Introduction

All features of EasySky V2 are documented here. Feel free to join Discord if you have any questions or feature requests. You can also Email us at Perfect_StormTD( @ ) hotmail.com.

Tutorial Videos

There are a couple of tutorial videos available that explain all the features of EasySky V2, including some best practices.

You can find them all here:

Video Playlist on Youtube

Installation

Note: EasySky V2 is created in Unreal Engine 4, but supports Unreal Engine 5 as well. For installation of EasySky V2 in Unreal Engine 5, please see here.

After you’ve downloaded EasySky V2 from the UE4 marketplace, you’ll need to add it to your project. Once that is done, the plugin will be available for you in the plugin folder. Simply launch the editor and go to Edit -> Plugins.

Once the plugin menu has opened, you can look for the plugin in the left menu. You can either search for PS Studios or EasySky V2, or look under the menu installed. Once you found the plugin, click on the checkbox Enabled.

After enabling it, make sure to restart the editor by clicking the Restart Now button.

Now that we have the plugin enabled, we need to tell the engine to show plugin content before we can place the blueprint in the level. Navigate to your content browser and find the View Options button on the bottom right. Click it, and set the “Show Plugin Content” and “Show Engine Content” to true.

Adding the sky to your level

If you want to place EasySky V2 into your level, simply drag the BP_EasySkyV2 into your level. Make sure you do the following things in order to make it work correct:

  • Remove or reference all Directional Lights in your scene
  • Remove or reference all Sky Lights in your scene
  • Remove or reference all Exponential Height Fog actors in your scene
  • Remove or reference all Post-Process Volumes in your scene
  • Remove all other sky actors
  • Remove all Atmospheric Fog actors

EasySky V2 Properties

Please click on a link to get more detail on the subject.

General knowledge about EasySky V2

EasySky V2 is a system that can simulate different kind of weather in your levels. It comes with a skybox and weather effects. EasySky V2 works out of the box, and there is almost nothing the use needs to configure, although lots of tweaks are possible to make it feel unique.

The most important thing to know is that EasySky V2 works with presets. These are sets of weather properties that determine a weather scenario. The sky itself will blend between those weather scenarios. It will randomly pick a new weather scenario after a random timer ran out, causing a shift in weather type. Predefined weather scenarios are Clear Sky, Medium Clouded, Clouded, Medium Rain, Heavy Rain, Thunder Rain, Thunder Storm and Foggy, but users can add their own weather scenarios easily, or alter the existing ones.

Rain will always blend to snow as soon as the temperature drops below 0 degrees Celsius. 

EasySky V2 works out of the box in network sessions, in listed servers as well as in a peer to peer session. It is important to understand that EasySky V2 only supports 1 weather type for the entire map. There are no zones possible. This might be an extension for the future, but for now it’s not possible.

Function library

There are a couple of pre-made functions that you could use to make the use of EasySky V2 easy. Here you can find a list of them.

Save Current Data

This saves all the relevant information of EasySky V2. This includes current weather, temperature, and time.
The data is saved as a Save Struct type.

Load Data

Similar to Save Current Data, this loads a Save Struct object in EasySky V2. Use this to load your saved data.

Add Actors To Scene Depth

This function can be used to add new objects to the rain and snow occlusion system. By default, the system will only update once every 5 meter the character walks, but this can be used to also include freshly spawned actors. Make sure to run the Regenerate Puddles functions with the Force Update bool set to true after you’ve added the actors to the scene depth.

Regenerate Puddles

Used to regenerate the rain and snow occlusion system. Force Update should be set to true to force update it.

Determine Night Or Day Time

This will return 0 when it’s night time, or 1 when it’s day time