Experimental Beamworks Weather 1.0.1

Beamworks Weather
Beamworks Weather, also known as BWM_Weather, adds a complete dynamic weather system to BeamNG.drive. Using the included in-game HUD app, you can control rain, clouds, fog, wind, thunderstorms, and the time of day without leaving your current session.

The mod is designed for single-player use and works as a standalone BeamNG game-engine extension. It does not permanently modify any original game or map files. When the mod is reset or unloaded, it attempts to restore the environment settings that were active before the weather system started.

Main Features

• Seven selectable weather presets
  
  
• Dynamic native rain
  
  
• Procedurally generated 3D lightning
  
  
• Eight different thunder recordings
  
  
• Distance-based thunder delay
  
  
• Smooth weather transitions
  
  
• Adjustable rain intensity
  
  
• Adjustable fog and wind
  
  
• Full time-of-day control
  
  
• Automatic weather changes
  
  
• Automatic time progression
  
  
• Three rain-quality settings
  
  
• Dedicated movable and resizable HUD app
  
  
• Automatic fallback rain system
  
  
• Saved user settings
  
  
• Map compatibility detection
  

HUD App
The mod includes a dedicated BeamNG HUD app called:

BWM_Weather Control

To add the app:

1. Load any supported map.
   
   
2. Open the pause menu.
   
   
3. Select UI Apps.
   
   
4. Choose Add App.
   
   
5. Search for BWM_Weather Control.
   
   
6. Add the app and exit UI editing mode.
   

The app can be moved and resized like other BeamNG HUD apps. It can also be collapsed using the button in the top-right corner.

The status indicator in the header shows whether the weather extension is connected and initialized.

Weather Presets
Clear
Creates clear conditions with minimal cloud coverage, no rain, low fog, and light wind.

Cloudy
Increases cloud coverage and creates a darker, overcast atmosphere without activating rain.

Light Rain
Enables a light rain shower with a relatively low number of visible raindrops, mild wind, and increased cloud coverage.

Rain
Creates normal rainfall with clearly visible rain, stronger cloud coverage, and more noticeable wind.

Heavy Rain
Produces intense rainfall with significantly increased rain density, darker clouds, stronger wind, and reduced visibility.

Storm
Creates a full thunderstorm with heavy rain, procedurally generated lightning bolts, world illumination flashes, and delayed thunder sounds.

Each lightning strike is generated at a randomized position in front of the camera. The bolt contains a main branch and multiple smaller branches to create a more natural appearance.

Thunder is played after a delay based on the simulated distance between the player and the lightning strike. Eight different low-frequency thunder recordings are included and selected without immediately repeating the same sound.

Fog
Creates dense fog and greatly reduces visibility. This preset is suitable for atmospheric driving, screenshots, nighttime scenarios, and challenging road conditions.

Current Weather Display
The HUD shows the currently active weather preset and the target weather preset.

During a transition, a progress bar displays how far the weather change has progressed.

Storm events such as Lightning and Thunder are also shown briefly in the current weather panel.

Intensity
The Intensity slider controls the overall strength of the selected weather preset.

It can be adjusted from 0 to 100 percent.

Depending on the selected preset, intensity affects values such as:

• Rain density
  
  
• Cloud coverage
  
  
• Fog
  
  
• Wind
  
  
• Storm strength
  

Setting the intensity to a lower value allows you to create softer versions of the available weather presets.

Transition
The Transition slider controls how long the weather takes to change.

The available range is:

0 to 60 seconds

A value of 0 applies the selected weather immediately.

Higher values create smoother transitions between cloud coverage, rain intensity, fog, wind, and other supported environment values.

When another preset is selected during an active transition, the new transition begins from the current visual state instead of restarting from the previous preset.

Wind
The Wind slider manually adjusts the current wind strength.

Wind can affect:

• Cloud movement
  
  
• Ground-level wind
  
  
• Rain direction
  
  
• The overall intensity of storm conditions
  

The manual wind setting can be used independently from the selected weather preset.

Fog
The Fog slider manually controls fog density.

This allows custom combinations such as:

• Rain with additional fog
  
  
• Clear weather with reduced visibility
  
  
• Heavy storms with dense atmospheric fog
  
  
• Foggy nighttime conditions
  

The displayed percentage is converted internally to the fog-density range supported by BeamNG.

Time of Day
The Time of Day slider allows you to control the current map time using a normal 24-hour clock.

The slider uses five-minute steps and displays the selected time in the following format:

HH:MM

Four shortcut buttons are included:

• 06:00
  
  
• 12:00
  
  
• 18:00
  
  
• 00:00
  

These can be used to quickly switch between morning, midday, evening, and midnight.

Time controls are only available on maps that contain a compatible BeamNG time-of-day object.

Rain Quality
Rain quality controls the maximum number of raindrops that the weather system can display.

Low
Maximum of approximately 1,800 drops.

