Although weather sync was added by Koncord to the rewrite in fd721143e2 in a way that used surprisingly few lines of code, it relied on the server requesting weather states every second from authority players and sending them to non-authority players, while also allowing only very sudden weather transitions across regions, i.e. if there was one player in the Ascadian Isles who had stormy weather, and another player with clear weather in the Bitter Coast Region walked across to the Ascadian Isles, that player was instantly made to have stormy weather with no kind of transition at all.
My approach solves both of those problems. It solves the packet spam by only sending weather updates to the server when weather changes happen or when there are new arrivals to a weather authority's region, and it allows for both sudden weather transitions when players teleport to a region and for soft, gradual transitions when players walk across to a region. It is inspired by my previous actor sync, and uses a WorldRegionAuthority packet to set players as region authorities in a similar way to how ActorAuthority sets players as cell AI authorities. Weather changes are created only by the region authority for a given region, and weather packets are also only sent by that authority.
However, it should be noted that gradual weather transitions are used by default in this implementation. To use sudden weather transitions, the serverside Lua scripts need to forward WorldWeather packets with the forceWeather boolean set to true. That is, however, already handled by our default Lua scripts in situations where it makes sense.
Additionally, delete DedicatedPlayers who disconnect.
Previously, all disconnected DedicatedPlayers were still kept in memory, but never used again. There was code that suggested they were meant to be reused upon reconnecting, but that reuse had never actually been implemented, and would probably not be that useful anyway.
Additionally, print player guids using their string representations for consistency.
The creation and updating of DedicatedPlayer references remains very inelegant, but this commit is the first step towards fixing that.
Because of frequent server crashes, I tried to simplify the player map indexes with commit c91e240664, but it had no noticeable effect and was later partially reverted by Koncord in commit 902e968fd9, apparently for reasons of readability.
For the sake of consistency, this commit completes his reversion.
David Cernat
Koncord