In Starfield, rain isn’t just a backdrop-it’s a cleverly crafted illusion that follows you like a personal weather system, revealing the fascinating tricks developers use to balance realism and performance in vast game worlds. Dive into how this and other games make rain feel immersive without soaking your console in extra processing load.
Starfield players realized this week that their characters have rain clouds that follow them around planets, à la The Truman Show. Rain isn’t falling all over Neon, for instance – just wherever you roam. A Starfield player posted a screenshot from the game’s photo mode to Reddit, showing a block of rain around their character, and nowhere else.
It may have been surprising for players, but the rain trick is not unique to Starfield – it’s used in most games, according to game developers. Thomas Francis, lead visual effects artist at Darkest Dungeon studio Red Hook, told AELGAMES that it’s a common practice in games to attach rain visual effects to the game’s camera to optimize for performance “by not rendering every rain drop, only what is important in front of the camera.”
“The technique can also be used for snow, wind, leaves falling, dust,” he added via email. “All sorts of environmental visual effects.”
That’s what you’re seeing in this screenshot, except that the grid or block of rain appears to be attached to the character and not the camera. (For transparency, two AELGAMES staffers were unable to reproduce the effect; when we entered Starfield’s photo mode, the rain turned off.) You can see this clearly when the camera moves back but the character you’re playing as stays in place. Karl Schecht, a 3D environment artist and the guy who reloads household items like they’re video game guns, told AELGAMES that games have some “clever trickery” that’s been standard for quite a while.
“Even if what’s on screen looks real, more often than not things are quite a bit different under the hood,” Schecht said in an email. “You see, everything in a videogame, whether it’s lighting, reflections, weather stuff, and scenery are all part of a built system. They’re set up to look and feel real, but also to run smoothly on your console or PC. Let’s take the rain in Starfield as an example. Whether you’re in first or third person, the rain looks solid. But switch to photo mode, zoom out, and you’ll see the rain is actually a small particle system, about 3×3 meters, that hangs out above your character.”
David Szymanski, who created Iron Lung, broke down the effect: “Basically rain is usually done with some sort of particle system, which is just a way of making a lot of similar things that all move or animate,” Szymanski wrote. “Particle systems are great at rendering a lot of things at once very cheaply, but it would still require a not insignificant amount of processing power to have hundreds of thousands of raindrops (or more) visible onscreen, especially if they’re also transparent in any way.”
Developers can size down the particle system to have as few raindrops as possible, tied to either the player or the camera, he added: “If you tweak the size and number of raindrops right, you can have a relatively small area that’s actually ’raining’ but still looks like a torrential downpour from the player’s perspective.”
Video games are often doing a lot of things at once, so optimization is essential to prevent “unnecessary overhead” – aka CPU/GPU strain – Schecht said. That cost Szymanski mentioned isn’t a financial cost; it’s the cost of resources. “You can think of developing a game a bit like a resource management game in and of itself,” Schecht added. “Everything you add into your game is going to cost some overhead. The more stuff you have, the more difficult it will be to run the game smoothly. So you have to use tricks and tools to lower that overhead.”
He continued: “These are all things we do in the industry to make sure that the pixels we’re pushing aren’t going to make your computer melt through the floor!”
These techniques may be common knowledge to developers, but the little tricks seem to work so well that players typically don’t notice them, in Starfield or elsewhere. It’s a peek into the labor of making games that players don’t often get to see. “I think for lots of gamers yesterday, it was the first time they saw the wizard behind the curtain, so it was funny to see all the reactions,” Francis said.
How do developers create realistic rain effects while optimizing game performance in Starfield and similar games
Developers create realistic rain effects in Starfield and similar games by using a clever optimization technique where the rain particle system is attached directly to the player character or the game camera. This means rain visually falls only in a small area around the player, creating the illusion of a full rainstorm without rendering rain across the entire game world, which would be very performance-intensive. By controlling the volume of particles and limiting the rain effect to the player’s immediate vicinity, the game maintains immersive weather visuals while optimizing performance and reducing unnecessary processing load on the console or PC. This method is a common industry practice to balance realism and smooth gameplay.
How does attaching rain particles to the camera or player improve performance in Starfield
Attaching rain particles to the camera or player in Starfield improves performance by limiting the rain effect to a small area around the player rather than rendering rain across the entire game world. This approach reduces the number of rain particles that need to be processed and drawn at any given time, significantly lowering the computational load on the system. By having the particle system move with the player or camera, the game creates the illusion of a full rainstorm without the expensive overhead of simulating rain everywhere, allowing for smoother gameplay and better frame rates.