Recommended for:

• Lower-end systems
  
  
• Large or demanding maps
  
  
• Better overall performance
  
  
• Players who prefer lighter visual effects
  

Medium
Maximum of approximately 4,500 drops.

This is the recommended default setting and provides a good balance between visual quality and performance.

High
Maximum of approximately 9,000 drops.

Recommended for:

• More powerful systems
  
  
• Screenshots and cinematic driving
  
  
• Maximum rain density
  
  
• Maps with good precipitation performance
  

The currently selected drop limit is displayed directly in the HUD.

Changing the rain quality is applied immediately. You do not need to select the weather preset again.

Native Rain and Fallback System
Whenever possible, Beamworks Weather uses a compatible native BeamNG precipitation object already present on the current map.

When no suitable precipitation object exists, the mod attempts to create one reusable rain object using BeamNG’s built-in rain-drop datablock.

This fallback rain volume follows the active camera so that the mod does not need to generate rain across the entire map.

The HUD displays:

Camera-following rain fallback active

when this system is being used.

If neither native precipitation nor the fallback system is available, the HUD displays:

Rain effect unavailable

The rest of the weather system can continue working even when rain is unsupported.

Automatic Weather
When Automatic Weather is enabled, the mod changes the weather automatically after a randomized amount of time.

The system uses weighted weather probabilities and avoids repeatedly selecting the same preset.

Different presets can remain active for different amounts of time. Severe conditions such as thunderstorms are selected less frequently than normal weather.

The HUD displays the approximate number of seconds remaining until the next automatic weather change.

Automatic Weather is useful for:

• Long free-roam sessions
  
  
• Realistic road trips
  
  
• Dynamic gameplay
  
  
• Cinematic driving
  
  
• Unpredictable weather conditions
  

Automatic Time
When Automatic Time is enabled, the time of day progresses continuously.

A complete in-game day takes approximately 20 minutes.

Automatic Time works independently from Automatic Weather. This means you can use:

• Automatic weather with a fixed time
  
  
• Automatic time with manually selected weather
  
  
• Both automatic systems together
  

This allows weather changes to happen naturally during sunrise, daytime, sunset, and nighttime.

Lightning System
Thunderstorms use procedurally generated three-dimensional lightning bolts.

Each strike includes:

• A randomized strike location
  
  
• A long main lightning path
  
  
• Multiple smaller branches
  
  
• Irregular bolt movement
  
  
• Several short flicker stages
  
  
• Local world illumination
  
  
• Randomized timing
  

Lightning is positioned in front of the active camera and uses a downward raycast to locate an appropriate ground-impact position.

A temporary light source creates a short blue-white environmental flash around the strike.

The lightning system uses scheduled timers instead of random checks every rendered frame, preventing unstable or excessive lightning events.

Thunder System
Thunder is triggered after a lightning strike and delayed according to the simulated distance from the player.

The mod includes eight different thunder recordings:

• thunder_1.wav
  
  
• thunder_2.wav
  
  
• thunder_3.wav
  
  
• thunder_4.wav
  
  
• thunder_5.wav
  
  
• thunder_6.wav
  
  
• thunder_7.wav
  
  
• thunder_8.wav
  

The system avoids immediately repeating the same recording, creating more variation during longer storms.

Stop
The Stop button begins a smooth transition back to the Clear preset.

This does not perform a complete environment reset. It simply stops the active weather and returns to clear conditions using the selected transition duration.

Reset
The Reset button restores the environment values that were captured when Beamworks Weather initialized on the current map.

This includes supported values such as:

• Cloud coverage
  
  
• Fog
  
  
• Wind
  
  
• Rain
  
  
• Time of day
  

Temporary rain and lightning objects created by the mod are also removed or reset.

Use this option when:

• The environment no longer looks correct
  
  
• Another mod changed the weather
  
  
• You switched maps
  
  
• You want to restore the map’s original atmosphere
  
  
• A weather effect remains active unexpectedly
  

Save Settings
The Save Settings button stores the current user preferences in:

/settings/BWM_Weather.json

Saved settings can include:

• Last selected weather preset
  
  
• Weather intensity
  
  
• Transition duration
  
  
• Wind strength
  
  
• Fog density
  
  
• Rain quality
  
  
• Automatic Weather state
  
  
• Automatic Time state
  
  
• Current time-of-day preference
  

Invalid or missing settings are replaced with safe default values.

Installation
Download BWM_Weather.zip and place it in your active BeamNG user folder:

BeamNG.drive/mods

You can locate the correct user folder through:

BeamNG Launcher
> Manage User Folder
> Open in Explorer

The ZIP file should contain the following folders directly at its root:

lua
ui
scripts
art
settings
mod_info

Do not place the complete ZIP inside another folder and do not install it inside the main BeamNG installation directory.

The ZIP does not need to be extracted.

