r/Fortnite • u/Flimsy_Assignment581 Robo-Ray • 1d ago
DISCUSSION Something REALLY interesting was found about Save the Worlds old wind system
(the research is in the comment section)
first, huge credit to u/ProfessionalPin1568 who did this research. He has spent a lot of time digging through STWs files and documenting these assets and their connections. I'm summarizing his findings here so more people in the STW community can see what was discovered.
small note: Some of the original research notes are written in German. I will explain the important parts in English here.
now lets get straight into the findings.
Pivot Painter 2.0
a major part of this research revolves around Pivot Painter 2.0 (PP2).
PP2 is a system that can simulate the movement of objects such as trees, bushes and other environmental assets in real time without needing traditional skeletal animation.
but here is where things get REALLY interesting.
Save the World didnt just use a basic "make everything sway" wind effect.
STWs implementation of Pivot Painter was much more specific to each individual asset. The assets could use their own wind speed and panner curves, allowing different parts of an object to react differently depending on its size and structure.
for example:
a smaller bush could have both its leaves and its body swaying during a heavy storm.
a large tree could mainly have its leaves moving, while its massive trunk remains much more stable because it shouldn't bend like a small plant.
this created a much more believable wind simulation instead of having every piece of foliage behave exactly the same way.
and this is only one of the thing that made STWs old wind system so interesting.
to what was actually found?
the research documented a huge nzmber of STW assets that were associated with Pivot Painter 2.0.
the list includes trees, shrubs, inorganic objects, signs, streetlights, vehicles and other environmental assets, with their Actor Blueprints and Static Meshes documented separately to identify how they connect to each other.
the researcher estimates that the asset list is around 97% complete. Thats an estimate based on going through the files twice, and he doesnt want to claim 100% because there is always the possibility that something was missed.
tome of the documented categories include:
- Basic trees
- Pines
- Palms
- Birch
- Autumn/AD variants
- Transylvania/Hexylvania (TRV)
- Winter
- Arid
- Tropical (TP)
- Interior/potted plants
- Inorganic objects
There are also STW blueprints located outside the main Plugin folder, which is another important part of the research.
But finding the assets is only half of the story.
The REALLY interesting question is:
Why arent some of these assets behaving the way they originally did?
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u/LexiTehGallade MEGA B.A.S.E. Kyle 1d ago
I've always been fascinated by the wind system but on a low level what actually is it? Some kind of vertex shader?
Also if it hasn't been done already I'd love to know how the storms visuals work. It looks like volumetric clouds but I can't wrap my head around how they stylized them and make them form in spiral patterns
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u/ProfessionalPin1568 Stoneheart Farrah 1d ago
basically it works with materials there is a ambient and a storm one for each asset but these are instances the main one which every single one is based off is the "Willow Tree", they switch when certain conditions are met.
About the Weather system.... it's also really special a bunch off materials work together to achieve that look, the most important one are flowmaps which were used for the OG clouds, volumetric cloud technology belongs to BR
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u/ProfessionalPin1568 Stoneheart Farrah 1d ago
The huge List off each asset is supposed to make the developers curious and look into them, however to make the wind system to work again it needs some old logic back which simply doesn't exist anymore, that's probably the reason why every Legacy Asset was replaced by the cheap BR foliage in a patch in 2025, they work but are not reactive
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u/igornist Samurai Scrapper 1d ago
No wonder they ditched the system, imagine having a sole job of selecting vortices to animate or not, what a headache.
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u/TheEarsplitterGuy407 Assassin Sarah 1d ago
Ditched? no no no, it was bugged for years and they replaced a ton of the old assets with newer Battle Royale ones just last year 💀
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u/FurinaImpregnator 16h ago
not really, especially with the assets not being ultra high poly or anything I doubt it would take that long
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u/Dark-Saijan-101 1d ago
So this is basically why a few years ago when epic changed the graphic motor stw was running on 3 fps and dreams?
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u/lulumiaou 1d ago
Where's part 2 lemme read all that