Wind VII

I'm looking over my old code and wondering what on earth I actually did to make this work.

Or whether it worked at all.

Allegedly, I used a curl function to boil the pressure down into a wind value (wind rotates around pressure centers, this makes sense). But I had gotten that initial pressure from a hand-drawn map on GIMP, and that's what I'm trying to get away from in this latest attack.

I tried to fiddle with getting the gradient but the implementation of a discrete gradient on a hex grid was somewhat problematic. However, this value may be useful later on in determining the length of the wind vector - winds on a steep pressure gradient will naturally be stronger.

The angle is another matter. This is where I really thought the gradient would help (and maybe it would on a different grid or even map layout). I ended up doing something much simpler: "walk" around the edge of the major pressure cells, correcting for direction based on the Coriolis effect, then (predictably) use IDW to fill in the rest of the map.

a quarter million objects has more of an effect on performance than you might think

For now, I am not box-blurring these values, so the transitions are still a little choppy. My plan is to apply the effect of the topography on the wind vectors and then smooth it out, so that everything lines up more nicer.