Restart BeamNG.drive after installation or reload the game’s mods, UI, and Lua extensions.

Unpacked Installation
For development or manual testing, the mod can also be installed as an unpacked mod.

Place the project folder here:

BeamNG.drive/mods/unpacked/BWM_Weather

The BWM_Weather directory must directly contain:

lua
ui
scripts
art
settings
mod_info

Compatibility
Beamworks Weather attempts to support as many BeamNG maps as possible.

However, maps can use different environment systems and may not contain every required object.

The mod checks for compatible components such as:

• Precipitation
  
  
• CloudLayer
  
  
• LevelInfo
  
  
• TimeOfDay
  
  
• Fog
  
  
• Wind
  

Unsupported features are skipped safely and should not crash the mod or the game.

Each missing component only produces one warning per extension session to avoid console spam.

Visual results may differ between official and community-created maps.

Known Limitations
Rain Indoors
Rain can currently remain visible in some tunnels, garages, buildings, and covered areas.

BeamNG does not provide a universally reliable public rain-occlusion API for every map and structure. The mod includes an isolated exposure-check function for future improvements, but it currently treats the player as exposed to rain.

Map Differences
Not every map supports:

• Dynamic cloud coverage
  
  
• Fog adjustment
  
  
• Wind adjustment
  
  
• Native precipitation
  
  
• Time-of-day control
  

Unsupported components are skipped automatically.

Custom Environment Systems
Some community maps use custom weather or environment objects that may not react like standard BeamNG objects.

Performance
High rain quality may reduce performance on lower-end systems, especially on large maps or when combined with high graphics settings.

Brightness Control
Universal scalar controls for sun brightness, sky brightness, and ambient brightness are not applied because BeamNG maps may use different gradient files and lighting configurations.

Performance Recommendations
Use Low rain quality when:

• You experience FPS drops
  
  
• You use a lower-end GPU
  
  
• You play on a large map
  
  
• You already use demanding graphics settings
  

Use Medium for most systems and normal gameplay.

Use High when:

• You have a powerful system
  
  
• You want maximum rain density
  
  
• You are creating screenshots or videos
  
  
• The current map handles precipitation efficiently
  

The mod avoids repeatedly searching the complete scene tree. Environment objects are discovered and cached when a mission starts instead of being searched every frame.

HUD synchronization is limited to approximately 6–7 updates per second to reduce unnecessary processing.

Troubleshooting
The HUD App Does Not Appear
Confirm that this file exists inside the mod:

ui/modules/apps/BWM_Weather/app.json

Then clear the BeamNG UI cache and reload the UI.

The HUD Shows Disconnected
Open the BeamNG GE Lua console and run:

extensions.load("BWM_Weather_main")

Check the console for messages beginning with:

[BWM_Weather]

Rain Is Not Visible
The current map may not include a compatible precipitation object, or the fallback precipitation system may have failed to initialize.

Check the compatibility message inside the HUD.

Weather Works but Time Does Not Change
The current map may not contain a compatible TimeOfDay object.

Settings Are Not Saved
Make sure the current BeamNG user folder is writable.

Weather Remains Active After an Error
Open the GE Lua console and reload the extension:

extensions.unload("BWM_Weather_main")
extensions.load("BWM_Weather_main")

Then press Reset in the HUD.

Console Commands
Advanced users can test the mod using the BeamNG GE Lua console.

Load the Extension
extensions.load("BWM_Weather_main")

Unload the Extension
extensions.unload("BWM_Weather_main")

Start Light Rain
extensions.BWM_Weather_main.setWeatherPreset("lightRain")

Start Normal Rain
extensions.BWM_Weather_main.setWeatherPreset("mediumRain")

Start Heavy Rain
extensions.BWM_Weather_main.setWeatherPreset("heavyRain")

Start a Thunderstorm
extensions.BWM_Weather_main.setWeatherPreset("thunderstorm")

Stop the Weather
extensions.BWM_Weather_main.stopWeather()

Enable Automatic Weather
extensions.BWM_Weather_main.setAutomaticWeather(true)

Reset the Environment
extensions.BWM_Weather_main.resetWeather()

Print the Current Weather State
dump(extensions.BWM_Weather_main.getWeatherState())

Summary
Beamworks Weather adds dynamic and controllable weather to BeamNG.drive through a compact in-game HUD app.

Choose between clear skies, clouds, fog, several levels of rain, and full thunderstorms. Adjust intensity, transition duration, wind, fog, rain quality, and time of day while driving.

Automatic Weather and Automatic Time can create continuously changing driving conditions, while procedurally generated lightning and distance-delayed thunder make storms more atmospheric and unpredictable.

Mod Name: Beamworks Weather
Internal Name: BWM_Weather
Version: 1.0.0
Supported BeamNG Version: 0.39.x
Game Mode: Single-player
Developer: Beamworks Modding Group