly spawned smoke effects by the Random Dynamic battle smoke mod to correctly match the overall mission wind direction. Currently regardless of the wind direction the smoke created by this mod always blows from south to north.

 

Thank you for any consideration given to this.

[MajorMagee]

Yes, this would ensure that the effects from city_fire_loop.txt, city_firesmall_loop.txt, and villagesmoke_loop.txt never appear incongruous with the rest of the simulated environment.